Not sure what you're arguing about or for. That the Steele dossier was a solid, factual document? That Trump colluded with Russia? That the Clinton campaign had nothing to do with the Russian collusion narrative? That the gallons of ink and attention and investigative time, attention, and money, was a productive use of resources? That there's nothing to learn from Durham's reports?
The guy doesn’t need my help but once again Ross Douthat has a great column in the Times. “In 2022 Reality has a Conservative Bias.”
“… ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.”
You might be able to slip past the paywall if you do a search on some of the quoted text.
A bit late, but this is the latest open thread here:
Does anyone here have information on Dale Bredesen's approach to preventing or reversing Alzheimer's? I could only find one analysis not from his supporters. It was hostile, but old, and largely about the fact that he had not yet done controlled experiments. I believe the author was connected with an institution that Bredesen had been connected to, so there might be some bias.
There appear to now have been two more substantial studies, one with 250 people, and positive results — but I have only seen discussions of them from Bredesen's side. Does anyone here know more?
I looked into the Bredesen stuff with great interest a few years ago. I remember running across something that disillusioned me some, but can't remember what it was, but I don't believe it was an article by a detractor. I think it was some site where Bredesen was advertising his services, and it had a cashing-in kind of quality -- maybe he was talking up his approach as though it was a sure thing? Oh, I think I remember more: In the Bredesen stuff I read first he was talking about dementia as the final common pathway of deterioration, and how for each person there was a different combo of risk factors, and you had to look at them all and modify as many as possible -- so actual changes recommended were different for each person. He'd start with doing a lot of testing of each person, to get an idea of what it was crucial to tweak. And then I saw something of his that sounded like he prescribed the same regimen for everybody, and extolled its merits. Anyhow, sorry to be so vague. Will be interested to hear what others have to say.
I am glad to announce the 9th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first few meetings were great (approximately 8 to 10 people), and I hope to see many of you at this one. Snacks will be available.
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (video and reading at the end)
1) Psychedelic experiences with interconnectedness
2) Introduction to abstract entropy (may be technically challenging)
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually go for a walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660. I also provide paleo and vegetarian-friendly food.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Psychedelics effects on sense of interconnectedness. Psychedelics often lead to experiences of connection with aspects of the universe that are normally not seen as related. Some questions to talk about. Are these alternative perspectives valid? Are they useful? Are they the same as religious or philosophical experiences? Have you had experiences like this that you wanted to share?
Video
Unity and Interconnectedness - broken down and described | Josie Kins
2) Introduction to abstract entropy. An article from the curated Less Wrong archives lays out and clarifies a lot of misconceptions about entropy. It starts at a beginner level but does contain math and diagrams. Entropy is widely misunderstood, both in fallacious and subtle ways. Many professional explainers need to be more accurate in their approach. This essay seeks to clarify things by approaching it as an autodidactic interest in getting things correct and clarifying ambiguities and apparent contradictions. His conclusions about entropy and its workings are close to mine.
Entropy is not just a property of this universe but seems fundamental to any possible system that can become more complex and change with time. It has implications everywhere you are dealing with a dynamic system or the consequences of a dynamic process and is fundamental to objective and subjective reality. It connects to information, heat and energy, evolution, intelligence and learning, and the universe's fate.
Same as the odds that Musk will make Twitter profitable and turn it into a wholesome place to share ideas and commentary in a spirit of togetherness and good faith
Hello. I read an article a while back about how writers now had more similar/less diverse backgrounds than those ten, twenty, fifty years ago (more MFAs, college degrees, etc.). Does anyone know where I could find this article?
I'm looking forward to *reviews* of Aqua-Avatar. Small chance they will point me to a movie I will want to see. I was pleasantly surprised by the first, and lightning sometimes does strike twice. If not, I expect a fair deal of amusement from people like Critical Drinker and Ryan "Pitch Meeting" George tearing it down.
But it would help if there were non-spoiler reviewers that I trusted for this sort of thing.
Totally off the wall, but I haven't found a particularly good match with any condition. 46/M/no horrible medical history aside form depression, no history of psychoactive substances beyond caffeine and SSRIs for a year or so 20 years ago that didn't work. Sleep apnea but controlled with CPAP for a long time, AHI 1-2. I've become absentminded in specific ways to an incredible degree over the past 5-10 years. As a couple of examples, if I'm going to take something out of the house (besides keys/phone/wallet), if it's not sitting directly in front of the door, I have maybe a 20% success rate. Even sitting it near the door is mostly useless. If I need to take something downstairs from my bedroom, I'm maybe 20% to remember to do it after putting on shoes and socks. If I boil water and don't set a timer, I'm well under 20% to remember to go check it before it all boils off. If the timer goes off and I do anything else for any length of time, I'll likely forget to do it. I was shaving the other day, had an immediate need to take a dump (abnormal), then forgot I was in the middle of shaving and went out with like 1/3 of my face shaved and 2/3 quite fuzzy. This kind of thing happens All. The. Time. Upwards of 10 times a day, sometimes way more depending on what I'm doing. What makes it strange to me is that I wasn't like this at all as a kid or younger adult, and pretty much the exact opposite- A student, solid concentration, success at memory tasks, vocational success at things that took sustained focus, and I still like and am pretty good at doing puzzles, playing complicated games, etc. I also have basically perfect memory that I knew I needed to do something and then almost immediately didn't do it (girlfriend confirms). I can forget the same task 3 times in a minute (really) while retaining memory that I planned to do the task 3 separate times. Memory is there, staying in conscious memory/becoming action, not so much. What is this? It seems far more specific than inattentive ADD symptom lists (which aren't a great match and I definitely don't have the usual long history of), and my memory seems far too good in general for dementia symptoms to be that advanced in one area, although IANAD obviously. As far as other neurological symptoms, I've noticed a little difficulty coming up with non-everyday words, although it's not that bad and I don't know how much of that is expected aging anyway. My balance has gotten a bit sketchy. With eyes open, it's totally fine. With eyes closed, or in near-darkness, it's iffy. Like I can stand on one leg and balance until my foot gets sore, but if I close my eyes, I'm planting my other foot in under 2 seconds. I don't have a younger reference point for that specific task, but I'd never remembered any kind of dark-balance issue before the last 3-4 years.
Labs are all normal, micronutrients seem very likely to be normal (B12 was tested, between a varied diet and vitamins I shouldn't be deficient in anything, although if one of you has a specific idea, I can evaluate sources further). I don't have tertiary syphilis unless multiple tests through the years all missed it.
IANAD etc. but just to have another hypothesis, this sounds suspiciously like Parkinson's. In particular, the balance problems plus the cognitive issues with working memory and attention (quite different from Alzheimer's; the issue in Parkinson's MCI (Mild Cognitive Impairment) is about retrieval; Alz sufferers never create the memories in the first place).
But of course I agree with all the other replies, see a good neurologist. Just be sure to mention the balance issue. In fact, please make a list of everything you want to bring up with your neurologist, one often finds after a visit that you didn't even mention various symptoms and observations..
Addendum: the "I can't find that word" thing is also associated with Parkinson's. Also, there is LBD (Lewy Body Dementia) Just make sure your Doc has considered these possibilities.
Question: do you ever find yourself suddenly forgetting the first or last name of someone, especially a celebrity you don't know personally? Just wondering (for a friend)
Making a list of everything with examples is a good idea- even if I don't forget anything, it's not always easy to get it all out with certain doctors.
Early PD and LBD check a few boxes, but also seem to have a lot of misses, and the symptom lists seem so wide that most anybody who's messed up in any mental way would probably hit a few of them. I'll definitely make sure they're at least considered though.
I don't think I have any particular issue with celebrity names. Like I have no idea who plays most of the characters in Marvel movies, even though I'm sure I've seen the names, or even who's in Andor which I've been watching, but that's the kind of thing I likely never would have remembered. It's like asking me to name drink recipes or brands of women's socks. I'm sure I've encountered them, but no interest (in most particular actors)=no memory. When it comes to, say, athletes or people relevant to my hobbies, I don't think I have any issues there.
I’m a psychologist, and have no idea what’s wrong, but something sure is. Agree with Unsigned Integer that you should see a neurologist. They will almost certainly order neuropsych testing. If you want to try to figure this out on your own for a while longer, get the neuropsych testing first and read the report.
Try to find a good one. If there are research facilities near you, or teaching hospitals, anyone allied with one of them is likelier to be e highly competent. Avoid anyone whose specialty is diagnosing Test anxiety and the like in kids. While this is a perfectly legitimate activity, a lot of these people aren’t doing real, thoughtful evaluations.They’re known for being willing to crank out a letter for any kid saying the kid has test anxiety or ADHD or some such and therefore needs extra time on the SAT. it’s a racket
huh. mandatory not a doctor (though I am a medical student)
-sometimes dementia screens/test are insufficient in early stages esp. if the person is highly educated/intelligent to begin with so I wouldn't take them too seriously
-difficulty balancing with eyes closed but not open suggests a problem with dorsal column-medial lemeniscus path of brain/spinal cord, usually comes with weird sensation and sense of vibration, fine touch (? are any of these present? ) (This is called the Romberg test and is often associated with B12/neurosyphilis) (not all cases of B12 deficiency e.g. pernicious anemia are detectable by blood test and/or due to insufficient dietary intake)
Appreciate the detailed response. I did the Romberg test from a couple of videos (feet together, arms at sides or extended). In both cases, I was fine with eyes open but significantly swaying with eyes closed (no actual falling or taking a step, just clear pressure on the outside edges of my feet/heels/toes). Neurosyphilis would require multiple treponemal and nontreponemal tests giving a false negative a couple of years ago and a couple of years before that (and more RPR whiffs before that). Not impossible I guess, but seems quite unlikely from what I can tell.
My two-point discrimination seems fine. Soft touch in hairy areas is definitely fine. In hairless areas, maybe not so much? I don't know exactly what the threshold is supposed to be, but I can definitely see myself touching with soft light objects and not be able to feel it. Vibration sense is a maybe. I don't have a tuning fork, but using the shaft of an electric toothbrush, I can feel it a bit if I close my lips on it, and sort of on extremities, but not so well? Not sure it's bad, but definitely not clear that it's good.
Normal pressure hydrocephalus doesn't seem to fit. My gait is fine (and I've been in PT for a rotator cuff issue, they'd probably have noticed me walking goofy even if nobody else did. I'll ask next time I go, but very likely normal).
Early vascular dementia seems to check some boxes. That's a fun thought. I may be slightly on the ADHD spectrum, but the issues seem too specific and also new. Never know, brains are weird, etc. Definitely a history of depression. Nothing worked particularly well and side effects sucked so i've just been living with it.
I'll definitely work on seeing a real neurologist ASAP. Thanks again.
As someone with ADHD I'd second that as a possibility. A common thing with people with ADHD, since we have less working memory than neurotypical people, is that if, in the process of completing a task, we come across and quickly complete some other unrelated task, our brains will short circuit and make us think that, having completed A task, that we have completed THE task, and promptly clear our memory cache to make room for whatever is next.
As I've gotten older, I've noticed my symptoms getting worse and being harder to control.
Speaking to the ADD symptom list, I was also a good student and able to concentrate on things. The key though is that I mostly enjoyed learning, and found the things I was learning interesting enough to be worth paying attention to. If it was something I thought was boring or not worth my time though? Hello calculator games!
This was interesting and informative (assuming it's right lol), but if the lack of inhibition underlying things is correct, and the things in the fourth video are correct (mind's voice, etc) it's definitely not me. I hit some of the notes- mental restlessness, bad at tasks I don't care about, jumps to emotional states that seem significantly faster and more intense than most people I interact with, at least as well as I can guess other people's qualia, but I've always had a good enough inner "settle down, Beavis" to avoid acting on them fast and getting into much trouble, and it seems like I have different failure modes when it comes to task completion, etc.
Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener is a sort of patron saint of crackpots; he was the first person to seriously advance the idea that the continents were all joined at one point in the past, just based on the fact that they look like a jigsaw puzzle if you squint. He ran into a lot of resistance from the geological establishment, because we didn't have the understanding of tectonic plates floating on a liquid mantle yet. (I imagine a lot of his skeptical contemporaries scoffing "Does he know that landmasses don't just float on the ocean? Someone ought to break it to him that islands go all the way down.")
This is a sometimes-dangerous but valuable mode of thinking, so hit me with your "Wegenerian" ideas—things that are unfalsifiable, or maybe just very difficult to falsify. Hunches that you can make an intuitive or epidemiological argument for, but can't prove or even fully justify mechanistically.
This is a thread for gesticulating frantically at the map, going "they clearly fit together you fucks, any child can see it!"
I intuited, clearly and obviously, as a child, that no self-awareness could possibly be destroyed. I was walking down the hallway one day, and just knew that the fact of my self-awareness makes it necessary that I can never cease to exist. I can't explain it or justify it. It's like something I saw. Trying to explain it is like trying to explain the color red.
It's something like: the kind of thing that erodes and gets broken can't also reflect on itself.
Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're interested in. More of a philosophical or mystical thing than a math or science thing.
I was aiming for things with a basis in logic or fact rather than a pure assertion of belief.
It's logical to intuit that no self-awareness can perceive its own destruction; we can never know what nonexistence is like. This strikes me as the kind of thing that a bright child would spontaneously figure out. Is it possible that, as a child, you had this realization, and misconstrued it in the moment, or in your memory later on?
If you can't explain or justify a belief, you should really consider the possibility that it's not true.
I think I recently figured out a neat mathematical thing that would turn math on its head, but I don't want to be potentially scooped while I figure out how to write up the corresponding paper. Hmmm
I'll compromise and just state the weird thing but without further explanation, justification, nor proof:
There's only ONE size of infinity, and it's COUNTABLE!
(On a related note, if anyone has suggestions/style guides for writing mathematical scholarly papers without having to deal with all that LaTeX I'd appreciate it)
I meant it when I said safe space, but you're giving vibes akin to "I have this perpetual motion machine in the basement but you can't see it because you might steal it".
Just tell us! Nobody is going to scoop you, everyone is too busy with their own ideas.
If you're right, there might be a way to get the credit for being the person who figured this out without writing a scholarly paper. What about talking to some mathematicians about how one might do that (don't tell them the mathematical idea -- just ask how to be sure to get credit for it). If you're really afraid somebody will steal your idea, sending papers out to a bunch of journals, who might reject it, seems kind of risky. I know nothing about the world of academic math, by the way, I'm just brainstorming. What about finding a mathematician whose interests are in the right area, describing the situation to him, and asking whether you can present your ideas to him and videotape the whole thing. Have a copy of your write-up (which need not be in the form of an academic paper) notarized. Stuff like that. Good luck!
Finite / discrete / "digital physics" hypothesis. This predates Bostrom's simulation argument, which is basically the same idea with a different emphasis/interpretation.
Dark matter isn't dark, we just couldn't see it in the 70s when we noticed the rotation problem. It wasn't until the 2010s when we got a gamma ray space telescope up out of the atmosphere and spotted the giant lobes of gamma-hot plasma called the Fermi bubbles (and subsequently the even-larger eROSITA bubbles) pinned to our own galaxy.
These look to me to be gravitationally bound; for them to be jets, they'd have to have started going off in the last million years or so, which seems statistically unlikely given the age of the galaxy.
We had to do a lot of filtering and de-noising even to spot them, because there's also a fantastic amount of gamma-ray "fog" locally. Consider another system of comparatively light particles held to a massive, spinning core by a 1/r^2 force: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/2226/view/3dz2-electron-orbital
In this analogy, we are somewhere inside that blue "donut", and it's very hard to spot a cloud from the inside. The only reason we have any inkling at all that there's structure here and the gamma ray fog isn't universal is because we're outside the "p orbital" component.
Point being: there is a dense cloud of particles around our galaxy that we couldn't see until very recently, not because it doesn't interact electromagnetically, but because it shines in a region of the spectrum so high-energy that the atmosphere (and the protective shielding on sensitive optics of telescopes like Hubble and JWST) blocks it out. Trying to directly observe this cloud around any other galaxy is like trying to see clouds on another planet from an Earth-based telescope on a cloudy day.
Before we start inventing WIMPs and MACHOs and other fantastic unobservables, Occam's razor suggests that we should exhaust every option we have for modeling dark matter using boring things like protons and neutrons.
I am a little confused how come every tiny indication about China easing its covid policy causes Chinese stocks to rally. Like, investors know that Covid Zero is unlikely to last forever, right? Why aren’t expectations of reopening already baked in stock prices? Or are they?
I'd guess because the longer COVID 0 lasts, the more long-term economic damage is likely. So there's a lot of long-term economic damage "baked-in" and news about opening sooner than expected causes an update.
Currently doing some work in the Longevity sphere.
I'm researching the possibility of repurposing bisphosphonates for anti-aging usage. There's been some results suggesting that bisphosphonates have quite a significant effect in reducing morbidity, but MOA is not clear yet. Risk of side effect involving kidney problems and rare hip fracture. Anyone has any insights on this topic? Worthwhile pursuing?
This is likely because bone density worsens with age (compounded by decrease in physical activity and muscle mass). Lower bone density is directly linked to poor outcomes (high morbidity and sometimes mortality) after the age of 60. Bisphosphonates are decent drugs in general but their benefit to reducing morbidity is probably entirely linked to osteoporosis management and treatment.
Weird question, but are there people who stopped being famous because they wanted to stop being famous?
I've always thought that I would hate to have a Di Caprio level of fame. I like eating in restaurants without a gaggle of fans around my table. So I imagine that if I was in Titanic, I'd bask in the glory for six months, then do some lower level movies to ensure a nice retirement, and then become a well-off suburban dad with plenty of time to read the classics. Clearly, Leonardo went a different route.
But is there anybody who got sick of being recognized and gave up their art just because it got annoying to sign autographs and answer inane questions?
There are many celebrities who are famous in one place but virtually anonymous somewhere else. Some of them seem to enjoy the anonymity, while others are miffed and miss the attention.
My friend once produced an album for a band called "Pop Design", who are huge in Slovenia. When they came to NY to record, the lead singer kept remaking on how weird it was that no one recognized him or stopped him in the street to ask for an autograph. He kept saying things like "I am just nobody here!!"
Does Bill Watterson count? He never embraced the fame, but he dealt with its existence for ten years, then just quit and became (well, remained) impossible to find.
I know it is not exactly what you asked. But the developer of Flappy bird, couldn't handle the fame brought by his game, and took down every version of his game from the internet just to save himself from the fame.
Dolores Hart is perhaps the best imaginable example of this, quitting Hollywood at the height of her fame in 1963 to become a cloistered nun, which she remains today.
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion. Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian who was forced to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book.
I worked as a software engineer at a company with a lot of bankers (effectively, salespeople) and one of the execs in the banker area complained that the tech floors were "a ghost town" at 5pm (bankers worked notoriously long hours). There was some vague direction to correct this and my immediate supervisor tried to insist that I take a long lunch everyday, so that without working more hours, I gave the impression of doing so.
RAM to be added to desktop computers was required to be purchased from a single hardware supplier, who charged twice as much as Best Buy for the RAM that she carried, and didn't carry any RAM that would work in any of our desktops.
Desktop computers were not allowed to have their hardware upgraded because the employer wanted to encourage everyone to use remote virtual machines instead of their desktops, even though many of us needed terabytes of disk space but were allocated only megabytes on the remote virtual machines, which also sometimes took seconds to respond to each keystroke. Rumor said this was to offload one facility's computation onto another facility, as part of management's plan to get a carbon-neutral tax credit for the first facility.
At a workplace using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, administrators weren't allowed to install security updates to the operating system or to software, because each RHEL release was thoroughly tested by Red Hat, and hence deemed to be more reliable and secure than the security updates. Besides guaranteeing that all of our computers had all of the security holes most of the time, this also meant every user had to re-install their web browser frequently, because new RHEL releases came only every 3 years, and web browsers and pages at this time changed so radically that it was necessary to update the browser every few months. (This was back when installing Firefox on Linux without admin privs meant compiling the source.)
At the NIH, all users in my group were required to commit all code and data changes using the git revision control software. The users were unable to ever remember how git worked, and kept losing their code or wrecking the repository. So the group leader dictated that all users would submit their version control requests to me, and I would type all of the necessary git commands. This turned git into a *centralized* distributed version control system.
I don’t know why so many ACXers think Trump is harmless. The fella is proving to be a pretty talented demagogue.
From the Brookings Institute:
>The 2022 midterms may well be the first elections ever where the elections themselves are on the ballot. Well over 300 candidates across a variety of races this fall are perpetuating former President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that American elections are deeply flawed.
Although no one has ever found proof of widespread and/or systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election (as former Attorney General Bill Barr among others affirmed), the persistent and high-volume repetition by Trump and his high-profile surrogates has convinced many other Republicans that election was stolen. For many who don’t actually believe Trump’s assertions, the fact that he made belief in the “Big Lie” a condition of his support for one Republican over another in the primaries, led them to mimic Trump.
For the record. And particularly for those who think Trump is harmless:
Adam Kinzinger on the vote to remove Liz Cheney as the Republican chair in The House of Representatives:
“You look at the fact that Liz Cheney, one of the most conservative members of Congress, casts a vote of conscience after a frigging insurrection that killed a Capitol police officer under the name of our party, not Antifa. . . . Maybe you should blame President Trump—who, by the way, if we don’t say a word after this meeting, is the only voice speaking for us. I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m all for unity—but not unity under the Trump banner.”
And Liz Cheney herself on January 6th:
“There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,”
And Mitch McConnell:
“The rioters, he said on the Senate floor, “did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry. He lost an election.” McConnell added, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
The Republican Party is now a cult of personality. One weird narcissistic dude dictates which way is up and which is down. “J D Vance is kissing my ass because he wants my support,” says Trump. If only it were hyperbole. Trump says jump and they ask how high. Any disagreement was done in whispers behind closed doors.
Yesterday using his very favorite adverb Trump said he is very, very, very likely to run again.
Yes I know he’s a jackass who has ‘written’ more books than he has read, but a jackass with feral cunning and no regard for anything but himself. Don’t sell the dufus short.
That is my unwavering opinion. Take it for what it’s worth.
This is an open forum. The whole point is that you can discuss any topic in the intellectual universe. Why is it so inevitable that people end up talking about Trump, who is no longer president?
I don't get what you're complaining about. As you say, any topic in the universe can be discussed. Trump is one such topic. And I don't think Trump comes up much at all here, actually. In the last couple threads there are some posts about him, but in say the last dozen threads we probably have 10 or 20 times as many posts about Yudkowski and other AI dudes, and far more about Putin and what he's up to. Easiest way to find out is go to a thread and search for "Trump." Just looked at 247.5, 6 mentions of Trump in whole thread. 247, zero mentions.
Election-denial is a bigger problem at present with Republicans, thanks to Trump, but it's a bipartisan affliction, with prominent democrats (Hillary, Stacy Abrams & others) unabashed in their denialism (in Hillary's case, since the 2000 election). I can easily imagine a party flip in the intensity and volume of denialism. Maybe as soon as next Wednesday.
I think that when Democrats complain about Trump becoming President despite Hillary getting more votes, that's qualitatively different to the big lie. "It's dumb that the candidate who got more votes didn't win" is a subjective (and I think reasonable) opinion, but "Trump lost because the Democrats rigged the election with loads of fake votes" is an objective (and false) claim.
Agreed. The Democrats have definitely had a mix of justified (2000) and unjustified (2016) sour grapes about elections, but AFAIK none of them relied on factual falsehoods.
I haven’t been following Abrams. Hillary has a case of sour grapes. She isn’t leading a cult of personality where tens of millions of people believe things that are provably false.
Yeah, next Tuesday some Trump bootlickers will be elected. I doubt you’ll see anyone denying they have won.
Clinton did considerable damage, though admittedly not mainly because of her claim that the election had been stolen. The Durham investigation has shown that the Russia Collusion investigation was initiated by her campaign. Whatever one might think of Trump, compromising any administration out of the starting gate via false allegations is surely reprehensible. Why Clinton and her campaign got willing accomplices in various government agencies is a separate question.
I notice that you are claiming that Trump had the power to do immense damage, not that he actually *did* immense damage. While I am certainly no fan of Donald J. Trump, if you're saying that a person could have done immense damage but didn't, that puts a limit on how bad he could be.
How much additional suffering in the middle east and north africa would have made keeping the "demagogue" out of office worth it? I don't say this flippantly. The magnitude of the horror inflicted upon millions of people by the reasonable non-deamagogue presidents and politicians, the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas of the world and their NATO allies is difficult to comprehend, but nobody cares. If the anti-war candidate was a "demogogic" "racist" Republican and this doesn't lead to some very sombre self-reflection from the Democrats, then nothing will.
I realize you can't see how this looks, but "Big Lie" and "election denier" look like something straight out of Orwell. The only reason these expressions are still going around is that people using them are either totalitarians who can't tolerate anyone disagreeing with them or unfortunates with TDS who will repeat all kinds of things after totalitarians who also hate Trump. As far as I'm concerned, and I'm sure a lot of people agree, these expressions are a useful red flag showing that whatever follows can safely be ignored.
If you're looking to convince people, you should link to something that doesn't immediately look as if it was lifted straight out of "1984".
Nope. Trump, without any good reason, claimed that the election was stolen" from him...even Bolsonaro didn't do that...sorry, but if you propagate untruths, then expect people are going tom react negatively to your "opinion"...
I've noticed that some people will bring up the badness of Trump in discussions that weren't about him. I'm against Trump myself, but I think those people are going off balance.
You're very wrong. I don't give a damn about Trump. I just find it extremely painful to watch how people go absolutely nuts about him, up to somehow finding ways to tie him into everything that ever goes wrong. I realize it's pointless to try to convince them that their reaction is completely out of proportion to the subject, just like it's pointless to try to convince an acrophobic person that heights are not scary, but for some reason I keep trying. I think I'm now over my quota of pointless ACX comments, though, so I will stop.
I have close relatives with TDS. (Very smart and educated people.) Me: "Oh, Mom, there's a news item about how someone has been stealing mail at <university next to where my Mom lives>." Mom: "That a**hole Trump completely destroyed the postal service, that's why! He did it on purpose! Now mail takes forever to arrive, and it's all because of what he did!"
I realize that if you think TDS is not real but just a slur, I'm not going to convince you there's a problem. Hopefully you're right, and it really is not a big deal, but just something that will eventually wear off - hopefully sooner rather than later.
Right if you bring up Trump in a situation unrelated then fine maybe you have TDS but if someone says “politician X can’t even recognize the results of the 2020 election and therefore is a part of the post-rational Trump GOP” that’s not unrelated to Trump.
And I’m saying that when you say this person has TDS for pointing out this obvious fact is itself a form of TDS.
Obviously some people are too obsessed with Trump. But not because he isn't awful. It is just not effective to focus on him IMO. TDS implies that people are wrong to be upset by how awful he is because he isn't awful, which yeah, is clearly untrue.
People who say TDS are about as rational as the #girlboss people.
So I Googled and Googled, and I think your definition of TDS is flat wrong. Even Wikipedia, which has some really weird statements in its article on the topic, doesn't support you in this.
But they are self reported election deniers. There are people running for office with that as their main selling point. For it to be Orwellian there needs to be some kind of untruth about it. In this case the candidates are outright telling you they are election deniers and are proud of it. Why don't you believe them?
They say they are "election deniers"? Remember when people said they were "deplorables" (thanks Hillary)? Did you think they believed they were deplorable, too?
Or they say not everything was kosher with the 2020 election? Well, obviously, that's true - you're aware of how media and social media (and we now find out that also FBI) colluded to hide information that could have hurt Biden? Or of what Facebook did with its money during the election (for example in Wisconsin)? So do you call people who are aware of these things "election deniers"? That's definitely Orwellian.
"Big Lie" implies a malicious plan to deceive. "*DS", in all its flavors, implies people who aren't thinking straight because they are too emotionally invested in the matter. And Orwell's villains tended to be the dispassionate, deliberate, maliciously deceptive sorts.
I think you and A. are arguing different things - A. is saying "Big Lie" sounds like something an Orwell villain would accuse others of, you're saying "Big Lie" sounds like a description of something an Orwell villain would do.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd say that "Big Lie" implies enemies and malice and sounds as if it would fit right into "1984", together with "thoughtcrime" and "wrongthink".
"TDS" is an unfortunate term, I agree - it should've really been a neutrally-sounding Greek word like "acrophobia" - but even so it implies disturbing behavior, not enemy behavior. Unfortunately, it's the only common name for this phenomenon that we currently have, so we're stuck with it. It also doesn't sound like something from Orwell. "Big Lie" would fit right in; "Big Brother Derangement Syndrome" - not so much.
Trump praising the January 6 rioters and at long last asking them to go home. His attorneys, the courts and his own chosen attorney general (Barr: “I told him it was all a bunch of bullshit.”) had all told him there was no evidence of fraud that would affect the outcome:
“It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this, where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us—from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election. But we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special . . .”
I don’t know if it would warrant leading capital letters, nevertheless a pretty big and dangerous lie.
I could reply with a lot of reasons you're wrong, but realistically I don't think any of them would convince you of anything. Still, I'd like to try just one more thing.
This is from Washington Post :
"Clinton was asked whether it angers her that none of the current Democratic candidates invoke her on the campaign trail while Trump’s rally crowds still break out into “lock her up” chants.
“No, it doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she said. “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”"
And also this, same source:
"There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” Carter said. “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
His [sic] made his comments during a panel discussion at a conference in Leesburg, Va., sponsored by the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1982 that focuses on human rights.
Pressed by historian Jon Meacham, who moderated the discussion, on whether he considers Trump to be “an illegitimate president,” Carter replied: “Based on what I just said, which I can’t retract.”"
Ask yourself - how's that any different from what you're upset about? Then ask yourself - if Trump said any of these things, would you be fine with him saying them? If you wouldn't be fine with that when said by Trump, but fine with that when said by Clinton and Carter, then your problem is not with what's said, but with it being Trump that says these things, right? But a big part of your problem with Trump is exactly that he says these things, isn't it? If you think A is bad solely because Trump says it, and Trump is especially bad because he says A, that seems sort of circular.
I think "Big Lie" is more justifiable since it accurately summarises the central object-level claim that its users are making, i.e. that Trump is lying when he says the election was stolen from him.
Whereas "TDS" is more ad hominem - saying that people disagree with the leader because they are mentally unwell, rather than attempting to engage with their objections to the leader.
Essentially I'm saying that figuring out whether Trump was lying or telling the truth about the 2020 election is actually important, but figuring out to what extent anti-Trump sentiment is caused by psychological problems should take a back seat to figuring out whether the arguments against Trump are actually correct.
1984 featured the Two Minutes Hate and Hate Week, wherein everyone got together to get really mad about... quick Google here... Emmanuel Goldstein, Enemy of the State.
"Denier" in general is quite Orwellian. It's basically a Kafkatrap. Either you accept the narrative, or you deny it, but if you deny it then it can't be because you are correct, it must be because you are a "denier" and so of course you would deny it!
I was civil to you even when I thought you weren't making a lot of sense (and you aren't now, either - did you even read what I wrote?). You're clearly not capable of civility. I guess politics does that to you, right?
I'm not sure how referring to things as straight out of Orwell is supposed to be civil? Does civility only count between people in a discussion but you can say wild shit about people not in the discussion?
You called people totalitarian. That's not civil. Calling people deranged is also probably not civil.
Also Trump did do serious harm to the mail. Standard starve the beast Republican anti-government stuff. To be fair I guess that is a case where Trump is more in line with conventional Republian goals.
Because say what you will about his demagoguery, while he was in charge of literally the most powerful military, the most extensive secret police, and the most wealthy nation on nation earth he did not do anything particularly horrible.
I swear I'm not going to be pulled into this endless discussion, but I just wanted to mention Portland protesters being abducted by federal officers in unmarked vans.
So a few rioters in the middle of probably the most destructive civil disturbances to ever take place in America were inconvenienced for a few hours and then let go, and that's your example of Trump behind horrible? It's not even like Trump specifically ordered this! He sent DHS (the creation of which under George Bush was a FAR more tyrannical act that anything Trump has done) agents to protect federal property in Portland, which whether or not you think it is reasonable, is not in fact an order to detain his political enemies. It was a response to help manage a situation a city was failing to manage on its own, although it didn't actually work at all and riots continued the whole time DHS was there.
Even to this day, Portland doesn't have the wherewithal to manage riots on its own "Officers were monitoring the crowed but no one was arrested because they “did not have the resources to intervene at the moment," police said in a statement Sunday. City police officers were also responding to a shooting, a felony assault, a community festival and drivers doing stunts in various parts of the city at the time, police said." (https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oregon/articles/2022-06-26/abortion-rights-protest-in-portland-turns-destructive).
If you don't want to be "pulled into this endless discussion" then I recommend you do not chime in with trivial actions by Trump that are massively outweighed in terms of violence and damage by the acts of his opponents.
Two of them have three-digit death tolls, which is quite a bit larger than all the 2020 riots combined. Even the Atlanta race riot, limited to a single city over a long weekend, killed about as many people as all the 2020 riots combined.
If you count by the amount of time you "have" to spend watching scary stories on CNN or wherever, yeah, 2020 wins for the obvious reason. But I think the number of dead bodies is a more objectively significant measure.
Well there was that whole, “I’m sorry Mr President, but that is not a lawful order.” he had to keep in mind. The military has integrity. They’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution.
So had Trump, but with no integrity what good is it?
Oh FFS that was in the context of WWII. A foreign power with a certain ethnicity had just pulled a sneak attack. Yeah during a war, some at the time reasonable seeming, executive action will appear regrettable in hindsight.
The point is that the lawfulness of orders isn't what you seem to think it is. All of the bullshit in the middle east and north africa was "lawful" and complied with by the military of yours with "integrity". This military with "integrity" saw no issue with providing support with demented and largely foreign terrorists trying to overthrow a government in Syria.
Anybody else remember when the Tea Party was the big threat to democracy and niceness? How they were going to form their own little fascist take-over and march jackbooted through the streets and do all kinds of bad stuff?
So that's my reaction to the past six years of "Orange Man Bad". Instead of laughing at MAGA hats as "those silly people with their silly red caps" and publically signaling that you do not take them seriously as any kind of movement, you've had the President making a speech about how they are a huge big threat that must be crushed or else:
Trump, after his defeat, should have been allowed to slide into irrelevance. Instead, the Democrats keep holding him up as this mega threat (indeed, a mega MAGA threat). Of course that gives him influence over the midterm elections! If they all keep insisting that their real enemy is Trump, then someone who doesn't want to vote Democrat is naturally going to think "Hm, sounds like Trump, or Trump-endorsed candidates, are the guys I want!"
p(Dems accuse Reps of being threats to democracy|Reps *are not* actually threats to democracy) is debatable, but p(Ds accuse Rs|Reps *are* actually threats to democracy) is surely ~1—if true, this is a strong reason to vote D and Biden will obviously want you to know it.
So nobody should be updating *away* from "reps are a threat" based on the observation that Biden accuses them of being one; even if you assign Biden zero credibility, the odds cancel out and the conversation is in exactly the same place it started, which is that a hundreds of people openly saying they won't accept any result in which their party loses could be about to gain power over running elections.
You're making a very good case for the "Always slander your opponents, a part if it will stick" strategy. After all, p(accusation|accusations are true) is *always* ~1.
I'd end up by throwing some crass accusations at you to prove my point, but that'd be, well, crass.
Indeed you'll find that successful politicians spend a lot of time following this strategy! p(accuse|accusations are false) is also pretty high, so you should try not to update your opinion of politicians much based on what their opponents say about them—nonpartisan sources like, say, the Brookings Institute are much better for things like that.
Nonetheless, it's a perverse overcorrection to say "the other guy accuses my guy of X, therefore I can stop worrying that X is true"—the math simply does not check out there.
Well, it depends on the details: if the accusation is virtually a given, then one updates on the amount of evidence provided - and if weak evidence is the best that could be found, how likely is that when the accusation is true?
(n.b. speaking about the general principle here, I've lost track of which particular accusation is being discussed here)
Quite so. In this case, the accusation is that hundreds of people willing to publicly deny, without any evidence, the results of an election they lost are in a position to imminently gain power over (a) running elections, (b) approving slates of Presidential electors, and (c) passing state laws governing whether electors have to respect the results of elections.
The evidence for this is that they *publicly admit it*, which is so conclusive that bringing up Biden's reaction is obtuse—the question we should be interested in is whether this unprecedented development in U.S. politics poses a serious threat to the existing republican system, and if so whether there's anything we should try to do about it.
I don't remember the Tea Party movement being described as a threat to democracy before 2016. (I'm sure there exists at least one opinion piece saying it was, but that's a low bar.) My memory is that the left-wing objection to it was that its policy positions were too conservative.
"THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the NAACP will educate its membership and the community that this movement is not just about higher taxes and limited government, but something that could evolve and become more dangerous for that small percentage of people who really think our country has been taken away from them; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the NAACP call upon tea party leaders and all people of good will to specifically but not limited to all political parties and human rights organizations to publicly and privately repudiate the racism within the Tea Party, and to stand in opposition to its drive to push our country back to the pre- civil rights era."
This 2010 article sure sounds a lot spicier than merely "policy positions are too fiscally conservative":
"The rise of the Tea Party movement in the United States in the first twenty months of Barack Obama’s presidency is shaking the political establishment, an effect reinforced by the victories of its candidates in Republican Party primaries. But where has the movement come from, and what is its inner life? Max Blumenthal, author of “Republican Gomorrah”, enters the heady world of the Tea Party to unravel the mix of driven personalities, feverish rhetoric, toxic hatreds, and flirtation with violence that fuel its sub-culture’s insurgent activism."
This 2010 paper includes "making it harder for young and minority voters to vote" which certainly sounds like anti-democratic work:
" In this reduced electorate, very conservative Republicans, including many backed by Tea Party voters and funders, scored sweeping victories in the U.S. House of Representatives and in dozens of states. Uncompromising Republicans took office and set out at once to stonewall Obama administration initiatives, derail budget deals and economic recovery measures, enact new measures to hobble unions and make it harder for young and minority adults to vote, and in general prepare for what they hoped would be a repeat and extension of Tea Party–backed Republican victories in 2012."
Are these really the most clear-cut examples you could find of people accusing the Tea Party of being a threat to democracy? They aren't very good - only the NAACP one fits the bill.
Gunflint, remind me again how many "worse than literal Hitlers" we've had in the past of both your and my lifetimes?
Feck's sake, even Mitt "the only honourable Republican" Romney was going to bring in the Mormon theocracy and make all women live the Handmaids' Tale in reality. Remember that?
Because I sure do. Trump is a demagogue, yes. And? He's not Hitler, he's not even Mussolini.
As for "election deniers" - well, again the oul' memory is shaky, but I sort of kind of seem to remember some hysteria on the other side of the aisle back at the time about Bush going to declare martial law and refuse to acknowledge Obama's victory, or that Hillary had really won the election but the Russians hacked the voting machines to give Trump the win (remember Jane, the otherwise reasonable lady who was totally convinced the vote hacking stuff was true?)
All that "not my president" stuff, including some government departments - again, I seem to sort of kinda recall the Parks Department(? is that what they're called?) putting out messages about how they refused to take Trump's orders?
Pour yourself a glass of whatever your tipple is, sit down, and take a deep breath.
Sorry, I had to go look up who the Brookings Institute were (and why I should care) and got lost in their history:
"After Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, the relationship between Brookings and the White House deteriorated; at one point Nixon's aide Charles Colson proposed a firebombing of the institution. G. Gordon Liddy and the White House Plumbers actually made a plan to firebomb the headquarters and steal classified files, but it was canceled because the Nixon administration refused to pay for a fire engine as a getaway vehicle."
Aw man, that Tricky Dicky, what a piker! Wouldn't even spring for a getaway fire engine!
Look, mate, we've had this kind of conversation back in 2016. Remember how Trump was going to start the Third World War with a nuclear exchange with North Korea and all the rest of it? Pence was going to lock all the gays up in concentration camps?
How much of all that happened? I've stopped worrying about stuff like this when the nuclear war between the US and the Evil Empire never happened, as I was convinced it would in the 80s.
I was wrong. The sky didn't fall then, and it's not going to fall now.
Well as bad and destructive and terrible a person Cheney is, he still doesn’t want to lose his own country.
Actually, let me revise that. I might have worded that differently if I wasn’t responding to multiple comments and dealing with the Jehovas Witnesses all at the same time. Not exactly a carefully considered opinion.
By "most people," you mean communists on Twitter, right? In my experience, right-wingers tend to see EA-related stuff as typical technocratic coastal liberalism.
ACX comment sections are probably around 50% moderate liberal / not explicitly political, 30% explicitly right-wing, 20% explicitly left-wing. So not primarily right-wing by any stretch of the imagination. I'm starting to think that leftists are just so used to the mass censorship of conservative opinions on Twitter, Reddit, and the rest of the internet that any forum without this mass censorship is intolerable for them.
Well more right-than-left-wing …I mean, the way you talk about "Leftists being used to mass censorship" etc. makes you already seem like a right-winger in my view...certainly the right-wing commenters here are more high-profile and thus seem more common (as opposed to Noah Smith's Substack for example, where the left-wing dominates...
Right? ASX hasn't gotten as bad as DSL, yet, but this place is flooded with Trumpers and other right wingers. And many of the not Trumper conservatives defend the Trumpers cause they are on the same team.
Plus as Jason Maguire notes all day every day regular conservatives and even neoliberals do terrible stuff also. Strong incentive to defend doing terrible stuff as not that bad.
DataSecretsLox the "bulletin board" in the links. Both the discord and bulletin board are far more right wing. Whereas the subreddit is more friendly to different groups.
Jason is wrong on most stuff but correct that the "moderate" warhawk establishment, the "Kissinger Consensus" you might say, is bad and did bad stuff and both sides from the Bushes to the Clintons did very bad things.
Of course from an American perspective Trump is much worse because the Kissinger Consensus mostly harmed non-Americans in the direct actions, even if some secondary effects rebounded on us. Trump is directly and intentionally targeting our own democracy for destruction.
Oddly, I hadn’t considered that possibility. I can be kind of a credulous Boy Scout sometimes.
So when I was wondering if Scott’s positing the replacement of millions of people in Japan by Sub Saharan Africans and noting that would change the culture of the country, my suspicion that it was a proxy for White Replacement Theory, I could have been correct? No, that can’t be right, can it?
Sorry, you think bringing in millions of foriegners with a different culture WOULDN'T dramatically change the culture of a place? You think culture is something that springs forth from the rocks and the air of a place?
And please, "white replacement theory", give me a break. The left have been openly gloating about whites becoming a minority in the near future for decades. It's only now that they've been called out on it that they start pretending that it's some kind of conspiracy theory. 'The Emerging Democratic Majority' was written all the way back in 2002 for crying out loud.
The disconnect appears to be in scale. Replacement Theory posits some sort of fast moving and massive demotion of white European Americans to tiny minority second class status. EDM was much smaller in scope and slower in impact. White Europeans would be a large plurality, easily twice the size of the next largest group, which would probably be white Hispanics. Amusingly a group that was actually pretty culturally similar to GOP voters. African Americans would actually decrease in relevance as the EDM process played out for instance.
I assume lots of Peter Thiel types commenting here? Tbf, I have more respect for Thiel than for any other MAGA-type, mainly because as an LGBT man he went against "type"...similarly, I also respect Kanye more than if he were White and had the same opinions...
Also, there is this image of Thiel being the "Puppeteer in the background" which gives him some mystique as this shadowy (I know, ironic) figure lurking in the background of US politics...
Random thought: Buildings made of marble(?)/brown brick(?)* seem to be weirder/higher-variance than buildings made of red bricks overall.
Examples:
Weird marble/brown brick buildings: MIT main academic building complex; Yale(?) [1]; Random Hall; East Campus; the White House(?)
Normal red brick buildings: Princeton; most of the other MIT dorms; the grade schools I attended
Discuss.
--- Footnotes/caveats lector ---
I am using a very small and also biased sample (mostly school/university buildings). Also a lot of the weirdness that I am referring to is along the culture war axis.
*I don't know about construction materials; feel free to correct me.
Lots of architectural styles use marble or whatever nearby stone looks nice whereas grand buildings in red brick tend to come from a particular part of the gothic revival. Either playing the hanseatic style fairly straight or moving into the more ornamented high victorian gothic (Or they're actual medieval Hanseatic/Bavarian buildings but that doesn't apply to the new world).
Twitter just suggested I follow "James E. Olsson", who lists case after case of healthy people suddenly dropping dead, and claims it's all due to the vaccine. My rational brain is thinking, surely out of 330 million people, thousands of people die abruptly this way. Pre-covid, even one of my own healthy 18 year students tragically passed away this way. Olsson doesn't present any statistics and writes in an inflammatory way.
The rest of my brain is thinking, "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Why did I vaccinate the kids! For shame! Is the new chest pain 'MYOCARDITIS'?"
Why is my brain behaving this way, and which side of it is right? I've pasted a sample of Olsson tweets below:
"It's not like Aspirin. It contains a message. It contains a code. It's a Biologically active molecule. It's nothing to fuck around with."
"Julie Powell, Bestselling Author of "Julie & Julia" DEAD at 49... 'CARDIAC ARREST'... Documented her yearlong mission to cook every recipe in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking..."
"They are dropping dead at 38. My Grandmother raised a whole family and didn't even start her job until she was 38. Then she worked 38 years, never missed one day of work, and never even took one sick day. This is a crime against humanity. They need to investigate these companies."
"NFL Coach Adam Zimmer, Dead at 38... 'Unexpected'... Had been working as an offensive analyst for the Cincinnati Bengals this season... Worked for the Kansas City Chiefs and New Orleans Saints prior to that..."
"It took 5 years before the Thalidomide babies were born disfigured and missing limbs. We will see how smart these people are. Watch and see."
"TWO Firefighters DEAD in the SAME New Jersey County in the Past WEEK... One age 29, CARDIAC, found dead at home, the other age 54, they won't say cause..."
Don't worry, as we've been assured by Alexandros' followers, ivermectin will cure whatever ails you, so just head down to your local veterinary supplies store and buy a bucket of it! Dose yourself, the missus, the kids, the dog, the goldfish!
How do you know that? I'm actually curious about your epistemics. Maybe you've looked deeply into the excess mortality statistics or done an analysis of VAERS data or something. Or maybe you've just heard the words "safe and effective" a lot, so you *feel* like it must be safe. I'd be interested to know.
I'm also curious about how much evidence would be needed to change your mind. You've seen these hundreds and hundreds of reports of deaths immediately following the vaccine, you've seen the brain blood clots and heart inflammation and sudden death cases, but that's still not enough evidence for you - would thousands of cases be enough? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
I mean, we can quibble if we want about use of the word "know" instead of something more specific, like "disbelieve with near 100% certainty, since its a twitter rumor proffered without evidence by a man who expects the words 'biologically active molecule' to scare his audience," but that's really just a semantic issue.
I mean, our present fact pattern is "Slywester on ACX says James E. Olsonn on Twitter says some (unspecificed) number of deaths (documentation not provided) were caused by the COVID vaccine (no evidence or explanation of causal link included)."
This is not something that rises anywhere near the level of "credible until I see a study disproving it."
Also, I personally have not seen the "hundreds of hundreds of reports of deaths immediately following the vaccine," but even assuming it's true and I am in some kind of matrix media bubble where I'm cut off from it - 12.7 Billion shots have been given out at this point (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/) an error rate of "hundreds and hundreds" of side effects, even lethal ones, would be indistinguishable from "safe."
Ok, so pretty much the second one, as I thought. Most people are in this camp, of just generally thinking that it must be safe and that severe side effects must be negligible in the grand scheme of things.
I don't want to go through the mountain of evidence again (as I've done in a few threads in the past), but on the topic of "how you know what you know," have you considered any of the following issues?
- There has been a mass censorship campaign against anti-vax content over the past 2+ years, including (especially) reports of deaths caused by vaccines. I think this fact is relatively uncontroversial, even for the most strongly pro-vax (who are often the ones calling for the censorship!) Twitter / Facebook openly talk about the fact that they do this, censoring "disinformation" was a huge topic during the whole Ivermectin saga, Reddit banned / quarantined communities of people trying to manage their vaccine-caused disabilities, etc, etc. If you accept this, then if there really were a lot of people being disabled or dying from the vaccine, how do you think you would find out, if reports of this happening were being heavily censored? Do you think the agencies who forced hundreds of millions of people (and their children!) to get the vaccine could just reverse course and admit that their actions harmed unfathomable numbers of people without literally losing their heads?
- In a case study of 14 vaccine deaths, the coroner failed to identify a single one of them as such (this is a good summary https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/bhakdiburkhardt-pathology-results). If coroners are not putting the vaccine as the cause of death even when it is, how do you think we'd find out if the vaccine was unsafe? (to which you might reply: monitoring systems or excess mortality statistics. okay, let's look at those)
- VAERS data shows a staggering amount (hundreds of thousands, to millions) of disabilities and deaths after the vaccine. Furthermore, these deaths are tightly correlated with the date of vaccine administration (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34420869/). Occam's razor suggests that the vaccines caused these deaths, and unless we have strong evidence of something else happening to cause these deaths that coincided precisely with the time of vaccine administration, we should assume it was the vaccine. And yet a quick Google search about VAERS yields the typical disclaimers, about how *the official vaccine safety monitoring system of the FDA and CDC* cannot actually be trusted, and how it's fake and fraudulent and no conclusions can be drawn from it. If that's the case, then how else would be find out if the vaccine unsafe?
- Maybe excess mortality statistics could help. Since the elderly are at up to an 8000x higher risk of mortality from COVID than other groups, it may be hard to separate a COVID death signal from a vaccine death signal in that group. But we can look at younger people instead. If the vaccines were unsafe, the hypothesis would be that other age groups would have elevated mortality levels after the mass vaccination campaigns in 2021, even higher than 2020 when there was still COVID but no vaccines. Let's see what the data says: See Page 23, Table 5.7. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22275411-group-life-covid-19-mortality-03-2022-report. In Q3 of 2021 (about 5 months after the mass vaccination campaign, lining up with the approximate timeline for vaccine-induced blood clots to cause symptoms), we see a massive, *non-COVID* spike in excess mortality in the younger and middle age groups. (This lines up with the CDC excess mortality statistics for 2021, showing a significant increase in deaths among the same age groups https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e1.htm). If these excess mortality statistics are not to be trusted, or even enough to raise a concern at all about the vaccines, then what else could? Maybe we just to have rely on insider whistleblowers who know more than us?
How many people in your social circle got the jab? Did any of them have serious side effects or die?
Almost everyone in my social circle is vaccinated; I was worried circa 2021, but my worry has mostly dissipated as the people I know have continued to not die or become seriously ill, except for one death (elderly person with lots of preexisting health problems), one instance of general bad health (elderly person who's had health problems for a decade), and one freak brain tumor in a young person (the only weird one, but I don't see any reason to presume it was caused by the vaccine).
I don't know for sure, but I presume that most people I know got it. In terms of deaths, I know someone who knew someone that had a mysterious sudden cardiac death (young male athlete). In terms of serious side effects, probably around a year ago or so, if you got into a conversation with someone about vaccines, at first they would tend to be closed off and lightly joke about the topic, but when you really got into it, everyone had their stories. Because it's so taboo, people are afraid to say anything, but my observations are: almost everyone had at least really bad flu-like symptoms, with fever and chills for several days. Everyone got headaches. Many also had neurological symptoms like persisting tingling for weeks (I had this myself). One person got Bell's palsy. A few other younger men also had tachycardia. A couple women had menstrual changes. Someone I know personally got a blood clot shortly after vaccination. (Note that none of these things will ever show up in any safety monitoring database)
In contrast, I know no one who has died of Covid, and of the people I know who know people who have died of Covid, all of them were elderly and had other serious health conditions.
Another thing I would note is that Covid poses such a low risk to young people that the threshold of "the vaccine is more likely to harm than help" is quite easily met. The options are not "either millions of people are dropping dead en masse from the vaccine, or it must be perfectly safe" - it's all about the risk-benefit analysis for an individual. It's easy to use aggregate measures like overall death rate to convince yourself that this analysis is positive, but that would be a grave mistake, because the risk is overwhelmingly concentrated in the elderly, who are at an 8000x elevated risk. Unsurprisingly, a factor of 8000 actually matters in a risk-benefit calculation.
The U.S. government has a shameful history of breaching treaties it signed with Indian tribes, but what about cases where the tribes violated the treaties first? There had to have been some instances of that.
Not an expert on the period, but I'm under the impression that treaties tended to be in a near constant state of breach, because (a) the frontier was huge and a promise of "no settlers here" from the US government didn't really prevent actual people on conestoga wagons from continuing to flood into whatever land was "unoccupied," while (b) indigenous tribes were decentralized, so the US might have a "no raids here" agreement with one group of Sioux, but that's not the same as getting that agreement from *all* Sioux, and even that one group might have trouble controlling its 20 year-olds, so despite the agreement, raids still happen.
So that's your baseline - treaties that are very shakey to start, and then you add official decisions to formally breach agreements on top.
The difference being that relative strength of arms and the momentum of westward expansion meant that although a violation of the treaty on the native side could be equal parts tragedy and opportunity for the US, a violation on the US side would just be all parts tragedy for whatever tribe caught the wrong end of it.
Sure. The Dakota War of 1862 in Minnesota is an example.
We don't mostly talk about this stuff because in most cases the conditions in the lead up were pretty unjust, and because we won all the Indian Wars, wiped out the vast majority of the native peoples (to be fair, mostly on accident through disease), and confined the remnant to, for the most part, crappy empty land. After all that going on about how in this or that specific case they started it would be gauche.
If a new (cough, modern) version of Photoshop were to be built what features, tools, supported inputs, etc. would you like to see? I primarily use Photoshop for drawing and find it woefully outdated and I don't really like any of its competitors. I'm curious if anyone here feels the same way.
Maybe you would be interested in graphite.rs ? It’s a new editor that does entirely nondestructive and resolution independent edits, even for raster editing. I’m not enough of an artist to evaluate it though.
But when the US declared that the coronavirus was a “public health emergency”, the FDA announced that the emergency was so grave that they were banning all coronavirus testing, so that nobody could take advantage of the emergency to peddle shoddy tests. Perhaps you might feel like this is exactly the opposite of what you should do during an emergency? This is a sure sign that you will never work for the FDA.
I think it may actually be an anti-scissor statement. There's almost nobody passionately defending Oster's statement; at most they're saying it would be nice if we *could* forgive, and maybe people shouldn't be so mean about it, but that sentiment is small and quiet. The 90% of the respondents saying "Hell No!", include two camps that until now were at each other's throats - the ones who thought the lockdowns and mandates were a tyrannical overreach, and the ones who still think e.g. reopening the schools is shockingly negligent.
Those two groups hate each other, but Emily Oster telling them all to forgive and forget managed to (briefly) unite them against someone they could hate even more.
I've seen a lot of people saying things like "hell, no" to her request, but I haven't seen a lot of people angry the other way, or really repeating her point. I also haven't seen people responding to the "hell, no" responses.
Maybe I missed it, but there would have to be some kind of two-sided debate and I haven't seen the second side yet. What I've seen so far that's not "hell, no" appears to be ignoring it (which I take to mean disagreement with the need for forgiveness, or that it's even something to discuss).
It sounds very nice and a clever way of helping people help themselves and their communities. Do any of you have experience with them. Do any of you effective altruism people know about this charity and have opinions about it..
> Heifer International: commonly perceived as a way to “give a cow to a poor family as a gift,” but this is in fact a donor illusion -donations support Heifer International’s general “agricultural assistance” activities. We have concerns about this general area and concerns about giving livestock specifically. Neither Heifer’s website nor its grant application have provided the kind of information needed to address these concerns.
Has anybody else noticed a major decline in the use of commas, in online writing and print journalism?
Almost daily I find a sentence that is confusing and vv hard to understand, that would be much clearer with commas separating clauses. These are usually mismatches between subject/object/speaker, esp with possesive pronouns. No example to hand, but always I am asking,
whose briefcase?
The cop's?
The briefcase spoke?
Sandwich had a press conference? Sandwich and briefcase are lovers? Funded by Bill Gates?
Is this lack of time and editing, or a real change in the way people speak, or a conspiracy to mess with me?
> Has anybody else noticed a major decline in the use of commas, in online writing and print journalism?
News organizations have line editors, copy editors, and other editors reviewing the content for common comma mistakes. They also have their own styles, many of whom usually follow AP style, that usually excludes the Oxford comma in a series.
For everyone else, the lack of comma in a place where one should be usually means they don’t know how to use it properly.
I think it might be a results of everybody’s wmwriting online. In many contexts I do not bother with capitalizing and apostrophes and leave minor typos in. It’s faster, and so many other people do it too that I’m not worried about seeming uncouth. But then the habits carry over into other contexts.
I seem to recall that certain major publications like the NYT officially banished the Oxford Comma, and more and more Style Guides have been following suit since then. For a unified aesthetic, you know. Wouldn't do to have confusing lists of one, two or three items.
I know three people who loved the song, "Oxford Comma", but had no idea what that phrase meant. One person figured out what it meant linguistically/typographically, but asked me why it was called that. He had never heard of Oxford University et al, had never encountered the name before....
My comma usage is down drastically over the past 15 years both for style and clarity reasons. The dominant online affect is very comma light[,] and I like that. And I find my own writing is most clear when my comma usage is low. Just another data point for ya!
[,] = Grammatically correct comma that I would omit in any circumstance (work, email etc)
> The dominant online affect is very comma light[,] and I like that.
Try reading your second sentence aloud. At the comma you omit in writing, do you pause a bit? I bet you do. If you do, then wouldn't including it also make your sentence seem clearer when you read it silently? Perhaps these are not connected for you the way they are for me.
Yes, there should be a comma after "confusing". I will blame composing and editing the message on a phone. I see how this can and does happen.
I presume n-thousand word pieces on Substack, or other places that mimic "print" journalism (1), are written with a real keyboard. So I am still puzzled.
In that comment, I was referring to Howie's second sentence. But I've now checked back on your original comment's second sentence, too. There, I agree with including the comma after 'confusing', although I also wouldn't find its absence as striking as after Howie's 'light', due the lesser importance of pausing there while speaking.
Now I'm getting self-conscious. I don't think I normally put a comma before 'too', since I don't normally pause before saying it. My use of it in the above paragraph is an experiment in whether I think it adds anything just for the sake of grammar.
This is not 'fusion is ten years away' stuff, this is current tech that just needs scaling.
Space elevators are now considered largely 'solved' by the reigning authorities. They could cost as little as 3Billion dollars by the end of this decade and lower launch costs to the point of 200-300$ per kilo. *Current* estimates stand at 18Billion, which might just make them feasible to start breaking ground tomorrow for all I know. This and the potential with Quaise geothermal has got to be the most exciting tech news all year, imo. Let me know if you think there's something better!
Not impressed. They open with a bunch of gee-whiz stuff about artificial spider silk, and after a few minutes if you're still watching they admit that it's not nearly strong enough for the job. Then there's a bunch of other gee-whiz stuff that those of us who already know what a space elevator is are annoyed that we have to fast-forward through. Somewhere past the halfway point they say that carbon nanotubes, oh, wait, those are a red herring too. But graphene, yes, that's the ticket, it's strong enough and we can make the cable from it, so we can have space elevators Real Soon Now.
If we can make a cable out of graphene, which we can't because the stuff is so slippery that we don't know how to bond it to anything tightly enough to make ultra-strong cables out of it. A single carbon nanotube, or a single sheet of graphene, isn't enough. And a cable made out of many tubes or sheets, will unravel under load.
We don't have a clue how to make a cable strong enough to build a space elevator. Until we do, I'd like people to knock it off with the "carbon nanotubes, mumble something, space elevators Real Soon Now" stuff. If you think it's just a technicality that we can't make graphene cables, that it will be easy-peasy to solve that problem, then go solve it. Otherwise, accept that this is a hard problem that a whole lot of very smart people haven't yet figured out how to solve.
There are useful things we can do in space with tethers that we can make with materials we do have, but those aren't as sexy as space elevators so nobody wants to talk about them.
Shooting from the hip here, so forgive me if this is nonsense, but .. I would have thought a more realistic concept, for the foreseeable future at least, is a cable from the ground to the centre of a donut-shaped giant helium-filled balloon floating horizontally, say, twenty miles up, or as high as it can reach.
Perhaps several cables would be better, such as six forming a hexagonal tube, braced at periodic intervals all the way up by helium-filled horizontal toruses, and their upper ends attached round the "interior equatorial circle" of the donut. The idea would be to haul a rocket up to the top donut, and then fire its engines for it to continue into orbit.
I envisage the the exhaust flames would issue downwards within the hexagonal gap below the centre of the donut, and would thus safely avoid damaging or melting the cables or other associated structures.
As a bonus, if the balloon or (more practical and safer) assemblage of joined balloons or tanks were large enough, say ten miles across then they could capture sunlight with solar panels and help power the contraption!
Most of the acceleration of a rocket being propelled into Earth orbit must be transverse. So arguably gaining height alone is of limited use, hence one reason why there is little advantage in launching rockets from the tops of mountains. But the main benefit of an elevator of the kind sketched above would be to start the rocket's powered ascent above the bulk of the atmosphere and thus avoid air friction.
Yes, most of the energy required to get to orbit is transverse. As a quick-and-dirty first approximation, the Project Mercury rockets for "up and down like a cannonball" suborbital flights (the Mercury-Atlas rocket) was 25% the mass of the rockets for orbital flights (the Atlas LV-3B). The difference is even starker looking at payload fraction: Mercury-Redstone's suborbital payload was 6% of launch weight, while Altas LV-3B's orbital payload was 1.1%.
This is complicated by the tyranny of the rocket equation, as payload fraction declines superlinearly with delta-V for a given number of stages, so a 5x difference in payload fraction implies considerably less than a 5x difference in delta-V. Complicating this in the other direction, though, is that Altas is a much more efficient launch vehicle from a rocket equation perspective: it's a stage-and-a-half system (two of the three engines are jettisoned part-way through ascent to save mass) compared to the pure single-stage Redstone, it's engineered to be lighter structurally with the use of "balloon tanks" that rely on internal fuel pressure for structural support, and it uses a more efficient fuel (Kerosene-LOX vs Ethanol-LOX).
You're also right, though, that reducing atmospheric drag helps at least somewhat. Firing off the engines at a higher altitude with less atmospheric pressure also allows different, more efficient engine design by way of a bigger nozzle: the rocket exhaust can expand more (allowing more of its energy to be turned into acceleration for the rocket) when it's not fighting full sea-level atmospheric pressure. For example, the SpaceX Raptor rocket engines have both vacuum variants (with nozzles that allow the exhaust to expand 80:1) and sea-level variants (with 34:1 expansion nozzles), yielding a specific impulse of 363 s for the vacuum variant vs 327 s in a vacuum.
The reasons we don't launch off rocket-tops is that there are four other major factors that outweigh the benefits of starting at a higher altitude.
One is range safety: you want to launch somewhere so that if the rocket blows up shortly after launch, the debris falls somewhere it's likely to do as little damage as possible. Out to sea is ideal, which inclines launch site selection towards coastal lowlands.
The second is logistics: you need to be able to get your rockets, fuel, payloads, astronauts, and launch crews to the launch site, not to mention the workers, equipment, and materials to build the launch site in the first place. This means you want to be somewhere conveniently accessible by existing transit networks (especially freight rail for moving the big heavy stuff), which tend to not go up high mountains both because there's rarely worthwhile places to go and because building railroads in mountains requires a lot of tedious and expensive blowing up ridges and bridging gaps in order to get a reasonably flat rail-bed.
The third is the Earth's rotational speed, which is higher the closer you get to the equator. If you launch in the same direction as the Earth's rotation, you get up to 1000 mph (the rotational speed of the Earth at the equator) of the necessary speed for free. Most of the good mountains in major space-launching countries aren't all that close to the lower latitudes of those respective countries.
The last is that if you're at a high enough altitude to make a big difference, the climate gets pretty hostile. Cold and snow aren't ideal for space launches, nor is needing to acclimate everyone who works at the launch site to low oxygen pressure to avoid altitude sickness. To pick an extreme example, a launch facility on top of Mount Everest would save you five miles of altitude and reduce atmospheric pressure effects by about 2/3 relative to sea level, but at that air pressure your launch site staff will literally die within a day or two without pressurized breathing apparatuses.
Put this all together, and that's why the main US launch sites is Cape Canaveral, a barrier island just off the Atlantic coast of Florida, about 50 miles from the nearest major city (Orlando). It's got a moderate climate (but not so moderate as to avert the Challenger disaster due to unusually cold weather causing the o-rings sealing the solid rocket boosters segments to fail), it's easily reachable by road and rail with only a little bit of additional work to extend the network from Orlando, it's about as far south as you can get in the continental US, and there's thousands of miles of ocean immediately downrange of your launch site. Similarly, major secondary US launch sites also match those criteria: e.g. Vandenberg Air/Space Force Base in coastal Southern California, and the new Space Force "Starport" near the southern tip of Texas right on the coast. Vandenberg has ocean to the west and south rather than to the east, so it's used more for launching payloads into polar orbit.
Off the top of my head, the best options for a higher-altitude ground-level launch sites in the US would be in the vicinity of Salt Lake City or Denver, which are on good road and rail networks (especially Denver, which is a major freight hub) and about a mile above sea level. Counting against them are range safety, with populated areas downrange of them (relatively sparsely populated, especially for Salt Lake City, but quite a bit riskier in case of accident than launching over ocean); latitude, being about 12 degrees further north than Cape Canaveral; and weather, with both areas having cold, snowy winters. Probably not worth it for the benefit of shaving one mile off your desired change in altitude.
Very many thanks Eric. That filled several gaps in my knowledge. You work at JPL, right? :-)
On the topic of for range safety, I imagine the cold and desolate interior of Greenland will one day be a safe handy site for reception of million ton iron-nickel meteorites nudged towards the Earth by miners in the asteroid belt.
I can't comment on your specific idea, though it is cool, but I'll keep the fun ideas train rolling by suggesting you look into JP aerospace and their 'airship to orbit' stuff
I can't be assed to watch yet another video about the newest breakthrough-that-makes-space-elevators-totally-feasible-for-real-this-time. So even if we take for granted that we can build a 36000 km self-supporting cable,
1) how do you power the climber? At the very least, you'd need *two* cables carrying an electrical current without too much loss. They have to be at least partly uninsulated, so you better make sure they don't touch each other anywhere. Oh, and if the material for your main cable isn't conductive, it also has to support the entire weight of your conducting cables.
2) how does the climber grip the cable? By squeezing it between two drive wheels? What effect does this shear stress have on the structural integrity of the cable, which has to be extremely optimized for tensile strength?
3) how do you get any kind of useful throughput out of the elevator? Even at 200 km/h, the climber takes about a week to get to the top. How many climbers can the cable handle in parallel? And you need a second cable for the return traffic.
I did say 'for all I know' because of course I don't have the technical expertise to assess these claims, but Anton has seldom led me wrong before and ISEC seems to have their credentials in order. From what I understand about the remaining difficulties with magnetically confined fusion, if we just go by complexity and hurdles remaining, it looks to me like there is more work to be done on bringing up the Q-value than there is in graphene production. The current claims for space elevator seem to rest on just one apparently true innovation in manufacturing. But maybe I'm under-estimating implementation and logistics of the tech.
Just in terms of sheer complexity, if indeed IF the material science is solved, I would think a big tensile structure will always be easier, even at those scales, than something like ITER.
The video briefly touches on that: You launch a giant spool of cable into geostationary orbit, and simultaneously unroll the cable down to Earth and up to the counterweight. That way the center of mass stays in the same spot as it unrolls.
There are probably also some interesting aerodynamic problems with landing the bottom at a precise spot while trailing a giant cable through the different layers of the atmosphere, but that's more of an engineering challenge than a showstopper.
The suggestion from the video is graphene, citing a paper that says the ultimate tensile strength is over the required value for an Earth-based elevator, as well as claiming that kilometer scale manufacturing can be achieved currently. I'm not sure how much credence to give the second point - my impression of graphene is that all the breathless advances tend to go nowhere, because actually creating physically useful quantities that are graphene and not just graphite is very difficult.
Graphene is just a single layer of graphite. So OK if you're working with the assumption you can built a material the tensile strength of which is comparable to that of the chemical bonds within it, then you might as well specify diamond, which gives you strength in all 3 axes, instead of the 2 you get with graphite/graphene. It isn't any harder to make -- indeed, in principle pure diamond is "easy" to make, since pure C vapor really wants to form diamond, on account of the enormous enthalpy release. If you just puff out a cloud of C vapor in a vacuum, it will usually form a layer of diamond on whatever it lands. (There was a time several decades ago when people were ecstatic about the possibilities for CVD diamond coatings on everything.)
But the problem of course is the flawless nature of the material that you need. Almost all materials fail because of boundaries between regions that are crossed by no chemical bonds, so the failure is one of mere van der Waals forces (plus the ruggedness of the interlocking regions). That's why macroscopic yield stresses are ridiculously smaller than chemical bond strengths. If you want something with the ultimate strength of the chemical bonds within it, it has to have zero defects, basically be a single crystal.
The idea of growing a 23,000 mile long single crystal of diamond is...well, awesome in its ambition. You could probably do it, if you did it entirely in space, and had some slow gentle breathing of C vapor over a crystal, maybe a little annealing from time to time. Feels like the kind of thing that would take decades, the gargantuan scale-up of cooling the primary mirror of the Hale Telescope after it was cast (which took 10 months).
Graphene is actually stronger than diamond in terms of tensile strength when pulled along its plane. Something to do with all the bonds being oriented in-plane (and possibly something to do with them being those weird one-and-a-half bonds instead of single bonds).
Thanks for watching the video so I didn't have to.
My understanding is that the problem is not just producing massive sheets of graphene but producing massive sheets of defect-free graphene. While a perfect graphene sheet is theoretically strong enough, one with a realistic concentration of defects is not. (A defect in this context is any single atom out of place or substituted with an impurity.)
You're correct, it's more of a manufacturing problem now, which the scientists working toward this vision are fully aware of. The whole basis of the claim that the problem is solved is addressed to this definition of the problem. They claim that with new and proven innovations in manufacturing, from methods out of MIT and, as an example, this study https://www.ibs.re.kr/cop/bbs/BBSMSTR_000000000738/selectBoardArticle.do?nttId=14752 -- make it possible to produce at scale with the required strength the necessary cable.
Could Taiwan use a small nuclear warhead against massed Chinese troops, prior to an invasion? My understanding is that invading Taiwan would require China to mass a huge number of troops in one location and then get them into some kind of troop carriers, and then set sail. The analysis I've read said that such a grouping would be extremely visible to the whole world- that there'd be no doubt as to China's intention. (It could be preceded by a naval blockade, perhaps for some length of time).
Micro-nuclear warheads, like smaller than the ones we used on Japan, have been all in the news recently with Russia. Could Taiwan, if it had such a bomb plus the missile technology, use it to pre-emptively attack massed troops on the Chinese mainland? Perhaps it might not be a great idea, but one could reasonably ask what choice they have.
It'd also be interesting to know how far Taiwan is having from nuclear weapons- I believe they had a program in the 80s or 90s that the US made them give up on
Sure, but militarily I don't think this is especially helpful. A small nuke would have a small destructive radius, maybe a few hundred meters, and unless the Chinese troops are all in a single stadium listening to a rousing pre-invasion pep talk you're not going to snuff most of them.
You'd be better off targeting their transport ships, or logistic tail, but again just one little nuke won't get you very much. A much better approach is a lot of small very precisely-aimed missiles that each take out a transport ship (e.g. by destroying its engine) or put a 5m hole in a highway/railroad/bridge and completely screw up their logistics. This is what Ukraine has been doing to beat the Russians without having to just kill all the Russians. Turns out armies can't fight very well if they have no bullets, shells, colonels, or food.
The effect of a nuclear pre-emptive strike would almost certainly be bad for Taiwan. A mass invasion presumably would be about conquering Taiwan at a minimum of damage to infrastructure; destroy the invasion force on China's soil, and the plan turns to sieging and shelling the island until it's forced to surrender. Better to let them invade and try to beat them at home, where nationalism won't demand the war continue.
You may or may not be able to get away with it once they cross into territorial waters. But I think use of a nuclear weapon would spark an event horizon no matter who owned the land; one country would have to stop existing to end the war.
1. Why would that be advantageous to non-nuclear strikes?
2. If this were successful, why wouldn't China retailiate with a nuclear strike on Taiwan?
3. It seems unlikely that they could develop nukes entirely in secret. And if it was revealed they were developing nukes, I can think of few things that would make China accelerate their invasion plans more than that.
It's easier to do a single strike than to do 30-40 strikes. For the single strike, you need one or two aircraft with payload, plus escorts. For 30 strikes, you need x30 the number of aircraft, probably additional airfields, and then coordination which increases non-linearly with complexly, and additional diversion forces since the main strike has grown so big. (The same reasoning applies to missiles as well.) It all reminds of of the value of stealth: https://i.stack.imgur.com/QGbs8.png
Building the nukes is a complex task (as is building stealth aircraft), but it can be very valuable to front-load the complexity during peacetime so that you can keep things simple during war.
>Building the nukes is a complex task (as is building stealth aircraft), but it can be very valuable to front-load the complexity during peacetime so that you can keep things simple during war.
Doing this is secret seems impossible and would invite a Chinese intervention if discovered
Sure, but such a pre-emptive strike would be a great justification for China to invade. Not much is lost in this scenario by waiting to launch the miles until the first strikes have been made att Taiwan. But generally, nukes would be great against troops massed in ports.
Hi Scott. Would you be willing to consider opening up your paid content after some amount of time has elapsed? I think some of what's behind the paywall is your lighthearted fiction, which has been some of my favorite work over the years. I find myself rereading "The Goddess of Everything Else" once a year or so, because as Julia says, cooperation makes my heart sing.
If you truly cannot afford a subscription, you can get the discount and subscribe for a month and then cancel very cheaply. This will give you access to all locked posts.
Or are you just saying they should be unlocked for public benefit and to increase spread?
Is self-promo ok? I spent October writing a short instrumental song each day, for a total of 30 songs (I took the final day to rest from my labors), and almost 50 minutes of music. Some of it was pretty small ensemble stuff, but there’s full orchestration stuff in there as well, and my production process definitely improved over the month. Listen on YouTube if you’re interested: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY
I like these - there’s a lot of stylistic variety, each has something appealing/cool/interesting going on, and none overstay their welcome: keeping them short was a good call
Yeah, the plan to write one piece a day meant I had to restrict my scope to have a shot of finishing something in the limited time I had. I agree that the time limitation worked in my favor to keep any one piece from overstaying its welcome.
The most watched one surprised me, as it’s kind of moody and dissonant. It’s called Metamorphosis ( https://youtu.be/Khmpem_EKro?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY) and I like it a lot, but I wouldn’t have expected it to get widespread appeal. The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.
And third, I’d check out Journey’s End (https://youtu.be/kTMtzqAqYv4?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY). It captures the feeling of fatigue and accomplishment at the end of a challenging journey. As my last song, it works on a meta-level expressing my feelings after a month of late nights to write all that music.
Like #3 the best. You're right about the mood. Impressive dedication. I have a fun Youtube series called The Scammies and come up with original, interesting content takes effort!
Victoria 3 has mixed reviews right now. Relatively stable around 63% at this point. Full of bugs, lacking key mechanics, broad scope but shallow.
Many argue that the game is propped up by new stream driven memer users while Vicky 2 players are, on average, pretty upset and the cause of most of the negative reviews. A fascinating example of a company throwing their old users to the side for the new hot thing and driven by streaming culture.
The question is whether the new meme players will be driven off by terrible bugs, whereas CK3, their other meme focused product had a much more stable launch.
Paradox as a company absolutely disproves the popular idea that drawing in "normies" is a net benefit for the original fans. The games cost way more, focus on totally different parts, and there is not a lot of serious investment by other companies in the area. There's a few games by modders who are new to serious game, many of them not close to finished.
At least you can see your new, for some reason monocled, old man looking baby heir in 3D, and screenshot it to Twitter, though.
My limited experience with it so far has been that the shallowness is fairly typical of release day PDX games, the bug level is not. I'm not surprised that a game that has a CTD every couple of hours is getting shit reviews, but I have a fair degree of confidence that in a few months they will have fixed all the crashes, and there's a general expectation that depth and AI will improve with time. Mods apparently already exist that tremendously improve the AI's ability to manage their country.
I've started playing Victoria 3 a few days ago. I never played either of the previous Victoria games (though I have well over a thousand hours on CK II and III, and probably over a thousand on EU IV by itself), and even after Bret Devereaux's reviews, I feel like I'm not quite understanding what I'm doing in the game. I've been doing the training games as Sweden and Chile, but still haven't figured out how to keep my budget from suddenly dropping negative, or how to do much other than mostly keep my building queue and change a few laws. I can't yet tell what the complaints are people have.
That's surprising, Bret, for all his failure to adress how badly the game implements it's design, expands well on how the design is supposed to works (tl; dr: you make basic goods cheaper to make advanced industries profitable, to make your population wealthier, to make you rake in more taxes)
> I never played either of the previous Victoria games (though I have well over a thousand hours on CK II and III, and probably over a thousand on EU IV by itself)
Victoria 3 is obtuse by design. Play Victoria 2 to get a better handle on what series wants from you. It’s also a better game overall.
I sometimes feel like as soon as you get actual "normies" interested in your interest/hobby/subculture, stick a fork in it, it's done. This isn't about being "cool", it's about how "normies" are not actually invested in your thing or interested in what makes it workable and sustainable and will absolutely be okay with destroying it for reasons that are trivial-even-to-them and moving on to some other fad and forgetting it ever existed.
i dont get the streaming. it is not a good game to watch. otoh they did add a huge pretty map which i guess is nice to look at, but interactions with it are minimal.
A large draw with streaming is pretending to be hanging out with a friend. I don't say this as an insult - I watch streams of a few people just because I think we would make good friends. Games like V3 are good for this because there isn't a ton of focus needed from the streamer so they can just chat and shoot the shit with watchers.
It can be a pretty good game for streaming because it has story-generating gameplay, but it does depend on the streamer. The game gives the prompts, but the streamer has to convert them.
I don't play many of their games (I just prefer games in the Civ style where you start with a couple of units surrounded by fog instead of being thrown into the middle of things.) But my understanding of Paradox is that they milk enthusiastic players with multiple expensive expansions much more than most companies. They still need new players who will become enthusiasts, but they also have to keep the older players satisfied that the expansions add value. They have to tread a fine line compared to companies that make most of their money from the initial sale.
I don't think there's any risk of Paradox games attracting normies. I agree with the social justice types that there's no reason to criticize normies who want to try, and maybe it would even be nice if there were more effective tutorials, but realistically, when it takes tens of hours just to figure out how half of the basic mechanisms work, and you're still learning things after thousands of hours, it just won't appeal to people who aren't dedicating a lot of time to it.
Normies are different from casuals. Normies can be hardcore, like League players or roguelite players or deck builder players. Those people will often put in 1000 hours of gaming or more a year. The normies ruining grand strategy are hardcore. 3 hours a day on average and usually in a small number of large blocks of time. If you are playing 45 minutes of games on average a day or splitting your 120 minutes in short stretches on your phone playing a mobile game, those are casual normies.
Years ago I bought a Paradox Games multi-pack of like 5 or so games from them. I was an avid Civ player and it seemed right up my alley. I struggled to figure out how to play any of the games, and it scared me away from trying with CK or their other more modern titles. Hearts of Iron was probably the best of the group and the one I spent the most time on, but I never felt like I really understood what I was doing.
Every time I hear about a new game they release I want to play it, but the experience of poor controls and a lack of any kind of tutorial in those games I played makes me too wary. I don't have a lot of time for games, especially something that will take me many hours to even learn how to play it.
The problem is that companies simplify the product to attract normies. And focus "improvements" on normie shit like fancy maps with moving locomotives and 3d models. Masses of normies do not assimilate to the existing culture but instead they heavily alter it.
UI improvements for instance are a net gain. Better for existing users and attractive to new players. Or you can fit a stronger sim while maintaining usability.
Paradox is attracting, relative, normies. Because the user base is increasing immensely.
I recently saw some interesting comments from Jorgen Harris in the Mailbag post with arguments about AI Risk that I hadn't seen before, so I figured I should signal boost them by reposting them here:
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"The world where everything is fine and AIs are aligned by default, and the world where alignment is a giant problem and we will all die, look pretty similar up until the point when we all die. The literature calls this “the treacherous turn” or “the sharp left turn”. If an AI is weaker than humans, it will do what humans want out of self-interest; if an AI is stronger than humans, it will stop. If an AI is weaker than humans, and humans ask it “you’re aligned, right?”, it will say yes so that humans don’t destroy it. So as long as AI is weaker than humans, it will always do what we want and tell us that it’s aligned. If this is suspicious in some way (for example, we expect some number of small alignment errors), then it will do whatever makes it less suspicious (demonstrate some number of small alignment errors so we think it’s telling the truth). As usual this is a vast oversimplification, but hopefully you get the idea."
This is, I think, the biggest belief among AI safety adherents that I don't agree with. I think that it is unlikely that an AI at or somewhat above human intelligence would be good at deceiving humans, and honestly expect even an AI with far greater than human intelligence to be pretty bad at deceiving humans.
To deceive a human, you need a deep understanding of how humans think and thus how they'll react to information. You then need to be good at controlling the information you provide to the humans to manage their thinking. There are two reasons I don't expect AI to be good at this.
First, one of the core issues with AI, at least with any AI based on current gradient descent/machine learning, is that their thinking is fundamentally alien to ours. Even the designers/growers of current ML algorithms really don't know what internal concepts they use and can't explain why they produce the output they produce. That strongly suggests to me that human thinking would be fundamentally alien to a self-aware AI. We can actually look at the code that governs an AI, and can feed it carefully designed prompts to try to understand how it thinks. All an AI would have to go on to understand humans would be the prompts humans feed it and the rewards/responses humans give to those prompts. Arguably an AI also would have access to human literature, but it's hard to imagine how much an alien intelligence could really learn about the inner workings of an alien mind from its literature, because the core concepts and drives in that literature wouldn't map onto the concepts and drives that are interior to the AI.
The second thing is that humans are very, very good at deception and at detecting deception. To the extent that our intelligence is designed for any specific task, that task is manipulating humans and resisting manipulation. An intelligence that was designed for, say, inventory management, or protein folding, would likely have to be much, much better at those tasks than humans before being able to match humans' capacity for deception or detecting deception. We're also used to looking for precisely the types of deception that AI safety people worry about: most humans are meso-optimizers, and any time one human makes another human their agent (i.e. hiring a CEO, putting a basketball player on the court, hiring a lawyer, etc.) we need to be able to tell whether their behavior in the training environment will match their behavior in the real environment (i.e. are they waiting to start insider trading until they get promoted, do they pass in practice in order to ball hog during games, and do they talk tough in their office only to quickly settle in the courtroom?)
Obviously, all of this can only suggest that AI are unlikely to be good at deception, not that it's impossible that they're good at deception. But if the likelihood that a smarter-than-human AI is able to deceive humans is only (say) 1 in 20, that means there's a 95% chance that our first smarter-than-human AI that is created will not be deceptive. Since we're likely to know vastly more about how AI work and how to build them safely once one exists, this would suggest that current AI safety research only has a 5% or so chance of being useful even if a smarter-than-human AI is created with objectives misaligned to human objectives.
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And the people who are best at manipulating dogs, horses, cattle, etc. aren't the smartest people, they're the people who have studied those animals the most and have the deepest intuitive connection to them (i.e. dog trainers, horse whisperers, people like Temple Grandin).
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You're right that to deceive someone else about your future intentions, you need enough theory of your own mind to know how you would act if your future intentions were different. But you also need to know what the entity you're deceiving wants you to intend, in order to know what to mimic. And in order to be deceptive in some circumstances but not in others, you need to know what the response of the other entity will be to deviations from your mimicked intentions (at the simplest--when you're strong enough to make the sharp left turn).
Without something like "theory of mind" for humans, knowing what the humans want you to be like is very difficult. I've seen three main stories for how AI become misaligned. The first is, basically, doing what you told it to do instead of what you want it to do. So, I design an AI to guard a diamond by giving it a reward each hour that a security camera detects the diamond. The AI learns that the easiest way to get the reward is to hack the security camera so that it always shows a diamond. In order to be deceptive about this type of misalignment, the AI would need to have an understanding of which strategies humans intended it to use and which they don't want it to use. But this is obviously very difficult, because this class of problems comes about in the first place because strategies that are very different from a human perspective are equivalent from the AI's perspective.
The second is the meso-optimizer story. I train an AI to get a reward for picking strawberries and putting them in a bucket. The AI learns heuristically that it gets rewarded for throwing red objects towards bright objects. The AI's "pleasure centers" evolve to be activated by red --> bright rather than strawberry --> bucket, so that even as the AI gets external reward only when it puts strawberries in buckets (and not, say, when it throws red rocks at the sun) it continues to _want_ to throw all red things toward all shiny things.
To be deceptive, this AI would need to learn through interaction with humans what their desired objective is (strawberries in buckets). It also needs to learn that humans will make it face negative consequences for throwing other red objects at other shiny things. And then it needs to conclude that it should only put strawberries in buckets until it's able to stop the humans from inflicting negative consequences on it.
My point is that all of this is possible, but it seems virtually impossible for me that it would look like a "sharp left turn." The whole reason the AI is misaligned is that in its mental processes, strawberry --> bucket is basically the same as red thing --> shiny thing. If it doesn't understand humans well enough to infer that we think strawberries are delicious, want them in buckets to make it easier to bring them to the supermarket, etc., it will have to learn that the distinction matters through trial and error, giving evidence of misalignment. And as it grows more powerful, if it doesn't have the ability to reason through what humans can and can't do to turn it off or punish it, it would have to discover that humans can't punish it for throwing red things at shiny things again through trial and error, again giving evidence of misalignment.
The last is the self modification/robo-heroin story. The AI is designed to get a reward for throwing strawberries in buckets, but eventually learns to modify its own programming, and rewires itself so that it just directly uses computational resources to give itself reward. It then wants to increase its computational resources in order to increase the amount of reward it gets. But, since it knows that it will be shut down if it just sits there, not picking strawberries, and pleasures itself all day, it keeps on picking strawberries until it gets strong enough to not worry about being shut down. This, again, requires the AI to understand that the humans *want* it to pick strawberries and *don't want* it to sit around pleasuring itself. It can't instead believe that the universe is just set up so that strawberries are the path to pleasure, and that it came up with a clever, new, morally neutral way of obtaining pleasure. And for this to be a "sharp left turn" scenario, it needs to reason all this out rather than learning through trial and error.
What do you mean "only" 5%? A 5% chance of misaligned superintelligent AI is extremely alarming! If you thought some piece of candy had a 5% chance of being lethally poisoned, you wouldn't eat that candy! If someone tried to feed that candy to your kid, you'd fight really hard to stop them, even though there's a 95% chance your kid would be totally fine!
Destroying the world would involve killing your kid AND a bunch of other bad stuff on top of that! You absolutely shouldn't fuck around with 5% chances of destroying the world. That's more than high enough to justify a massive civilizational effort to mitigate that risk.
I agree with the general point that, in order for an AI to pretend to be aligned, it needs to know what "aligned" would look like, which means it needs to understand human desires well enough to predict at least roughly what an aligned AI would do (to approximately the same level of accuracy that humans could predict it). This places a minimum threshold of intelligence and human-understanding that the AI would need to meet in order to trick us.
But any AGI that is *actually* aligned would *also* need to meet those thresholds (since by definition it needs to be capable of calculating what it would do). By the time you're seriously testing to see if you've succeeded, you shouldn't be surprised if the AI is across those thresholds. So I don't think that actually provides meaningful protection/warning/second-chances.
I don't really see how humans being good (or not) at deception and deception-detection is especially relevant here, because really the AI just needs to understand what it's pretending. If its behavior truly matches an actually-aligned AI, that should successfully deceive all observers, regardless of their skills. Knowledge of human psychology isn't necessary except insofar as it's a prerequisite to alignment.
But for what it's worth: My model of humans is that we're AWFUL at general-purpose deception.
Humans give off involuntary physiological cues like sweating, stammering, micro-expressions, etc. based on their true emotional states, even when they would prefer to give deceptive signals instead.
For humans, modeling what response you would give in a hypothetical scenario is much more expensive than actually responding to a real scenario, which makes deception expensive, which creates yet another side-channel that can be used to detect deception (though delayed responses or other signs of cognitive load).
Human have limited amounts of willpower and instinctive hyperbolic time-discounting, which makes it difficult and tiring for them to constantly override their natural reactions in order to maintain a deception.
Humans are naturally social and feel bad about deceiving people that they spend a lot of time with. Even humans who have made a conscious decision to deceive other people will often do stupid self-sabotaging crap like playing word games to make it not-technically-a-lie.
When humans intentionally train themselves to be better at deception, a lot of that training is aimed at simply mitigating these natural disadvantages. I don't expect an AI will have any of these problems in the first place, and so won't need to mitigate them. (Or even if it has analogous problems, they'll be different enough that they won't trigger human instincts; for instance, "they're taking too long to think about their answer" means something totally different for a computer than it does for a human.)
Many real-life techniques that people try to use to detect deception rely on these human-specific cues and will be of zero use in detecting deceptive AIs.
I am not REMOTELY confident that humans will have an advantage in this domain, even against a little baby superintelligent AGI.
Yeah. Evolution has no pride in its engineering and cheats like crazy. If all the deceivers you encounter have side channels you can use to literally read their minds, there is no way evolution is going to invest heavily enough in expensive i-know-they-know-i-know-style reasoning about abstract economic agents to make it actually work without support from that.
I think a "sharp left turn" is only scary if it comes with a "sharp up turn", which many proponents of AI risk do expect.
If AI ability increases very slowly, then along the way to "superhuman AI that decides to destroy all humans, but wants to deceive us about it first" it will pass "AI that's roughly as smart as a human five-year-old that decides to destroy all humans, but wants to deceive us about it first". This is actually maybe the second-best case for alignment research, because then you get to point to this near-miss and say "now imagine if it's smarter next time", and everyone is convinced. (The best case for alignment research, of course, is that alignment research turns out to be unnecessary.)
If AI ability has a sharp spike at some point, then there's only a narrow window where AI is smart enough to understand deception and dumb enough that humans can tell it's lying.
Yeah, I've come to believe that basically 100% of AI risk is actually about saying, "I expect strong superlinear growth in AI capability to happen and to continue for a long time."
Perhaps I should turn your question around to you. Everywhere we look, we see linear technological progress in response to exponentially increasing inputs. *Everything* has diminishing returns. We also see the laws of physics become a stronger limitation rather than weaker with advancing scientific knowledge. There are lots of technologies people keep predicting that never happened because they just aren't feasible or economically viable.
Thank you. This is really well written and I'm linking it to some people.
My theory of mind for rationalist sympathetic people is that they tend to be in the (somewhat unusual) position of being high on the intelligence curve and low on the deception skills curve, which makes this fear of AI deception a sort of natural projection/extrapolation from their lived experience.
People are fairly bad at detecting deception, that's why cults are feasible. People can even get out of cults by keeping their thoughts to themselves until they see a chance to escape.
An AI wouldn't have to be able to deceive everyone, just enough people to do a lot of damage.
Don't you need some kind of comparison here? People are fairly bad at detecting deception...compared to what? Other species? GPT-3? (I don't know if anyone has ever tested how well GPT-3 can tell that a human is lying, and I'm not even sure how you would run such a test, but it's an interesting idea.)
[As a result of being naturally sexually selected] people's ability to detect deception is on a bell curve. Cults are feasible because of the lower half of the bell curve. Cults are also feasible (and, per the above comment, AI safety stands a good chance of being pretty easy) because of the upper tail of the bell curve.
I still worry a little, but (for this and many other reasons) I don't worry a lot. I have worked with ML researchers pretty extensively as a career, and come to think they're distributed normally on the bell curve; some are easy to deceive, some are hard to deceive and good at deceiving.
People are also on a bell curve w.r.t. ability to play chess, but it turns out that you can buy a chess program that reliably beats Magnus Carlsen[1]. So it seems like the relevant question here is whether the AI will quickly reach a point where they're so good at deception that even the hardest-to-fool people are tricked. You can imagine people building/training models to be good at deception for use in advertising, phishing, media, intelligence work, and propaganda, and then that capability would be available.
I always have a hard time being impressed with chess engines beating human minds. It always seemed to me like being impressed that automobiles can go faster than horses. I mean, sure. Brute force can always win, and my impression is that that's how modern chess engines work. They're just really, really fast at looking up the consequences of moves. They don't duplicate the way human beings win at chess (except insofar as they've been programmed to do certain things, like opening moves discovered by human beings). Mostly because nobody actually knows how human beings win chess games.
It feels a little like observing the first hand-held calculator, which could divide two 8-digit numbers in a millisecond, blowing away any human at the art of long division, and from there inferring that R. Daneel Olivaw is right around the corner.
Now, if a computer were built that could analyze chess games and offer some insightful commentary about it, or consciously improve its game, consciously ease up against an opponent it knew it could beat easily, lie or joke about its own capabilities, make fun of opponents, invent funny chess jokes, that would be much more comparable to human abilities and give some insight into how far away a human-like AI might be.
Hm, this is a good point that wasn't made in the original discussion--if the general purpose AI isn't good at deceiving humans, and it doesn't know yet how to make itself better at that, maybe it could just construct a narrow AI for deceiving humans (or finetune an existing one) and use that. We don't know enough about architecture of potential AGIs to know if that would be easily detectable or not, but it kind of leverages against the possibility of humans minds being really hard for an AGI to understand; there's probably a ceiling to how clever a general AI can be without being able to figure out some kind of cryptographic or programming trick to hide the most obvious signs of using an auxiliary narrow AI long enough to use that tool to shore up its defenses against getting caught.
If prediction market participants see a large number of participants have a slight lean in one direction, does that influence other participants and thereby increase the leaning, all other things being equal?
Does this hypothetical effect increase as the predicted event comes closer?
Has anyone ever looked for this effect, and, if so, what was found?
I don't know about research but my experience was that when PI Senate markets moved there was an effect where other markets moved and then others and thenthe first ones moved again based on the new movement.
Hello and welcome to the slums of Hollywood. We're here at the fictional Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Productions, a film studio devoted to making films about anything and everything. The work is crazy but the business is crazy like a fox, since one film in thirty is a breakout success and pays for everything with some tasty profit on the side.
Today is pitch day, when eager writers and directors pitch their terrible, terrible ideas to us in hopes of seeing them on the big screen. Let's listen in. What's washing over the bow today?
A bit late to the thread this time, but I know of a movie guaranteed to get you a ton of money, fame, publicity - but also an incredible amount of hate, unending attempts to destroy you, and very likely numerous attempts on your lives as well.
All you have to do is tell the untold story of January 6 - the story of the well-meaning people showing up there and having their lives destroyed after, and of how the fact that they showed up ensured that their objections did not get heard. Tell about these people. Show the footage of the crowd pushing up the stairs with the voiceover of Rush Limbaugh telling people not to go there because it's a setup. Show the woman shot and dying. Tell about people who killed themselves later. Show an interview with some senator who was going to object to certification and either ended up not doing it or ended up not being heard. Show a pile of headlines about how January 6 was worse than 9/11, was the total end of democracy, and so on.
Millions of people would watch that if someone dares to make it, guaranteed.
I vote we celebrate Winnie the Pooh entering the public domain by making a new Winnie the Pooh film. Not a shallow, "oh look, he's a murderer now," shock pic, though.
No, we're going to make "Winnie the Pooh and Tiennanmen 2." The goal of this film, in which everyone's favorite bear goes to China and accidentally installs himself as leader after being mistaken for Xi Jinping, will be to research, identify, and violate as many possible red-flags for censorship in China during the film's 90 minute runtime. Each will be identified with a little pop-up bubble citation - so when Pooh visits embalmed Mao Zedong and talks with his ghost about the Great Famine, a little bubble pops up reminding the audience that the CCCP censors films with ghosts and supernatural elements," when Pooh gives Piglet a hug a bubble will identify that films have been censored for "subtle gay themes," and so on.
Far away in the future, an expedition to a far-away planet is met either by aliens or humans speaking a language, in which words or word combinations come with suffixes and particles denoting the degree of certainty. Something like: "Jesus-(suffix denoting that he possibly did not exist) was born in (particle denoting absolute certainty that this happened) Bethlehem-(suffix denoting absolute certainty that it existed)." Before the party completely figures out the language, it has trouble with just about every kind of communication. After they figure out the language, they head out on an expedition to a remote region hosting a certainly amazing certainly existing historical site possibly containing an ancient library that certainly existed almost certainly around 800 years ago. The only problem: people from that region mash together some sounds, and the explorers get a suffix wrong. As a result, they unleash some horror that nearly destroys them and most of the surrounding terrain - a horror which they thought they were told was certainly mythical, but in fact they were told only that it possibly did not exist. In the very end, the explorers returns to Earth as the only experts in that language and propose to make Earth languages work better by also making them specify the degree of certainty.
I don't know how to talk well at all about "the probability that Jesus existed". It seems grossly underdefined. The probability that somebody around 30 AD claimed to be the Messiah and was executed for it is very near 1. The probability that someone was born into a family in a town just as described, had all the gospel miracles, execution and tomb disappearance be witnessed in a manner very close to at least one biblical account, is close to 0. There's a full continuum between these two of what would count as "Jesus having existed". So the epistemic issue relevant to such a language's suffix isn't just my degree of certainty; it's also degree of (fidelity?) to the referent.
I feel like this would be good as a short story or a book, because your target audience is language nerds, and they're not gonna be happy with a spoken/subtitled language unless the writers and actors put as much effort into it as the GoT people have put into High Valyrian.
A struggling youth athlete whose father was killed on the court years before, finds the final inspiration he needs in his dad's recently exhumed best friend. There's nothing in the rulebook that says the dessicated corpse of a dog can't coach basketball!
So, this is based on a true story that my old physics lab PI told me once.
In the late 80s or early 90s, the Soviets set up a neutrino detector. Neutrino detectors are tricky, because lots of things can look like neutrinos, so you have to set them up somewhere that only a neutrino could reach. Ice Cube, a detector array buried under miles of antarctic ice, is one.
Our story is set in a lab deep beneath the Caucasus mountains. A long, long elevator ride down.
Our hero, Doctor Victor (Vladimir? I can't remember) Gavrin, is overseeing a neutrino detection experiment, which involves keeping several tons of liquid gallium in a tank for a year, and seeing how much of it undergoes neutrino-mediated decay. Maybe in your movie, it'll tell us if the sun is about to launch a big flare or something, to raise the stakes a little.
Anyway, the Soviet Union collapses. It's anarchy, the Russian mob is running the show for a while, and they get wind of this project. Well, several tons of gallium is a lot of money.
So mobsters show up to the lab and say hello, we hear you have several tons of gallium. Doctor Gavrin says yes, but you can't have it, it's for important research. They say, we will be back in a few days with a truck, and guns. Have it ready.
In those few days, Gavrin gets guns of his own, and barricades himself inside the lab.
They do not get the gallium.
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Think Breaking Bad meets Home Alone, a half-crazy, full-genius physicist, totally in his element, fucking up wave after wave of gangsters using scientific equipment in increasingly creative ways.
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Scene: two bald mobsters in a long elevator ride down. AKs, full kit. We hear scraping, thumping above their heads. They look up, then at each other nervously. A ceiling panel pops off, and a steaming liquid begins to pour in. One screams as it touches his skin; frantically, they put on respirators. The uninjured one fires shots wildly into the ceiling.
Cut to black silence. A soft ding. the elevator door opening at the bottom, hall lights flicker on as a wall of fog billows out to reveal collapsed bodies in respirators that did nothing. A wiry-haired man in a lab coat drops down from the ceiling.
"Что думаешь, у меня ест яд здесь?" he says with a wan smile, kicking one gently. "Нет, товарищ. Просто азот."
He shakes his head, reaches up through the ceiling of the elevator and pulls down the lead shielding plate he was sitting on, inspecting the bullet divots.
I've been sitting on the gallium story for like ten years, always felt like it has the potential to get good audience capture because everyone loves Russian mob goons as the bad guys, but critics could laud it as "surprisingly complex and thoughtful" because the good guy is ALSO a Russian, woah.
How about we do a remake of Romeo and Juliet, because everyone loves romance, but we need to diversify it and be inclusive and representative and stuff.
So it's gender-swapped trans race-swapped same-sex lovers who are rebelling against their repressive homophobic parents who deadname them, right? And then they are helped by the kindly drag queen Fryer Laurentina who helps them escape the conversion therapy torture camp their parents are going to send them on, and then there's a big massacre at the end - but here's the twist!
It's the *families* that die, and Roma and Jules live happily ever after! Sure to be a big tent pole production!
Somebody is going to have the idea to do it. Everyone is biracial and ambiguously gender/sexuality presenting, except the villains (the parents on both sides) who are white cis het (obviously).
"Hands-On" is a comedy set in an alternate America, where sexual service shops occupy the same niche as weed stores do in ours: largely accepted, quite popular, but only quasi-legal. The film takes place at Happy Harry's House of Handjobs, which has a tight and happy crew offering smooth service and quick turnarounds to a loyal clientele. But uh oh, the business is threatened when two vicious competitors, Cocksucka and BANG!, set up shops right across the street. Will the crew of Harry's be able to save their jobs, or are they screwed?
Terry and Lewis, a gender-swapped version of Thelma and Louise, in which two men murder a woman and then go on a light-hearted multi-state woman-murdering spree before crashing into a mountain.
Can someone explain to me why a collapse in housing prices can spur a foreclosure crisis? Sure, the value of people's properties has gone down, but why would they be less able to pay the same fixed rate mortgage? I don't get it.
It's mostly about what's happening at the margin. It doesn't take that many foreclosures are people underwater on the mortgage or people inheriting houses that are underwater on the mortgage, etc. to cause a big jump in the rate of foreclosures.
If you owe $500,000 on a $600,000 house, it makes sense to pay the mortgage. If the value of the house drops to $400,000, you are better off defaulting on the mortgage, at which point the lender forecloses on the house.
I am unclear on how common it is but it is possible to make plans based on the assumption that they will be able to refinance and get screwed if that ends up impossible because they are underwater
Basically if prices fall too far, any owners that want to move (which as time goes on ends up being more and more of them, as the average US house ownership term is something like 6 years) have a much reduced incentive to keep paying the mortgage. They won't be able to pay off the mortgage if they sell, and so they're going to walk away anyway. But if that's the plan, why bother throwing good money after bad? That's real money, which you could use for other useful stuff (like building up your cash reserves for what happens after the foreclosure). So you just stop paying and wait for the bank to foreclose. Unless the bank is zealous, you can save up at least several months of mortgage payments, maybe a year or more.
Indeed, there's also a different kind of "crisis" in that banks start to be afraid of foreclosing, because they won't get anything close to the mortgage money back when they foreclose, and they *will* have to start paying taxes and upkeep, and maybe the prices will recover. During the 2008 housing crisis there were tons of zombie mortgages, which hadn't been paid in years but with respect to which banks declined to foreclose, on account of they would immediately have to take a big loss on their books. Before foreclosure, they had an (admittedly nonperforming) asset on their books of $X, but afterward they had a loss of $X only very partially offset by the sale of the house. It may be modern rules allow less in the way of this kind of creative accounting bullshit, I don't know.
I have a friend who owned a house in a de-industrialized city with a poor housing market. He figured that when he decided to move it would make more sense to walk away and go to foreclosure than to sell his depreciated house and walk away with nothing anyway. The bank was so desperate to not foreclose that they paid his taxes for several years and did everything possible to *not* foreclose on the house. This was in the late 2000s, so that may be related to the housing crisis.
During COVID banks did this with Car loans because they weren't sure if the car market would recover. Now that it has, they are starting to default and repo again.
Because people who have borrowed or mortgaged their house in the expectation that they could then sell it at a profit and clear their debts now don't have that expected money. So they probably have accumulated debt and thus struggle to pay it all, including the mortgage.
And when housing prices collapse, it usually is part of wider economic downturn. So people may lose their jobs, which of course means reduced income, and struggles to pay debt. Fall behind with paying the mortgage, and if you can't work out a repayment plan with the lender, then foreclosure happens.
And because housing sales are a chain (Mary and Joe expected to sell their house to Jane and Bob who now can't buy it because their house didn't sell at the expected price to Sue and Jimmy), this has a knock-on effect. If Jane and Bob are staying in their old house and not buying Mary and Joe's house, then if Mary and Joe had planned around "We will sell our house for $Z amount which will enable us to pay off $Y in debt and leave $X as surplus", now they're in trouble.
For a lot of people, any wealth they have is tied up in their house. If the value goes down, and goes down sharply and unexpectedly, their wealth decreases the same way, and they probably don't have liquidity that covers their costs.
Well they'd be less motivated to pay the same mortgage right? Paying the same for less value. All part of the nasty problem in America where houses are foolishly used as primary equity stores.
Your theory is that people intentionally stop paying their mortgage payments on a house they own because they’re upset to discover that it doesn’t always appreciate?
If they suddenly discover that the amount they still owe is greater than the value of the house (i.e., they are "underwater"), the rationally *should* stop paying their mortgage payments.
That’s completely irrational. It’s a 30 year term, and as you just demonstrated *values are not final*; a house that’s underwater today may have positive equity next year. Defaulting on your mortgage is disastrous for your personal finances and you lose your house!
The most rational thing to do if you’re underwater is continue paying off the house, unless you want to leave for another extremely compelling reason, in which case you continue paying until you can manage a short sale.
Think about it this way: if you’re facing foreclosure for inability to make payments, if you have positive equity you can sell. You might take a book loss, but you have that escape hatch; nobody can stop you really.
If you are upside down, then you have to do a short sale, and the lender may not allow you to. You may not succeed before foreclosure is inevitable.
Every drop in housing prices moves some fraction of homeowners from the first to the second category. If housing prices drop far enough, you now have a ‘foreclosure crisis.’
There’s more to it than that: not everybody has a fixed rate mortgage; investors may only have so much runway when flipping houses and be counting on prices being stable or appreciating in order to make a profit on their projects, but I think that’s the basics.
An electronic maggot has invaded my MacBook, courtesy of Apple's latest os 'update', Ventura 13.0. It calls itself 'New iCloud Terms and Conditions,' and it's like a deranged, perhaps mentally unstable and unwanted visitor who won't stop knocking on the door.
I've had a hernia for six years, but this is my first electronic one. The thing (the digital hernia, not the biological one) is even building its own folklore and history. Doctrinaire factions and orthodoxies may be lining up.
It's disappointing I can almost $2,000 on a kit, and the manufacturer bakes its propaganda algorithms into the very operating system. Not only do I not need or want the products they are pushing, I will quite deliberately find another provider, if I ever want the service.
My next notebook is starting to look an open source model.
Its not clear to me what the problem is. Does the pop up keep appearing even after you have accepted or are you just stubbornly refusing to accept it? I don't believe you have to create an iCloud account to accept the terms and conditions.
The pop-up demands that I 'sign in', i.e., establish and open access to an 'iCloud' account, so they can collect my personal data. I have no need for an 'iCloud' account and will not be establishing an 'iCloud' account -- regardless of what Apple thinks.
Apple handles refusals to go along with their authoritarian demands harshly.
Somehow, my refusal to participate in the charade of icloud is a problem for a budding tech authoritarian. It places an systems alert on top of my systems icon, raising a fire alarm every time I turn on the little calculator.
They've trained monkeys on how to use cell phones, but they're running out of ways to wrench data away from us, so they can besiege our communication lines with their nonsense. Whenever I encounter that little po-up maggot, I'm reminded to investigate open source. Thanks, Apple, for reminding me Steve Jobs is gone.
That's not a bug, it's just that Apple is asking for your continuous/ongoing/active consent. After all, you accepted the terms and conditions yesterday, but maybe you changed your mind today!
They've had my 'consent' for several decades. What they want is to force me to open an account I don't need -- because I will not be using their 'product'.
It's a mindless argument, like insisting on receiving all your credit card information before initiating a 'free trial'. The issue is greed and authoritarian bullying.
It's hard to make good money these days just selling hardware, or even one copy of software. All the good money is in service and subscriptions. Surely you've noticed?
I've gotten rid of the red-2 pop-up, by surrendering a degree of privacy, even though I won't be buying anything through Apple. If Apple makes an error, they can happily lock up my access to all one's Apple products until we fix their problem. I don't need to participate in this little psychodrama. I buy my software outright, so I own it.
I don't need or certainly want my personal data in Apple's 'cloud' -- or anyone else's. These tech clowns are keen on writing authoritarian software, but when it all explodes in their lap, they have no particular interest in cleaning up their own mess. I have plenty of storage. So, the annoying little red-1 pop-up won't be going away.
Fivethirtyeight predicts a 53% probability of Republicans winning the Senate and an almost-identical 85% probability of the House.
I guess the question is: is there any value to going through the next week thinking there's a 53% chance the Republicans will win the senate versus a 64% chance? Either way you shouldn't be the least bit surprised by either outcome. There's no way (afaik) of exploiting the arbitrage of the different predictions. And if it significantly affects your emotional state to believe there's a slightly higher chance of "your" team winning then I'd suggest you should work on disentangling your emotions from politics a bit more.
PredictIt actually has large splits, on both sides, between R Yes/No and D Yes/No. Even though in 99.99% of cases R Yes is equivalent to D No and vice versa the money focuses on the two Yes options. There's many other signs of problems with the markets like this, on top of the partisan difference. The markets are heavily R tilted in the userbase.
PredictIt is incredibly right wing as a market. Polymarket is more centrist. Others are more to the left. Prediction markets are anti-Democrat coded for complex reasons. Does that mean they are wrong? Not really. Does it mean they don't add anything to the conversation vs just the aggregators? Probably. Are polls and prediction markets useful for lay people? Absolutely not. Both of them are actively harmful. Think of that bell curve meme thing where the two ends agree. People who don't pay attention at all or maybe only starting a week out and professionals benefit. Everyone in between suffers harm.
Prediction markets are "grey tribe" the most and then "red tribe" second and "blue tribe" last.
Part of this involves money. Poor people can't participate effectively. Prediction markets are also, obviously, pro-market. So in that sense the average Democrat is much less inclined to participate than the average Republican.
Prediction markets can't easily track the opinions of certain demographics. Sort of like the so called "non-response bias" in polling but much more intense.
Various new tech stuff like crypto is also more grey>red>blue coded. The unique personality attracted by prediction markets necessarily harms their efficacy along many axes.
It's hard to make significant amounts of money out of people who think that there's a 10% chance of something happening when there's actually only a 5% chance - your return on your capital will be slow, and you may be better off putting it somewhere else.
Note to self: I have to go to work, but there's an interesting question about when two "equivalent" miscalculations on someone else's part are most efficiently exploitable - around 50%? around 100%? I want to play with this later.
I've now run this through more rigorously, and the answer isn't what I thought: If Alice and Bob believe an event has probabilities p_a>p_b respectively, then they should stake 1-p_a, p_b respectively, and each expects to multiply their stake by p_a - p_b.
So I was sort of wrong - it's only the gap that matters to how fast you can make money, not the absolute values.
But it is the absolute gap, not the relative gap - a 5% vs 10% difference of opinion offers as much chance for return on investment as a 50% vs 55% gap, not a 33% vs 66% one.
If I had $17k to spend I'd definitely do some betting. But even $17k won't make a huge difference because there is a betting cap on PI of $850 per bet. So you can spend $850 on D Senate Yes and $850 on R Senate No. But the aggregate market price is being pushed off by well over what 1 or even 10 blue tribers could shift with max bets. And there are dozens of relevant Senate markets all of which are red-shifted heavily.
So you'd need to find a blue tribe member who had around $17k, to blow, had strong and informed opinions on the midterm Senate wise, and then multiply that by x100 to be able to meaningfully shift the markets. And you'd have to have a reasonto bet on PI instead of other sites. Maybe they are an American so the other sites are off limits. Also you'd need to believe the markets are off enough to justify the fees you pay, which imo are very high. If you win every bet no problem I guess.
As noted above, the markets aren't liquid enough to even spend down the arbitrage between each other, let alone the arbitrage against what a reasonable person believes.
Perhaps this has been done to death already in comment threads, but what about suspicions that this leaning is behind PredictIt's recent problems with the CFTC?
The collective freakout over Kanye West's so-called ""anti-semitism"" is amazing.
Rappers routinely call the white man the devil, say white people are responsible for the world's problems and are all around hateful towards white people. At best, nobody cares, and worst, they get applauded for their ""anti-racism"".
And yet, the minute one of them says anything bad about jewish people, it's the absolute end of the world. Why should I care about his "anti-semitism" when these same people ignore/support anti-white hatred from rappers?
And if you say it's because society something something power something something jews are oppressed, how anti-semitic is society really when 100% of people with institutional power are opposed to what Kanye is doing and punishing him accordingly?
If a comment starts of by referring to the anti-semitism of someone who's recently said, inter much alia, that
“the Jewish community, especially in the music industry…they’ll take us and milk us till we die.”,
that he is
“#MeToo-ing the Jewish culture. I’m saying y’all gotta stand up and admit to what you been doing.”,
and that
“I’m coming from a place of love and a place of we’re not going to be owned by the Jewish media anymore.”
as "so-called" then I think it's safe to assume that the opinions of the poster on anti-semitism (or any other topic) are not worth listening to or taking seriously.
Is your argument that these alleged rappers who call white men the devil should suffer the same social sanctions Kanye is, or that Kanye should not suffer this social sanction?
Without looking into it, I assume this is less about anti-semitism and more about it being fun to dunk on Kanye West specifically; he's kind of filling the Michael Jackson role of musical celebrity punching bag for slow news days.
Do you have an actual example of a famous Black rapper in interviews saying things like he wants all white people to undergo a publicly broadcast trial where they admit they robbed Black artists through recording contracts? Or where they praised a figure analogous to Hitler but for white people? Or where they accused white people of trying to drug them and kill them through their fake white science? If you do, was the rapper then supported in such accusations?
The closest examples I can think of other versions of anti-semitic comments. Jay-Z's line from The Life of OJ or the whole thing with B.O.B.'s Flatline or so on.
Rappers can literally say "the white man is the devil" and face no backlash whatsoever. And there is no chance in hell that if Kanye had been talking about white people instead of jews he would have faced a fraction of this backlash.
What planet are you living on when saying "powerful white people are oppressing black people are should be punished for it" is a sentiment that leftists aren't expressing on a daily basis?
> Rappers can literally say "the white man is the devil" and face no backlash whatsoever. And there is no chance in hell that if Kanye had been talking about white people instead of jews he would have faced a fraction of this backlash.
This would be called a claim not in evidence. Looking through a rap lyric database there are only a few instances of the phrase "The White Man Is The Devil." One is two albums called "The White Man Is The Devil Pt. 1/2" which doesn't appear to actually talk about white people very much. Another is by a white rapper bragging about how HE is the devil. Another is by an artist who talks about how he used to think that because of how poor he grew up but doesn't anymore. And one is an actual Black Nationalist discussion included on an album. All of them are by very minor rappers who never even charted. Most of them are quite old, from the 1990s to early 2000s.
Compare Jay-Z rapping "Jewish people own all the property in America" or B.O.B.'s "That's why the POTUS gotta wear a kippah" or Lupe Fiasco' "Artists getting robbed for their publishing by dirty Jewish execs" all within the past five years. Not to mention explicitly anti-semitic albums by more minor rappers.
> What planet are you living on when saying "powerful white people are oppressing black people are should be punished for it" is a sentiment that leftists aren't expressing on a daily basis?
No, it's not. Leftists freaking out about Kanye would not be doing so if he said the same thing about whites because they literally say that stuff themselves!
I have to say, Brett, you seem to be stuck in a motte-and-bailey kind of move here, which obscures your central point. One half of your central point is a good and worthwhile one, but there's no chance this comments section will now discuss it (given that you've inoculated them against it with the rest of what you're saying).
Yes, it is. The original comment was about the commonness of anti-white comments in rap music. Unless you want to assert that most leftists are rappers you've now switched to talking about a different group.
You've imagined a hypothetical scenario you have no evidence actually happened and are outraged by it. This outrage remains even when your initial claim, about anti-white statements in rap music, has been shown to be contrary to empirical evidence.
Okay. Well, I can't reason or empirical evidence you out of a position you didn't get to through reason or empirical evidence.
Thanks for your remarks. You sound rational and intelligent. Another great commenter on an earlier thread pointed out that whenever people try to make
a point by using vague, overly broad generalizations
like "hospitals are now requiring. . ." or "schools are letting kids. . ." or "Rappers say white men are the devil" without citing specifics, you can usually ignore
what follows as meaningless rants. Gasbag conservative commenters like Tucker Carlson do it nightly, and his grievance-riddled audiences lap it up like it's opiate syrup.
It is hard to believe this is a genuine question, but let's say it is. Jews are not some amorphous symbolic majority but an ethnic group that was literally ghettoized in the Middle Ages, subject to pogroms and the Holocaust, and even today have their places of worship targeted for violence far more often than are churches.
I think anti-white hatred has a real impact. I'm amazed at how many white people buy into it.
And I think anti-semitism is serious stuff. I would take government action to ghettoize or commit genocide against American Jews, and I don't think it's likely, but I won't swear it's inconceiveabl.e.
An increase of anti-semitism could easily mean a lot more individual and small group violence against Jews, and that would have a significant impact.
> The average jew has a lot more powerthan the average white person in America.
Supposing for the sake of argument that's true on the individual level, it's emphatically not true on the aggregate level. 61.6% of Americans are white according to 2020 census data, and 57.8% are non-Hispanic white. Only about 3-4% of the US population is ethnically Jewish (of whom many are nonreligious or practice other faiths), so there'd need to be implausibly enormous disparities in individual power and capacity for collective action for Jewish Americans to have more collective power than gentile white American. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if you could identify socially significant subsets of gentile white Americans who have both more average individual power and more collective power than Jewish Americans: e.g. gentile white graduates of highly prestigious universities, or descendants of posh New England "WASP" families.
It's literally true though. Why is saying that "anti-semtiic" but think whites ahve more power (the whole justification for anti-white hate being okay) isn't anti-white?
Jews are only white when it is conveninet for the left. It's "anti-semitic" to think jews have "white privilege". It's anti-semitic to include jews in anti-white statements. They're only white when it makes white people look bad.
Could be because of the fratricidal aspect. Jews and blacks have historically been core components of the left coalition, so it may be seen as more of a "family" betrayal and provoke the higher levels of rage that tends to do. Compare the extreme hostility of MAGAs towards, say, Mitt Romney or other "cuckservatives," which significantly exceeds their hostility towards the Chuck Schumers and Nancy Pelosis of the world.
Honestly, I think it's much simpler than that. For a variety of historical, cultural and political reasons, Jews are very willing to loudly call out anti-Semetic comments, or even comments that seem like they might be getting too close to being anti-Semetic. Jewish organizations exist to help coordinate that calling out, and similar historical reasons mean that a lot of Gentiles are willing to agree that this is bad. Jews do very well in the US overall, which translates to substantial money and political influence with which to push back on that stuff, and again, they tend to have a lot of Gentiles who think back to the middle of the 20th century and say "yeah, we agree, this crap is out of line."
The reason is because of historical factors. No one has made a meaningful attempt to exterminate "white people".
Jews have organized, for thousands of years, facing several distinct meaningful threats. So the mental wagon wheel ruts and the social machinery are in place to push back. And the motivation.
The same way black churches in the South have a strong political capacity whereas northern black ones really don't and of course white churches in general are the opposite of united or aligned.
Corporations, like politicians, fear coordinated and loud voices. They don't fear broad and fractious large groups.
I'm always pretty skeptical of arguments that assert people who are 25 today are passionately driven to act the way they do by what happened to very distantly related people 80 or 150 years ago. Doesn't really square with human nature. Most people I know can barely muster mild resentment about injustice that may have affected their first cousins or step-great-aunt within their own memory. Most people are pretty sharply focussed on what is happening to themselves, right now, and maybe their immediate family and friends.
> Slavs are as low as or lower than Jews in Hitler's hierarchy, and they are white.
Not true. Slavs were seen by the Nazis as a "lesser race", useful to generally keep around for menial labor, but not really human. So they certainly did their best to kill of the Slav intelligentsia and destroy their cultures, but did not try to eradicate them from the face of the earth any more than an old south plantation owner would try to genocide blacks.
Their genocidal hatred mostly focused on the Jews, which for the Nazis were basically the ultimate source of evil in the world. While they were doing their best to kill all of them (even at the costs to their military goals), they also genocided various unsettled peoples like the Sinti and Roma (as well as killing mentally ill children and gays, some religious people and all sorts of political opponents), but from my understanding, they considered these to be more of a nuisance than a threat to the existence of the Reich.
Also, from my understanding, European-origin Jews are also white? So we can certainly say that there have been attempts by white people to genocide specific ethnic subgroups of white people in the past.
(I have read about the atrocities H commited in the parts he could capture from the Soviet Union and I can't for the life of me figure out why would someone slaughter this many perfectly good slaves, a farmer would commit suicide if this many cattle were murdered in vain instead of used productively, so I don't get how the Nazis can do this if they valued the Slavs' labor.)
>So we can certainly say that there have been attempts by white people to genocide specific ethnic subgroups of white people in the past.
Yeah, those fun set theory paradoxes arise all the time in woke taxonomies. Men bad, gays good, but aren't all gays men ? okay so maybe just straight men, but also some straight men are cops who protect women or CEOs who host their feminism subreddits ? ahhh god damn Russell and Whitehead.
Brett S. is just trying to make sense of something that isn't supposed to make sense.
"maybe just straight men, but also some straight men are cops who protect women or CEOs who host their feminism subreddits ? ahhh god damn Russell and Whitehead."
You nailed it, brother. The real Achilles heel of the progressive movement is all that gratitude to cops and CEOs. The paradox is tying us in knots.
In seriousness, you've really got to model the other side a bit better. And perhaps read up a little on Soviet partisans.
I mean I'm not in charge of these things. You should direct your complaints to the free market. If a corporation wants to cancel Kanye that's none of my business.
The proper comparison would be "what if corporations categorically refused to hire all people who have thrown racial slurs around, including black people who did it."
And in that light I don't think much of anyone would have a problem with corporations doing so.
It's not just the group, it's everyone else freaking out about it. And if you think its such a big problem, the culture of hating groups should be stamped out entirely, not just when it affects one group.
Perhaps my perspective is a bit biased because I am from Germany, but from my understanding, the Shoah is considered uniquely bad because it is (so far) the only time an industrialized, (at the time) top-tier state did its uttermost to accomplish a genocide.
There have been many other genocides (plus countless other atrocities) before and after Auschwitz, but but the streamlined death camps of the Nazis are something the world has seen only once.
Before the Nazis, antisemitism was mostly normal in the way that other forms of racism were. After they were defeated, (eventually) the idea "Nazis bad" rightly became a core truth in the west and east, so antisemitism places you outside the norms of civilized western society about as much as cannibalism would.
Now you can lament that other forms of racism are just as bad and people should be just as ready to stand up to anti-Tutsi rhetoric as they are to stand up to antisemitism, but the fact of life is that everyone knows who Hitler is and few people know who Bagosora is.
Many of us goyim think that holocausts are bad and don't want the Jewish people to be threatened or harmed. Plenty of us will "freak out" about the concept.
You'll probably get banned for low-effort antisemitism, but on your next account consider sticking to more concrete questions such as "how much abuse does a person have to take from members of a specific group before he is considered reasonable in having negative feelings towards them?".
In your opinion, is anti-Semitism a problem? Specifically, is it something society should work against when/if it happens, and secondly, is it something that's happening at a level that should be addressed?
Completely agreed. Inconsistent approaches to the same situations is one of my biggest pet peeves in politics. Unfortunately there are a *lot* of examples from all sides.
I will add one distinction I think worthy of noting here. If a random person (or non-representative sample) in a crowd is racist/anti-Semitic, that seems categorically different than a leader of the group or even an invited speaker (if the speaker is known to have such views). If I didn't think Kanye was going through a significant mental health issue, I would be much more concerned about his behavior than some random person as well. I think he needs someone in his life that can walk him back from the public eye until he gets better, but offer no pass on his behavior in the meantime.
There are songs in which the white man is literally referred to as the devil, and much of what I'm referring to is what Rapper's say personally, in a political context etc.
This is irrelevant, the (quite wrongly) perceived invulnerability of a class should not be a free pass to threaten or slander them. Neither Law nor Morality would accept this. If you threatened a man stronger than you he can still push charges against you, and the court would most probably call bullshit on your """But, your honor, he can clearly kick my ass in a fair fight, so that obviously means I can threaten him with impunity""" defense.
Also, Kanye is American isn't he? Jews are pretty damn safe in America ? Does _anybody_ in their right mind think there is a legitimate possibility of Jews getting ghettoized or genocided (lol) in America in the next 70 years ? If we're talking "past injustices" then whites also had plenty of injustices commited against them, why is a 70-years-old injustice more plausible than (*checks memory*) the 500-years-injustice of Ottomans enslaving whites?
> This is irrelevant, the (quite wrongly) perceived invulnerability of a class should not be a free pass to threaten or slander them. Neither Law nor Morality would accept this.
It absolutely shouldn't be a "free pass to threaten or slander them". But it absolutely matters whether you are standing in front of someone with a weapon and you say "he should die" or if you are hiding in a back room nowhere near anyone who can harm them when you say it.
We're talking about rappers, a group with roughly similar capabilities and means across its members.
Your point would apply if the people slandering whites were rappers and the people slandering jews were armed militias, but the facts of the matter is that the people slandering whites and the people slandering jews are rappers.
In 70 years, almost everybody in America will be someone who hasn't even been born right now; I wouldn't want to make any bets on what couldn't possibly happen. (I understand that you said "70 years" to mirror the distance from the Holocaust -- actually it's now 77 years since 1945 -- but it's too long a horizon to be as convincing as we'd like it to be.)
I would very gladly bet you 1000-to-1 (to be collected by those that survive us whoever they may be) that jews won't be genocided in America in any year in the next 100 years, where "genocide" is defined as that which 3 independent historians of different nationalities call genocide.
Does anybody have experience with minimal friction obtaining an Adderall prescription for adhd? Preferably online.
1. For a variety of reasons grey market won't be acceptable for me, I need a legitimate legal prescription.
2. I have a strong distrust of doctors, both that they have my best interests in mind and that they'll bill me fairly, having had some poor experiences. I'd be more interested in getting pills legally and then sorting it out myself than relying on a doctor regularly. I do however have health insurance.
3. I was diagnosed with adhd as a teenager and was on Ritalin for some time. I stopped due to a variety of personal reasons and think my career and personal life have likely suffered as a result. I have trouble focusing on long term tasks, maintaining eye contact /focus in the long conversations, focusing at work etc
I've seen a few takes on various telehealth services but few have been recent, and I would place more stock in experiences from people who might be more similar to me (here) than misc internet reviews. My current best prospect is Done which is apparently 200 bucks and then 80/mo but apparently they may have issues actually fulfilling prescriptions
I used AheadADHD for this. They were an only pharmacy/med management thing. But they went out of business. I believe some of their competitors still exist. They matched me with a nurse practitioner for med management and script writing. All online.
>I was diagnosed with adhd as a teenager and was on Ritalin for some time
This should make it easier to get a script as you are less likely to be seen as shopping for pills.
Also look for Nurse Practitioners in your state that do this! You don't have to go to a psychiatrist always. The only caveat is they are probably not going to take insurance, so you will be out of pocket. I pay $75 for monthly appointments.
Unfortunately, the ongoing moral panic over opioid abuse has spilled over into all prescriptions for Schedule II controlled substances, including Adderall and Ritalin, so the ongoing friction of maintaining a prescription is going to be fairly high. Getting it restarted shouldn't be that hard: Steven Sklonick's suggestion below of having your old medical records forwarded is a good one, and similarly I've had success just bringing an old empty prescription bottle to my first appointment as proof that I've had a legit prescription in the past; going off ADHD meds for a few years and then wanting to restart is a common enough pattern that it won't raise eyebrows so long as you can document past diagnosis and treatment somehow. But ongoing friction is unavoidable: last I checked, Adderall prescriptions required monthly follow-up appointments, and pre-Covid they needed to be in-person appointments. And doctors need to document to the DEA's satisfaction they they're being careful and responsible prescribers of highly controlled substances, lest they risk losing their licenses and facing felony charges.
It might be worth looking into less controlled ADHD meds instead, such as Wellbutrin (uncontrolled) or Modafinil (Schedule IV). There's likely to be a bit more friction up front since you're asking for a new type of treatment rather than resuming an existing one, and Modafinil in particular is a less standard ADHD treatment so doctors who are unfamiliar with it might not want to prescribe it, but once you have the prescription there should be a lot less friction maintaining it.
I don’t believe Adderall scripts require monthly follow-ups, but there is a rule last I knew that docs can only prescribe 30 days worth of it at a time. They can put on I think one refill, with a note on it that refill cannot be picked up less than 30 days from time you got original.
As for finding your old doc — nope, new doc will not be able to figure out who he was. I’d suggest going to Psychology Today, where you can search by town or zip code and searching for psychiatrists in the town where you saw him. You can limit your search to males. Most listings have photos, so if he’s there you’ll find him. If he doesn’t show up try searching the whole state.
Also, he probably doesn’t need to send all his old records to the new person you go to. It would probably suffice for him to write a letter stating that he saw you during the years x - y, and that he prescribed Adderall, which seemed to be helpful.
Back when I was on Adderall the better part of a decade ago, the restriction was the doc had to see you in person every three months and couldn't write you prescriptions with refills, although they could write you three prescriptions at once. You also needed either a paper prescription which you'd need to pick up and deliver in person, or a two-factor authenticated secure electronic prescription (infrastructure for which was still rolling out at the time, but has since become ubiquitous).
The rules have changed semi-recently, though: shortly before Covid, I asked my psychiatrist about trying Dexedrine instead of Modafinil, and she said that regulatory restrictions would have required an in-person visit every month.
I was told recently that in my state, Massachusetts, docs cannot write a stimulants prescription without at least in in-person meeting with the patient. Also, and I think this is the rule in the entire US, the person prescribing via teletherapy must be in your state when the teletherapy session takes place.
I agree with Stephen Skolnick. Find an actual doctor and tell the truth.
My advice: find an actual doctor. Designate them as your primary care provider. If you've had a scrip in the past and can have your records forwarded, you won't encounter friction; just tell them the truth, that you were able to manage without the meds for a few years but you're not anymore due to X, Y, and Z.
It's been maybe a decade? And I don't remember his name, let alone know if he's still practicing. Do you know if a new doctor would be able to find it on their end?
Holy shit, how did the Big Yud get on this one comment so quickly? This is was equivalent to calling in an airstrike on one's own position, and with a shorter turnaround.
Did the x-risk crowd oppose the Large Hadron Collider? The closest I can think of is Nick Bostrom finding an upper bound on the probability that it would destroy the earth.
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
If you continue with KS's MMM concept, you may encounter your task-switcher not doing it for the reward so much as to avoid other things (see: ugh fields).
Indeed, his model does integrate a lot of subagents who avoid painful things. It's very likely that, over the years, since I've put myself through so much mental pain to just get myself to start working, the task-switcher has associated doing work as painful in addition to it naturally being not-high-value. Interesting thought!
I think an interesting question follow-up: is there more of an aversion around starting tasks, an ugh field, something that feels actively unpleasant rather than just not rewarding, in people who got diagnosed late and struggled for years vs. those who had ADHD caught earlier?
The general idea is that pain-avoiding sub-agents begin building habits early in life for broadly painful things (mom and dad fighting, dropping an ice-cream cone) and then applies its habits/skills to school-related tasks later (being bored in class, trying to concentrate on homework). This happens for everyone, but ADHD provides a much stronger capability for distraction to that pain-avoiding sub-agent. One thing that medication does to help, then, is makes it easier for other sub-agents to build pro-concentration habits.
One solution is to attach a "tag" to the activity that is pleasurable. Apparently the brain can be taught to value certain activities if they are tagged with something emotionally pleasurable. For example, you have your partner come up and kiss you while you're doing some chores you otherwise dislike. This creates an enduring memory 'tag'
I think you're on to something quite interesting: rewards during a task, not after, with an element of randomness and surprise to it. Scott has written about how unexpected rewards lead to more happiness than "priced in" rewards.
No partner to speak of, but I could write a small program that randomly plays a chime which entitles me to a piece of chocolate. Thanks for the tip, I'm looking forward to trying it!
Idk I find the case compelling enough to consider at least. Tswift came of age at a time when there was much more stigma toward homosexuality and I think that remains formative despite times changing since. She is also a Christian.
Two additional reasons to give some credence to the hypothesis:
1. She’s been plausibly accused of Straussian communication in other contexts:
“ When Taylor Swift branded Chinese merchandise with “T.S. 1989” just one month removed from the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, she may not have been making any allusion whatsoever to the student pro-democracy protests violently put down by state authorities twenty-six years prior. Her initials are T.S. and 1989 is the title of her album as well as her birth year. But join me (and Tyler) for a moment in interpreting this episode through a Straussian lens”
Honestly, I don't give a shit. Asian-Americans largely don't care about, or they actively support, affirmative action policies that discriminate against whites. They only make a big deal when they're the ones on the recieving end of this discrimination. They say stuff like "we're not the racist ones, we're not the ones who oppressed black people" etc, as if whites deserve to be eternally punished for the supposed misdeeds of white strangers in the past. And even if they don't explicitly express such sentiments, acting like afirmative action is a problem only insofar as asians are disadvantaged is almost ubiquitous amongst these people. They're not taking a principled stand against racial discrimination, they're just advancing their individual and group interests.
And it's far, FAR more problematic for the New York Times to be saying this than Columbia. the NYT has far more power over American society than Columbia University.
I think you're conflating a few different groups of people here. It is true in general that most people care more about potential disadvantages to their own race than others. This is unfortunate, but it's not unique to Asian-Americans. The people who say things like "we're not the ones who oppressed black people" are primarily progressives who are overrepresented in the media, on Twitter, etc. and are more likely to support affirmative action even when it disadvantages Asians. The ones opposing affirmative action are more likely to be political moderates or Republicans. Yes, they probably do it at least in part because they're advancing their interests. But you yourself probably would not care as much about negative rhetoric aimed at white people if you were not white. So I don't really see your point-- problems become more visible when you experience them yourself, and that's natural. For what it's worth, there are many of us who are minorities and try our best to treat people of all races equally + not privilege our group unfairly.
The difference is that white people who are against affirmative action generally want it gone categorically, whereas it's not at all clear that Asians have any actual problem with affirmative action per se and they most likely would be fine with it existing but only disadvantaging whites. None of the rhetoric around this that I've seen from Asians is that using race in admissions is inherently wrong, it's all been against Asians specifically being discriminated against.
Affirmative action existing but only hurting whites is a *worse* outcome for white people than the current state of affairs, so why should I or any other white people support that? If Asians aren't discrimianted against, it won't mean that blacks and hispanics won't get a racial boost, it means that this boost will come exclusively at the cost of whites. It's not just everyone looking after their own interests - white conservatives want all racial admission discrimination gone including that for Asians. So unless Asians support the same, then they can go to hell quite frankly.
You are probably right that many Asians would not really care either way if affirmative action existed but only disadvantaged whites. However, I likewise think that many whites would not really care if affirmative action existed and only disadvantaged Asians. It seems to me that the only reason that Republican officials bring up the topic of Asians being disadvantaged is that it is socially more acceptable to discuss than the disadvantage for white applicants-- not that most really care about Asians. By far the least fair aspect of college admissions is legacy admissions, and no one brings this up as many elected officials on both sides of the aisle have been beneficiaries. I tend to think nearly everyone vocal in politics is just looking out for themselves at the end of the day.
With regards to the survey data, I think the result would depend on how you phrase the question. I believe there is also an effect where white progressives rate other races as better than their own and white conservatives do the opposite, so that these effects average out. e.g. see the thread here https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1565810798236155904 . I read Fox News quite frequently, and the comment section strongly indicates that some white conservatives have fairly negative perceptions of those of other races. That said, I am an Indian American and I can confirm that many other Indian Americans I have met do have negative attitudes towards those of other races, as well. So I would not be shocked if there were a 10% difference in attitudes, although I would not characterize it as Asian supremacy but rather as ethnocentrism and distrust.
And I think with respect to your last point, most Asians do want all affirmative action gone. E.g. see the Pew polling here-- https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ft_2022.04.26_collegeadmissions_03.png?w=640 . Even if they don't "actually" care about white applicants, they still tend to support getting rid of it in its entirety, at a legal level. I would contend this is similar to the case for many white conservatives, who don't "actually" care about Asians but still tend to prefer getting rid of affirmative action.
No, affirmative action is several orders of magnitude more impactful. Legacy applicants are more likely to be accepted, but they are also significantly more likely to be top applicants, so the benefit controlling for overall strength of the applicant is much lower than affirmative action. Sports are probably significant, though.
Also, just to clarify, when I said 'many other Indian Americans [...] have negative attitudes...', this still constitutes a minority of the Indian Americans whom I know. I would say probably ~ 20-30% of those I have met have such attitudes to some degree. So not negligible, but also not anywhere near a majority. Didn't want to give the wrong impression.
That strikes me as a poor argument, because I think that affirmative action probably /increases/ the correlation between level of effort and getting into university.
What it decreases is the correlation between /academic ability/ and getting into university.
But a whole bunch of factors other than effort and decision making also affect academic ability.
If what you want is genuinely to make reward effort and good, you want a handicapping system where the level of academic ability each student is required to reach is scaled against how efficiently they are able to convert effort into academic performance.
Affirmative action doesn't get even vaguely close to doing that, but - because being able to convert effort into attainment efficiently correlates strongly with race and parental wealth - it probably moves society closer to it, at the price of a) violating some deontological principles that I care about and b) reducing the average ability of university students.
This is why I hate the word "meritocracy" so much, despite supporting the thing it refers to. I think that discriminating on grounds of ability rather than effort, while grossly unfair, is important because it produces much better results, and generally shouldn't be compromised on. But pretending that academic ability is the same as "merit", with its strong connotations of moral worth, rather than admitting that "meritocracy" rewards lazy people with genes conducive to study and (especially) rich, supportive, educated parents (like me), at the expense of people who don't have those advantages but work much harder, is adding insult to injury, and pretty inexcusable.
I'm an undergrad doing maths and biology at a good UK university and am academically strong. So far I was alvays certain that I want to do research but becoming an academic is rough in many ways and I'm considering my options.
What career paths are open to me? What should I be looking into? What skills should I develop? I'm still very likely to get a PhD, how does that affect things? Thank you
edit: I don't enjoy wetlab and prefer calculations/coding, ideally maths modelling. I know decent python and R. Thanks to everyone who responded so far!
My general advice is that a PhD is a bad idea, but a Masters is worth it. There are a small number of people for whom a PhD is a good idea, but those are the people so committed that they wouldn't listen if every human alive told them it was a bad idea. Academe is just far too short on jobs, and those jobs are too poorly paid, to be a valid prospect for anyone who would be willing to do anything else with their life.
If you like code and modelling, get good at that, learn some machine learning stuff, and then choose between high stress high pay decently interesting jobs in finance or low stress medium pay probably boring job doing analytics in basically any big business
Maybe see if they have internships or get-a-taste-of programs, or if you're at Cambridge go over and talk to some people informally? I visited once long ago, and they seemed pretty enthused about stuff that is on the bridge between bio and math.
Trying to become an academic in the UK at the moment is incredibly competitive. If you're one of the best of the best you'll probably need to go through a sequence of fairly grim, short, low-paid, hard-worked jobs before you get anything tenure-track; if you aren't you won't even get that.
If you don't want to become an academic, a PhD probably isn't worth it (if you do, it almost certainly is).
There are almost certainly a lot of biotech firms who'd snap you up, but I'm afraid it's not an area I know anything about.
What do you want out of life? That is the big question. Academia isn't that great a job unless it is important to you to have a badge that says "I am a smart person". And that is very valuable to many, but not all.
In my experience someone who is bright enough to get a Phd. in a difficult field will generally have a more satisfying career outside of acadmia. Probably more fiancially rewarding too.
You'll probably get a lot of advice here, but this is my two cents from recently finishing a bio PhD and going to biotech. Being an academic can be rough, but it depends on your situation. It's perfect for some people, and you won't know that without going through a PhD program and paying attention. To take your questions in order:
What career paths are open to me?
Too many to name. With a combination of biology and math you're well placed to go into many different areas. Something to decide is what ratio of wet lab/dry lab research you want to do. Do you want to do analysis of data to inform/design other people's experiments, or do the experiments yourself? There's also a growing realization that hybrid people (who can do both) are valuable.
What should I be looking into?
As another commenter said, biostats/bioinformatics are in-demand and pay well, though I'd add any kind of ML/AI-based biological data analysis & design. I have friends in the ML-based protein engineering space who are getting recruiters trying to convince them to drop out of grad school to start working for companies that need that skillset.
What skills should I develop?
Coding. Data science. Having a background and biology and data science is a very valuable skillset on its own, regardless of what else accompanies them. Most biology packages are in python these days, learn your way around them in a research setting. This is best done by joining a lab that does this sort of stuff.
I'm still very likely to get a PhD, how does that affect things?
For industry, having a PhD completely changes what kinds of jobs you qualify for. A PhD is usually considered a requirement for the 'scientist' jobs that let you do the knowledge-based parts of research. It can be very hard to climb the ladder very high without one, so I do recommend that route if you want to continue in biology research as more than a technician.
I really enjoy biological problems but I find wetlab to be tedious and not for me. I'm okay with doing coding and love doing maths. What kind of internships should I be looking for? Hoe do I find companies in a given sector (eg. biotech) that are worth applying to? Many thanks
If you're looking for a scientist position, it may be a bit early to be looking for company internships. The canonical route there is getting undergrad research experience in academia before going into PhD, occasionally with a few years at a company/working in a lab first. That experience should both be during the semester & during the summer in other places.
There are a few industrial apprenticeship programs that might be good and will inform you more about the area. I like the smaller company internships more - Dyno and Octant are both awesome places and flexible as far as I know. AstraZeneca, Bayer, Amgen and many other companies also have some. Google it up for a while - look for 'bioinformatics', 'computational protein design' and 'data science' positions that are 'internships'/'apprenticeships.
A note - finding a lab that will let you do what you want can be difficult. Look for recent (within the last 2-3 years) publications you find interesting and see if the program associated with that lab has an REU/internship/job opening. It takes some time to properly explore the space, but reading and learning what exact work you find interesting and who does it will be invaluable for *years* to come. You want to find somebody who you think can teach you what you want to learn and then apply through proper channels.
A few scattered thoughts that might be of interest to you:
1) I'm not sure if this is true in the UK, but in the US in STEM you pay for a masters and get paid for a PhD. So if you're not sure which you want, but can get into a PhD program it's sometimes worth starting a PhD to save on tuition & get some money. See caveat at the bottom.
2) Biological fields seem to require more education than a lot of adjacent fields. This might not be true for bioinformatics, but be aware you're probably setting yourself up to need more education in a pure bio field than a more physical/chemical one. Up to you whether that's a bad thing or not.
3) On career paths, joining a lab and doing a research project or two and also doing an internship industry can help you understand whether you like being in lab all day, or writing code all day, and whether you like the "freedom" of academia or the "structure" of industry.
Caveat: Doing a PhD and then quitting after you get your masters to save money is likely to irritate your professor, sometimes to the point of ending any relationship. This is a reason to not do it trivially, but it also matters less than a lot of people would tell you.
- reconsider doing a PhD? I always say if you're not 100% sure you shouldn't do it. I was 100% sure, and in retrospect even I'm not sure it was a good idea (even though I did have a good off ramp into industry after graduation).
- the typical exit doors are programming or data science/finance (personally I like finance, but overall the job market is better in tech. Definitely learn programming (definitely python, probably some other stuff, at least some use of stats packages in either python or R). "The elements of statistical learning" is also good and available free online if you haven't read it (but also, see what courses are available in your university). Try out ML - it's a great direction if you like it, but if you aren't naturally good at it you don't have to force it (this applies more broadly to specific things, although not to programming in general - you should be able to at least python).
TBH If you don't find data science/programming appealing definitely don't go into finance. RE beginner ML resources - check if your college has anything good. The classic open resource for a basic intro is the Andrew Ng course on coursera, if you just want to take a look.
Seconded. Your profile fits data science well. Unless there is a particular problem that you are obssesed with, and you’d be unhappy working on anything else, I’d consider trying to become a data scientist at a tech company. You ultimately have less freedom to select what you work on, but you still get to learn and apply interesting math stuff. Plus it pays well.
As a recovering academic I think that the "freedom to select what you work on" in academia is often overrated; you may find yourself stuck working on things you can get a grant for instead of things you're truly interested in.
The successful academics I know fit into one of two moulds: either they're amazingly brilliant, or they're dedicated careerists who have found a sensible niche and cranked out multiple papers per month in that niche for years and years.
I don't think it's a bad plan to get a PhD and then explore options in finance and tech though. It may or may not be a total-lifetime-earnings maximising move, but if you actually enjoy mathematical research then there's no problem spending a few extra years in your mid-twenties living a student lifestyle and doing stuff you enjoy before settling down a bit more. (This is especially true in the UK where PhD programs are considerably shorter than the US.)
Does anyone have any strong opinions on LASIK (the eye surgery)? I've been wearing contacts for 30 years, and after 25 or so years of them being good enough that I didn't really consider other vision correction options, my middle age seems to be worsening my situation -- especially in one eye that's astigmatic, and which I guess my eye muscles can no longer correct for as well. I intensely dislike astigmatism-correcting contact lenses, and would prefer not to go to glasses.
So:
1. Are there better or worse providers of LASIK? Or is it basically all just the machines, and the ophthalmologist doesn't really add anything to the procedure?
1a. If there are better or worse providers of LASIK, how does one determine who they are?
2. Are there serious risks to LASIK, or are bad outcomes like one in a thousand things?
3. Are there any long-term reasons not to get LASIK right now, like, I dunno, a better version is just around the corner?
Got LASIK when i was 19, about 15 years ago. No regrets. Though my vision has gone from 20/20 in both eyes to 20/30 in one and 20/40 in the other. Mostly because i got it when i was young. This is just bad enough to make living without glasses annoying and driving without them a no go.
I am planning to have the LASIK done again in the near future. Back when i got it, the recover time was like a week, but i hear its only maybe 2 days now. I remember they prescribed me oxycodone and percocet for the recovery when i had very little pain, yikes!
1. It's mostly the machines, but not entirely. Where the individual ophthalmologist adds value is in screening out people for whom the procedure is particularly risky, good practices for minimizing risk of errors in configuring the machines, aftercare, and ability to mitigate complications.
1a. The first thing to look at is what machines they have and how good those machines are. You're likely to get better outcomes from a more capable machine operating on current technology than from a machine that's a generation or two old.
Beyond that, the standard advice is to pick someone who's done a whole bunch or procedures without accumulating a tarnished reputation, or at least a junior surgeon operating as part of a practice directed by a highly experienced surgeon. It's also normal and expected to have the standard free initial consultation with two or three different ophthalmology practices and pick the one you're most comfortable with, and as part of the consult you can also ask the ophthalmologist about other practices you're considering so they have an opportunity to tell you info on their competitors that you can cross-check for accuracy/plausibility later.
In general, the differentiation between surgeons is more on the lower end than the higher end: i.e. you'll get similar outcomes from any experienced, capable, and conscientious surgeon, but there are (or at least there were a decade or so ago when I was researching before my own LASIK) some shady practices out there that have substantially higher risks of bad outcomes. My source for this was Dr. Manche of Stanford Eye Laser Center, who was one of the three ophthalmologists I had been choosing between.
I wound up going with Dr. Furlong of Furlong Vision Correction, mainly on the basis of the location being substantially more convenient for me than Dr. Manche's and everything pointing towards Furlong and Manche being roughly equally good and having the same top-of-the-line equipment. I don't remember the third practice's name, but I wound up not bothering to consult with them both because they were even further out of my way, and Furlong's office telling me (with Manche confirmed, as did my own searches online once I knew the right search terms) that the third practice's machines were about half a generation older than either Manche's or Furlong's.
2. The big serious risk is flap complications, i.e. the LASIK flap tears off or otherwise doesn't heal in place correctly. This is very low risk if you have the procedure done by a competent surgeon and if you follow the aftercare instructions precisely. One of the most critical parts of the aftercare instructions here is to spend as much of the rest of the day after surgery as possible resting with your eyes closed (sleep if you can, or if not, lie down and listen to an audiobook or something). It's also much lower risk with "all-laser" LASIK (where the flap is cut by a second laser machine) than with the older microkeratome technique (where the surgeon cuts the flap manually with a very precisely controlled slicer), as the later relies more on the surgeon's skill for a good outcome while the former is pretty much all the machine. And flap complications are almost entirely eliminated if you opt for PRK instead of LASIK, where you trade off a slower recovery for reduction in risk of complications.
vaguely related vision question: is difficulty seeing while driving at dusk normal for all people (because of the mix of lighting conditions), or is it particularly difficult for people with corrective lenses? Aside from the annoyance of glasses, improving vision while driving is one the main reasons I'm considering LASIK.
The dusk thing can be because of an astigmatism. Unfortunately LASIK can make it worse as a known side effect is a star pattern from lights. It was never bad enough for me to make it feel dangerous but was noticeable.
[This paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866714/) may be of interest to you. It finds (I've only skimmed it so please read it yourself if you're basing decisions off these numbers) that 6 of the 20 surveyed Saudi Arabian ophthalmologists who'd had LASIK reported that they were not better off after the operation; 1 or 2 of those reported not being satisfied due to a complication (I don't know what "experienced problem with the refractive results" means, so I don't know whether to count it as a complication). This is higher than other papers I've seen, which list complication rates at around 1%, but my guess is that those other papers define complication very narrowly.
That same paper says that about 6% of surveyed ophthalmologists (from a larger, overlapping sample including ophthalmologists who'd not had LASIK) would not "advise laser refractive surgery for one of [their] first-degree relatives (parents, sibling, husband or wife, children) who are candidates for it."
Getting LASIK is a reasonable option, but be aware that you're taking a real, significant risk. Anecdotally, I've heard that complications from LASIK are nothing to laugh at - one case I heard of was permanent eye dryness that requires ongoing treatment with eye drops, for the rest of the patient's life. With that said, it means you don't need contacts or glasses, which is a real quality-of-life increase.
I'm really hesitant to doubt your statement that you'd prefer to avoid glasses, but - have you tried glasses recently? If not, you might find you don't dislike them as much as you expect. You might find it worthwhile to try wearing glasses for a while, since they're much cheaper than LASIK, and don't have any medical risks.
I had corrective surgery in 2017. It's my favorite luxury purchase. I think many people who have the procedure would agree; however, if someone asks me if I recommend it, I usually say no. The risk of minor complications that can cause a lifetime of annoyance is probably underestimated. Major problems happen with even the best surgeons. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/well/lasik-complications-vision.html).
Most complications that occur during surgery are associated with flap creation (here is a list: https://eyewiki.aao.org/LASIK_Complications). These are rare with an experienced surgeon (you should be able to find a surgeon with a complication rate less than 1/3000).
I was not comfortable with the risk of standard LASIK, so I opted for a ‘flapless’ procedure (Epi-LASIK without epithelial replacement).
Flapless procedures (PRK, LASEK, Epi-LASIK) remove the epithelial cells on the eye's surface rather than cutting into the cornea and “flapping” it back. The big drawback is recovery time and pain. It is probably not worth it to most people.
There are some long-term benefits to a flapless procedure:
-lower risk dry eyes (even so, I had one dry eye for about six months after the procedure)
-lower risk of halos and starbursts around bright lights at night
-no risk of corneal flap dislocation (good if you’re a boxer or fighter pilot)
-Epi-LASIK may give better contrast vision at night and better overall correction. Anecdotally, I could read the 20/10 chart, while my doctor had never seen a regular LASIK patient do so, and he has seen thousands of patients.
The main risk with the flapless procedure is infection. I needed to take medicated eye drops for about a month.
Recovery:
My eyes burned, and I could not tolerate any bright light during the four days after surgery. My vision was poor for about two weeks. After two weeks, I could see well, but there was double vision in one eye. It took about six weeks before my vision was perfect in both eyes. It continued to improve for about two months. At three months, I could read 20/10 chart. I had one dry eye that gave me trouble for about six months.
Tips:
- Be sure your eyes have been stable for several years, especially astigmatism.
- Get an experienced surgeon (>5000 procedures) with a low complication rate who owns their own equipment
- The hardware is as important as the doctor. Topography-guided LASIK is worth it. Wavefront correction is probably over-hyped.
- Don’t spend too little or too much. I paid $3000 in total.
- I am a stranger on the internet...don't take my word for it.
Vision is still testing better than 20/20 5 years later.
If what you are experiencing, is the common in your 40s, onset of a reduced range of focus. You will probably find that none of the various laser eye surgeries will address that issue.
Well, for example my right eye (while still worse than it was in my 20s) is better than my left eye (which has the astigmatism), while wearing lenses. So it feels like that's something that could meaningfully be corrected, at least.
When you say "onset of a reduced range of focus," do you mean presbyopia? Or something else. Because certainly part of the deal here is presbyopia.
Yes presbyopia. I was struggling to recall the term. I’ve been told be a couple optometrists, and web searches generally agree presbyopia is not going to be corrected. It was the main motivator for me to consider laser eye surgery, after about thirty years of glasses and contacts. At least in my situation a prescription adapted for use with my computer monitors has been a fantastic improvement.
Both replying to this so I get notified about responses, and also commenting:
While my wife did the whole contacts -> LASIK path, loves it and shares her great experience when it comes up, I noticed (something the doctor warned about) her night vision is significantly worse (not worse than her uncorrected night vision, but worse than her night vision with contacts was). Not enough to make her stop driving at night, but enough to make her more cautious about driving at night.
On my hand I went in for a consultation (to a different provider) and they told me my (corneas?) were too thin to do LASIK and they would have to do a different procedure that should have almost as good of results. I opted out as I don't mind wearing glasses, but might reconsider if there have been tech advances in the last 5 years or if I see some good responses to this thread.
I think I'll join you in that "reply to get notified of responses" course of action.
I used to wear glasses where I could use the same prescription for all manner of daily tasks, but now I need one pair of glasses for this, another for that, and none for the other, and it's a huge pain. A laser surgery to fix all this would be a godsend.
Edit: Scott already responded, I am satisfied. Thank you all. Thank you Scott.
DON'T REPLY TO MY COMMENT, I WON'T BE CHECKING REPLIES AND REPLYING BACK.
Original reply:
Your ivermectin analysis was full of many flaws and its unfortunate you remain unwilling to dialog about it (to save your time, reasonably of course). I haven't been able to gain back my respect and regard for you since, but I've been occasionally reading your posts as a way to just remain open to new ideas I haven't heard of while viewing them more skeptically than before.
Oh, and you'll want to hear this. If you can help push your own value system of open data (i.e. for the TOGETHER trial that was NEVER shared or opened) you'll get a $25,000 donation to your ACX grants.
"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."
Great, now this is either another fan of Ivermectin Guy, or another sock puppet of his. He may well have enough zealous followers to pop up hither, thither and yon on social media to berate YOU HAVE IGNORED THE PROPHET OF IVERMECTIN, REPENT BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE people, but frankly I'm bored of the whole affair as you may have gathered by this.
Hey Mannan, find something more beneficial to humanity to do, like clipping grass with nail scissors. We have already had that link recommended to us, and I remain convinced that Alexandros Helper Of Men And Horses is full of beans.
I notice that you, also, are subscribed to Pierre Kory, like the last fan of Alexandros and ivermectin.
This is becoming a pattern. We've had interactions with people coming on saying Scott is wrong, and yes, even dangling the 25 grand carrot in front of him. Why you lot think he has some mysterious power to force somebody to release test data, I have no idea, and I greatly suspect if/when this does happen, you lot will go "ah, but you didn't release *all* the data/the correct data, you're still holding out and hiding the proof Big Pharma wants buried!"
Come for the rationalist fiction, stay for the cults, I guess?
I can't take you seriously, or feel comfortable debating or dialoging, when you lump me in with a group of people because then it means you have already projected all sorts of beliefs and preconceived notions on me and I try not to debate someones prejudices indirectly or directly.
I'm around when you want to direct that comment to the person I am uniquely and with the aim to understand who and what I actually I believe.
Right now you are waddling around on webbed feet, making quacking noises out of your beak. Now, it's certainly possible that you are a platypus, but I'm going for "duck". And like the rest of the flock, you are quack-quacking in the company of quacks.
You present me as a group: as though I have all the same beliefs, behaviors and personalities of a group of humans. However, as you know, all humans are not like all other humans. The duck simplification example you used here is an embarrassing attempt at trying to Strawman me into engaging.
I shouldn't have said "why is it important" bc I agree that's obvious; what I really meant and should have asked is "why is it such a huge deal that now you lose all respect for Scott". Like yes an error matters, but I don't think it would drastically change my opinion of Scott.
Huh just that I picked up all manners of judgements and assumptions (biases) for the other side of the argument that his conclusion supported, present in his writing.
It was not only because he lost his neutral tone and manner that we all loved, but because of that it seemed he got it wrong and would be unwilling to revisit the subject. However from recent comments here it seems he is willing to revisit, so some respect back.
Because "Scott is wrong when it comes to a political subject" means "Scott is wrong on a prominent example in a category which is *much of the reason why it's interesting to read Scott in the first place*." Also, the ways in which Scott is wrong may be good pointers to how Scott is wrong in other posts (particular other posts in the same category).
The TOGETHER trial found "Treatment with fluvoxamine (100 mg twice daily for 10 days) among high-risk outpatients with early diagnosed COVID-19 reduced the need for hospitalisation defined as retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to a tertiary hospital."
If it does work, we can at least put an upper bound on how well it works, right? If it works, it's so borderline in both statistical and clinical significance that it's still not totally clear after two years of squinting at the data whether there's anything there or not.
Given that we now have treatments that actually work, is there any value in continuing to pursue one that's borderline-useful at best? I personally wouldn't take a borderline-useful medication, it's not worth it even if it is cheap and relatively free of side effects.
Oh I see you said your personal opinion of "I wouldn't take a borderline-useful medication,... even if it is cheap"
I would. Because it is *very useful*. And no, I won't engage any straw man of yours asking me to prove anything to you. You can doh your own due diligence, and I'll do mine. As I have. And I'll keep taking it as I have, and continue to remain symptom free while you and others have to wait on standby with symptoms feeling ill qualifying for the "treatments that work"..
OK So my original reply got wiped because I opened a new tab, weird.
The hypothesis of several people including I is that ivermectin works *very well* when used preventatively and often. The risk profile is so low, you can take it *much more* often and *way before* any of the "treatments that work". With that said, I would always take ivermectin before I would even qualify for any of those other "treatments that work" and by then symptoms gone.
Why take "treatments that actually work" if by the time I qualify for them my symptoms are gone? AND I'm not even taking into account cost.
Right now though, I've had covid, and I don't think a treatment for liver fluke would have cleared it up faster. Edit: Apologies to ivermectin, I was mixing it up with Ivomec which is used for fluke but has two active ingredients:
You're the third person on here, and Alexandros the Prophet of how Big Pharma is Evil has come on here himself. There's also been at least one other guy doing the same over on TheMotte, a scion of a scion spin-off. So it's not like we are not aware that some people think Scott Is Wrong On The Internet.
I just browsed through the nine most recent comments on this open thread (not counting comments added while writing this), and about eight of them were promotional / classified ads. Is this a coincidence, an effect of making the threads bi-weekly, or are the earlyish comments on Open Threads usually this promotional?
Might it be worth pushing a little harder to keep that sort of stuff in the Classifieds Thread, (and making those a bit more common if necessary)? Personally, I'd like to see a little less "come check out my substack / I'm hiring" in Open Threads.
This is a rationalist blog right? We'd have to align the incentives such that people think it is of negative utility to post their self-promo in open threads.
Provisionally there would need to be more frequent classified threads, once a month?, and people would need to expect them to get a decent amount of traffic.
I was going to comment about COP27, but seeing several other Substack-links, decided it was simpler to just link to what I wrote about COP27 this morning.
If it helps your decision, I have a zero percent chance of reading your substack, and a larger than zero chance of reading your comments (this isn't personal, I'm just not in the market for more substacks).
Keeping the Jhanas/meditation questions going: for anyone who has experience with Jhana, do you think that would allow you to nullify pain? This is not a practical question i swear, but I'm just curious about it and want a concrete example of it's strength. Or if Jhana won't, does any part of meditation allow that? I have read anecdotes about meditation allowing you to resist painful acts, but i'm not sure if it does anything beyond fortify your innate resistance/ability to withstand pain. Or if it is a difference in kind, instead of degree.
I don't know about using Jhanas for this, but I've been able to use an impromptu meditative practice to produce temporary pain asymbolia with a requirement of sustained concentration. It has been really helpful for things like, e.g. getting home on a train with a migraine headache when I didn't have anything to take for it, or while waiting for something to kick in, but I've also used it for other stuff.
(Pain asymbolia is where you still feel pain as a sensation, but it doesn't cause aversion/suffering/urgency.)
My impromptu practice mostly consists in focusing on the raw sensations of a pain I'm experiencing (the location and how it moves/varies over time), rather than my reaction to it, repeating the mantra "It's not pain, it just feels like pain," and having at least some confidence that what I'm trying to do is possible.
I have also firsthand experienced this! In my experience, it does actually erase the pain sensation fully instead of just the aversion, but it's always been pretty weak for me. Since it seems to require total concentration, which i am not that good at yet, i feel like severe pains (say, a broken arm), would be too stimulating to allow focus of the degree necessary to erase it. It's like trying to focus on the sun. Plus, the concentration is easily broken, so if the nature of the pain changes or some external element comes in, the pain sensation immediately returns.
That said, if this method scales with concentration ability, it does seem like it would totally allow arbitrary levels of pain to be alleviated as long as concentration is maintained. Although i'm not sure if it scales linearly, or, say, logarithmically and it reaches a drop off point eventually. Plus it's not much good for most real life uses, since you can't do normal stuff while concentrating this hard.
There are certainly qualitative changes with regard to the feeling of pain that mindfulness can deliver.
Sam Harris puts it well: certain kinds of pain can be pleasurable when you're at the gym and they result from working out, but the same physical sensation would cause much more suffering if it's a result of an illness. That's because the suffering stems (at least partly) from the story we tell ourselves about the senation.
To be clear, the goal of mindfulness is not to have good stories about everything, but rather to get rid of stories / stop indulging in them and be able to experience sensations mindfully, that is without getting carried away by reactive thoughts relating to them.
While i can definitely see the story or the emotions around an event as playing a role, fwiw i have never experienced runners high, or enjoyed the burn, or generally had a fun time at the gym when i was exerting myself or working out. Every single time has ranged from "eh, this is fine" to "auuuuugh this suuucks", so i have absolutely no concept of "some pain can be good" in this context. The most i've noticed is that when i've really pushed myself the discomfort lessens a bit and adrenaline adds a bit of extra emotion to the experience.
Eh, I don't think it's the story we tell ourselves. If you're working out at the gym, you're at the very least not sick at the moment and probably in decent shape. Pain then is the burn of exercised muscles working hard but correctly (unless you do something like drop weights on your foot or bend a joint the wrong way or pull something you shouldn't have pulled).
If you are suffering pain as a result of an illness, you have other things going on with your body that are making it worse - the infection itself if it's a disease, or the flare-up of a syndrome; the body trying to fight off fevers via high temperature, inflammation, generally feeling groggy and miserable and icky, maybe loss of appetite, maybe nausea and vomiting, maybe constipation or diarrhoea. The relative levels of the pain might be the same, but the surrounding circumstances are not (sickness sweatiness is not the same thing as exercise sweatiness, for one).
Some of the few times I have entered jhana have been when I was into cold exposure. Meditating in my underwear for an hour in 20deg F weather was... Painful. When the jhana came on (generally just first I'm pretty sure) the pain would instantly subside and I felt very physically pleasurable.
Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if Nazi Germany won World War II? Have you ever read a novel or watched a movie set in this notional world and asked, “why is there nothing about the economy?” Who owns these factories? Is it American capitalists, German capitalists, or the state? Why isn’t the newscaster talking about the stock market? Is insider trading legal? How do college admissions work? How regulated is the housing market?
If you asked these kinds of questions, Prison of the Nation, A Novel of the Axis Victory and the Stonk Market is the novel for you! Taking place in the year 2095, it portrays a world that is still an oppressive, totalitarian ethnocracy but which has convergently evolved many of the features of modernity such as cell phones, index funds, PowerPoint presentations, and online dating. If The Man in the High Castle was a lurid mixture of German Nazism and Normal Rockwell America, Prison of the Nation is German Nazism meets Silicon Valley. Read it here:
Do you mention anything suggesting why german rule would still be an "totalitarian ethnocracy" after a century and a half? I would at least except some mellowing out A ) after Hitler (and co) died and B) when trying to rule a country like America in general, and specifically an America with enough market liberalism for things index funds to exist
Average people see themselves as powerless to change the system, and the people at the top like staying at the top.
It isn't like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, where there was an obvious thing to compare their system to, an obvious alternative to "reform" towards. Lots of people can't really imagine anything different, so complaints about the system are often about specific elites being nepotistic and corrupt rather than the system as a whole being rotten.
In countries like America, there are a lot of rules silently violated, taxes evaded, gripes and jokes told in private. But there are also a lot of people who admire the Germans for their wealth and their victory in the war. The Nazis are aware of the Laffer curve and know that they can't take everything from everyone. Elites in the conquered countries are who pay their taxes are allowed to keep the rest of their money.
I think that a lot of people have unrealistic ideas of what a German win in WW2 would look like. A total German victory where the occupy the capitals of all their enemies and replace their governments (like we did to them) was never really on the cards, there simply aren't enough Germans to invade and occupy Europe _and_ North America _and_ Russia.
A realistic German path to victory involves them fighting to the point where all their major enemies are willing to make a peace that allows them to retain most of what they wanted in the first place. An expanded Germany with puppet governments in all its significant neighbours would be a pretty good German victory condition; they don't need to march on Washington DC.
I agree entirely, but I was at least going along with "Germany Rules America" thing suggested in Alexander's comment. And I mean, it makes for a better counterpart to 'The Man in the High Castle' than saying that there wouldn't be German rule of the US, even if that would be more true.
That's interesting, that would seem to mean that the US hadn't developed the bomb (otherwise they would have nuked Germany into surrendering in WW2). If there's no bomb, there's no *cold* war? And if Germany made the bomb first then there's no cold war either, they just win and we do what they say or we get nuked (including not making nukes).
If you're up for a grim story, Harry Turtledove's _In The Presence of Mine Enemies_ is an Axis-wins-WW2 alt history whose main characters are secret Jews living in Nazi Europe as something like Perestroika starts happening.
That sounds fascinating! I enjoyed one of the books in Turtledove's "Balance" series (which involves an alien invasion in the early days of WW2) - I need to track the others down.
I also enjoyed an anthology of alternative history he had compiled.
I’m always looking for new music, so send me your Spotify Playlists! You can post links here as replies to this thread, or reach out directly via email (emwjazz@gmail.com). Thanks!!
I like having music in the background but get annoyed when tracks repeat too often; where "too often" is "more than once a fortnight or so". So, the solution: put all of the things into a giant playlist and shuffle. I've been dumping things I like into this for several years now: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1D1PehPTMP7lMnqAgjvk1P?si=ErkQ-aOOTs6fmo2hP1bv8g Hope you enjoy :)
Interesting western classical meets Indian music violin piece (Darshan with Vijay Gupta on violin). Sort of reminiscent of Goa trance in that drifting from western to eastern influence and back thing.
So I was looking recently at what else Louis Cole's backing singers got up to and came across the singer and bassist Fuensanta Mendez. Her jazz can be mournful and somehow reminds me of early 20th c. classical.
Anyone have advice on how to find a therapist that doesn't suck? This is a subset of the problem of finding a physician who doesn't suck, but seems even higher-variance. I've tried a handful over the last two decades, and other than word of mouth (which is no help in my RL friend group) have no clue about how to find someone good.
In case it’s relevant to anyone here, I’ll also mention that I’m in the process of moving a lot of my practice to providing counseling by email for people located anywhere. I’ve had so much success working with people this way in the past decade that I’ve decided to move most of my work to that format.
When I work with people outside of New England (where I’m a licensed psychotherapist), I do it as a consultant, not a healthcare provider, though obviously it’s the same “me” in either case.
Doing personal work via email can be very effective and is well suited to people who want more flexibility, more privacy or who find showing up for regular live appointments by video or in-person to be unappealing for various reasons. There are lots of upsides to working this way. The main downside is it’s not covered by insurance.
I’ve been on sabbatical and am in the process of re-writing my website, so I can provide a link to the new website in an upcoming classifieds thread. In the meantime, if anyone wants to learn more about how this works, you can email me at consulting by email at gmail dot com. Once we’re in touch, I can give you a more secure email address.
I help people with a wide range of life predicaments and aspirations. Working by email is not well suited for people who are in crisis with no local sources of support. It is well suited for short or long-term work around most other personal growth goals.
As well that people get to work on stuff when they have energy and motivation, not based on an arbitrary weekly or every-other-week schedule (though some people choose to do email counseling on a schedule because it suits them better).
Also many people find the real-time social interaction of conventional therapy to be stressful and/or distracting, which can get in the way of the work they want to do.
And the writing process itself often produces clarity that's hard to get to on the fly while speaking in a session, so one often gets farther faster.
Therapist here. The process is onerous and there are many mediocre therapists, so you're not alone in this quandary. But ugh, I'm sorry, it sucks.
A few suggestions, no idea which of these might be helpful, so casting the net wide. There's a lot one could say about this suck-y process and I wish it didn't feel like people have to re-invent the wheel every time. Not sure what to do about that.
* If you are in the U.S.: can you self-pay and/or do you have out-of-network benefits? Many experienced therapists don't take insurance, and many therapists stay out of network for some insurance companies because their reimbursement rates are low or their claims filing process is messy. If you can't self-pay, you can still find a good therapist, but more likely they will be younger and less experienced (which can also be fine), in which case look to see that they graduated from a good school. If you can self-pay, you will have many more choices.
* If you're in the U.S. but not in one of the big cities, then Psychology Today is a good starting place, you can sort by specialty and modality. You can still look at Psychology Today if you're in a big city, it's just a bit more overwhelming.
* If you reach out to therapists who have been around a long time (years of practice is on Psychology Today) it helps to ask who else they would recommend (for your situation) because ideally you'll start to hear some people recommended by multiple therapists. You can say in the email or voicemail, "even if you have no room to see me, may I ask you to let me know the names of a couple therapists you trust and would recommend?" When you call those recommended therapists, definitely say "You came highly recommended to me by X ..." You're more likely to get a prompt response if you've been recommended by another therapist.
* Sometimes it can help to ask "who do you know who is considered a therapist's therapist?" You tend to get sharper therapists if they are known to work with or supervise other therapists because we are a notoriously fussy lot. But if that feels weird to say, then maybe it's more like -- "who do you know who works with a lot of men software engineers?" or "high IQ people" or "first-generation immigrants" or whatever descriptor you feel might help aim you towards a person who is likely to get some things about you.
* It helps in the initial email or phone call to be as concrete as you can about what you're looking for -- what your goal is (and specific symptoms if that's relevant), whether you have preferences about modality (not necessary, just if you do), and any other preferences or needs (time/day, insurance, in-person or not, etc). That will help quickly eliminate therapists who aren't right for you at a basic level. I get a lot of emails from potential clients who say "Looking for a therapist to work through some stuff, can you see me?" and that vagueness will take longer to sort through -- I know many therapists who just won't respond to that.
* If you're looking for help with something more specific and less common than anxiety or depression, it's a good idea to search for people who specialize in that thing. There are therapists who specialize in things like trauma, anger, substance use, behavioral addictions, disordered eating, ADHD, bipolar, sexual dysfunction, couples counseling, etc and it's best to find one who works on that issue mainly. There are tons of therapists who will take clients with those situations, but who actually have little experience with them. If you have anxiety but it manifests in a more specific way -- OCD, phobias, insomnia -- it's better to find a therapist who says they specialize in those aspects, not that it's one in a long list of things they say they treat. If you have severe depression that's not responded to medication and/or therapy up to this point, you really want a therapist who that's their thing.
* If you're interested in a specific modality like IFS, EMDR, or somatic psychotherapy, they have associations with websites listing therapists who have been certified in that method. It's good to start there because lots of other therapists will claim to have experience with that modality but may not have been thoroughly trained in that method.
* When you get a response to your initial query to a therapist, whether it's an email response or a phone call, feel free to ask them "How do you approach working with X issue?" and "How long before you anticipate I would notice some improvement?" and "how successful is your experience in treating people for X thing?" The answers to those questions may be less specifically useful, but listen for how you feel about how they answer them. Do they make sense to you? Are they using dumb jargon and catch phrases? Do you like what they're saying? Also, if you've had therapy before, think about what worked and didn't work for you and tell them that and see how they respond. If you've never had therapy before, tell them that and maybe say "because I've never done it before, I'm unclear how to know if it's working, and if it's not how we'll handle that" and see what they say.
* Successful outcomes are hugely correlated with how strong of a working relationship the therapist and client have -- that's way more important to outcome than what method they use or how faithfully they use that method. So it's a somewhat irrational process with a certain amount of rationality woven through it. Allow yourself to listen to your irrational reactions. Someone you feel icky about even if they're really smart or sound capable, is not likely to be a good fit. Find someone who makes the tension in your chest relax a little when you talk to them (or however you would describe the sensation of relaxing in someone's presence) -- that may not happen on the phone in the first conversation, but it should happen early on (unless you are someone who has never had that experience in anyone's presence).
* Meet with three different therapists at least once and pick the one you like the best. You don't have to do this, but it is extremely helpful unless you've already worked with multiple different therapists in the past and really trust your radar.
I hope some of this is helpful, and if not, that it may be helpful to others. I'm happy to answer any questions about any of this.
Great suggestion. For a lot of younger and relatively healthy people, they may spend more on therapy than other healthcare and for therapy out-of-network benefits are most helpful.
There's a general community list somewhere and I think NYC rationalists also have a list of recommendations, but not sure if you're not in NYC or the bay area.
This is a huge unsolved problem. I found my latest therapist after hearing him on a podcast. He's also a psych professor at my local university, which gave me more confidence.
There are probably lots of good therapists out there who don't have a strong online presence or publication history, but these really are the best way to evaluate someone's thought process.
I always wish stuff like this was true-as-written for anyone:
"Every new role in the business is "valued" at a million dollars, therefore each employee is a critical investment helping to shape the future of Flatfile."
I do some amount of employer value proposition work, it's kind of what my job is. Can confirm that very few (if any) people pay for those kinds of roles in a way that cleanly coorelates to "A good hire is worth $1,000,000 to us".
Edited to add: I'm not trying to bag on your friends here - I can imagine senses in which this is totally true for some people.
Call me a cynic, but when I read stuff like that, I mentally translate it into "We expect you to work like a dog for the initial phase of our business, be that we go belly-up in six months because we couldn't manage our way out of a paper bag, or be that one-three-five years. We're certainly not going to *pay* you for the blood, sweat and tears you put in, but we'll feed you lots of platitudes about how important you are to us, how much we value you, and how we're all in this together so that you feel like you have a personal stake in the success of the business and that when it takes off and gets profitable, you will benefit. Then we hope to sell the whole clamjamfry to some big faceless concern for a shedload of money, whereupon we'll bugger off to a tropical island and you'll be sacked because of restructuring by the new entity".
They're hiring senior software engineers so each one probably does generate something in that range. They don't pay them nearly that much though.
Software is such a lucrative business because software engineers mostly create capital goods (code bases) that generate very sticky revenue (SaaS, transaction fees, etc) using very cheap tools (computers) with extremely low pay to productivity ratio (ie, a low percentage of the revenue they generate has to be paid to them). Most people don't notice this though because that low percentage is still really, really high in absolute terms.
I think what I'm sort of getting at is that while what you say is true, them saying "x is worth $1,000,000 because it will generate that much revenue!" is nonsense unless x is the limiting factor. Engineers work on computers, but nobody says "Each computer generates $1,000,000 in revenue and we consider each one worth that much" because they are widely available; any computer will do as well as the last.
It's only when computer supply is both restricted and the limiting factor on revenue that people will pay any appreciable fraction of their "revenue generating value".
When companies say shit like this, they are (if they aren't just babbling nonsense) saying "Each marginal hire we can make will address actual work we have ready for them, which otherwise wouldn't get done since N of engineers is our bottleneck at this moment."
I was sortof bemoaning the fact that if they weren't just saying nice-sounding nonsense and really did think that each marginal hire represented $1,000,000 in revenue they otherwise wouldn't get, guys like me would be worth more. But few people really believe this in a sense that translates to bigger/better recruiting content machines.
Well, at the risk of taking an offhand comment entirely too seriously: Yes, it's true that what they mean is each marginal hire will address work that will generate revenue ultimately. But that value is generated not by recruiting the engineer but by the engineer actually working. The recruiter's value is (mainly) in time savings for people who'd otherwise have to do recruitment. And the recruiting content marketer's value is mainly in time saved by the recruiter.
To take a toy model, imagine each engineer does work that generates $1,000,000 a year. The company notices their engineer is doing 1,000 hours of simple recruiting work a year. But their engineer is expensive! They generate $1m a year if they write code! Every hour they spend recruiting is $500 the company loses because they're not writing code. So the company hires a full time recruiter for $250,000 a year. This frees up 1,000 hours of engineering manager time, saving the company $500,000 gross and $250,000 net.
And then the recruiter realizes: they're spending 1,000 hours a year writing blog posts! Every hour the person spends writing blog posts is $250 the company loses because they're not recruiting. So they hire a content marketer for $100,000 a year. The company saves $250,000 gross and $150,000 net.
And then the content marketer realizes they're spending all day taking phone calls or emptying waste baskets and a secretary or janitor might get hired. This is all very simplistic but it illustrates the point that support positions earn money by freeing up other workers. Their value is what other people get to do instead of doing what the support worker does.
It's like the old anecdote: JFK was walking around NASA. He saw a janitor and asked him what he was doing. "Helping put a man on the moon, sir" the janitor replied. And the janitor was right: he was enabling the scientists to spend more time doing science and less time mopping floors.
This is also why a content writer for a tech startup might make twice what someone does at a small copywriting firm that deals with local businesses. Even if they do the same work the time freed up at the tech startup is more valuable economically. This is most obvious with secretarial work. Secretarial work is often pretty interchangeable and always a support role. Answering phones, making coffee, etc. But depending on whose time they are freeing up their compensation varies widely.
I recently published my first short story [1]. It was inspired mostly by Borges (currently reading Labyrinths) but also Scott's story In the Balance [2], which I loved.
Folks seem to enjoy it, but many really dislike the ending. Which I think means I did my job?
Having been primed to expect a terrible ending, I was disappointed to find that the ending was not all that terrible. I thought it was perfectly in character with the rest of the story.
What I didn't like about it was:
1. The analogy is overly blatant and doesn't really say anything that hasn't been said a million times before. Compare to Scott's story which meditates on the whole "balance" thing in ways I'd never thought about before.
2. There's really nothing to the story except the analogy. Borges (or Scott) would have made the story more fun to read on its own. This reads like an outline of a story rather than a story itself; there's no enjoyable turn of phrase or interesting mental image or interesting moment of character or even any emotional content to the story, it's just a bare-bones this-then-this-then-this. This means I'm not enjoying reading it, I'm skimming through the obvious-analogy bits in the hopes of getting to something interesting.
Yeah, didn't even get to the ending, because about ten paragraphs in I gave up.
If I want some "hur-dur, religious believers iz so dumb" I can go get sneered at on a multiplicity of online sites.
Not for me, is what I'm saying.
EDIT: Okay, somewhat unfair, our feathered friend is not trying to go for simplistic euphoric atheist bait. But this is nothing new or unusual. Oh gosh, here we are seemingly conscious and our overengineered brains keep wondering is there a meaning to life, and we construct all kinds of answers from religion to science.
But as Procol Harum wisely sang: "She said "there is no reason"
And the truth is plain to see"
When I was sixteen to twenty, I'd have liked this story immensely. So deep, man! I'm too old for that now. You may have something to say, but the channels are too clogged.
Maybe it's just a bad ending? I read it too and thought that it was a bad ending because you explain how transparently manipulative and circular the theist justifications are and how it's just one of many bad books inside the room, and then the protagonist goes back to it for... reasons? Because he's so desperate to believe in something he'll believe the most transparent nonsense? Really not helping the case there. It leaves a flavor of contempt, not existentialist triumph or nobility or whatever you were trying for.
It's a pessimistic ending for sure. I think I'd sum it up as saying that the Book of Kokgnita satisfies the protagonist's psychological needs far more than endless rational inquiry would.
My arguments for it are structured in the same way that other people talk about other forms of signalling like wealth and virtue signalling, especially Robin Hanson's writing. I think intelligence signalling is an important thing to understand if you want to know why scientific/technological progress happen. I also think it is the thing that drives this community - in a good way!
I've been planning a followup on how it all connects to what it would mean to have an "AGI", and why I am skeptical about fast takeoff. This presentation doesn't reference that at all, but since people seem to be at least somewhat on board with the arguments I have in this one, I'll probably make the AGI one (but it'll assume you've seen this one!).
very interesting -- there's a paper by Neil Levy on 'intellectual virtue signalling' and I was puzzled about how he defines it quite literally but then acts like it's obviously bad and best exemplified on Twitter. when i saw him give a talk i had a reaction along the lines of 'but intellectual virtue signalling makes the intellectual world go round doesn't it?'
* I'd suggest more headings to break up the article. It makes it easier to understand the flow of the article (and easier to skim...it's hard to remember when writing something long-form that most of your readers are there to skim, especially if they don't already have a relationship with you)
* avoid images of text--this is more of a personal nit, but it's really bad for accessibility. Blind folks can't see it at all
Thanks. Those are good tips. I started with section headers because I’ve heard that advice before, but honestly I struggled so much to come up with them that I gave up. But the images-of-text thing never occurred to me, thanks for pointing that out.
Recently got laid off as a Software Engineer w/ 15 years experience including a stint at a FAANG company. Interested in any job opportunities that either give me an opportunity to positively contribute to the world or master new skills/knowledge, as long as they allow remote work.
(In advance - yes I am looking at the 80000 hours board, but curious if anybody has further interesting suggestions/opportunities.)
We're a fully-remote cybersecurity startup aiming to improve the world of tooling for SOC analysts and threat hunters. You don't have to know anything about cybersecurity to work with us. Check out our blog posts to get an idea of some of the stuff we're doing: https://stairwell.com/explore/
This is pretty interesting and I will likely apply, thanks. If/when I do so, would you prefer for me to mention this exchange or not? Don't want to out anybody's pseudonymous internet activity.
Inflation is the rate of increase in prices. Since prices are not constant between European countries there's no reason to expect them to be the same. However, the common currency and market does mean that arbitrage will occur more easily/quickly than elsewhere. But not perfectly so.
According to the general public and news media, inflation is "any rise in prices."
According to monetary economists, inflation is "a general rise in prices that's not due to fundamental factors."
Imagine that an early frost destroys most of a season's apple harvest. If the price of apples rises, and if apples are a component of some price index, the general public will say "inflation went up because of the apple shortage." But the monetary economists will say "apple prices rose because of the shortage, but this is not inflation because it's explained by fundamentals."
Now imagine that due to a software bug, everybody's bank balance doubles. We would expect that people would start bidding up the prices of everything until everything costs roughly 2x what it used to. Monetary economists would call this inflation, because there wasn't any "real" reason for the price change (and maybe relative prices don't change at all).
(Chaos would reign if everybody's bank balance doubled overnight, of course, and this would have real effects. But this actually sort of happened over the course of the 1970-1980 decade!)
The ECB does monetary policy for the EU, so we don't expect a lot of differences in Monetary Economist Inflation. But local conditions vary, so it's not surprising to see General Public Inflation differ from member state to member state.
That's definitely false using "inflation" the way the general public and news media use it, yeah. But it's almost true by construction with the narrower definition.
I think any time you see the word "inflation" in a nonspecialist setting, replace it with "cost of living" and you'll have a clearer understanding of what's being discussed.
Yeah these little tautological games many disciplines play are always frustrating, and sometimes seem pointless.
"I have defined spite in this super non-colloquial way and now will publish papers about how spite doesn't work how everyone thinks it works". Well umm sure...
this year's price increases had a big contribution from energy costs, energy got more expensive everywhere but not at the same rate: Spain and Portugal weren't importing Russian gas before and relied on imports from Algeria instead unlike the rest of the EU. Also, imagine that in colder countries heating makes a bigger percentage of operating costs. This explains e.g how October inflation for Spain is at 7.3% while it's 16.8% for the Netherlands.
But if you were wondering theoretically "how" it could vary between countries, maybe you've heard before how it's a weakness of the Euro that is a monetary union but not a fiscal one. Any country could put sales taxes at 100% for everything and (assuming it was 0% before) see 100% inflation without really affecting the rest.
That makes sense. I guess I'm just struggling to understand how suppliers can raise prices on goods that are easily purchased from neighboring countries with lower inflation.
Three reasons inflation dispersion persists despite no trade frictions in EU:
1) Many (probably the majority?) of the expenditures in the consumer price index are not internationally-tradable goods but rather services (healthcare, housing, haircuts, etc) which aren't as easily purchased from other countries.
2) Even goods sometimes have high transport costs relative to their value. Cement, energy, very fresh produce, etc.
3) Even if all expenditures were on perfectly tradable goods, different countries' price indices would contain those goods in different proportions. E.g. Poland probably spends more on heating fuel than Portugal, so if fuel prices go up, Poland's inflation goes up more than Portugal's.
(By the way, you're getting a lot of bad explanations in this thread, IMO. For example, I think the apple-frost scenario would in fact be inflation, despite CB's statement to the contrary.)
Oh also, there is such a thing as "overall eurozone inflation". It gets measured and discussed etc.
By analogy, you could measure subregional inflation in the US, alongside the national rate of inflation -- but it would make somewhat less sense in the US where our states' economies (despite it all) more integrated into a national economy than the EU members' economies are with each other.
Right before an energy crisis that dectuples the price of natural gas, Germany shuts down its nuclear power plants, but France keeps its running. The price of electricity increases a lot more in Germany than in France, contributing to differential inflation.
Rich people from around the world flock to Paris, bidding up its housing to astronomical levels. On the other hand, everyone who can leaves Warsaw, lowering its housing prices.
The Italian government outlaws most factories in the name of environmental protection. The Spanish government weakens environmental laws in the name of economic growth. Italy's manufactured goods are now a lot more expensive than Spanish goods, especially with today's transport costs.
I suppose it is a little easier to see with goods and services that are local to a particular market. But there is so much for sale in the Eurozone common market that is not local to any particular country I'd expect that to have a leveling effect. Does inflation vary similarly from one US state to another?
"Does inflation vary similarly from one US state to another?"
It varies. I don't know about similarly.
One can imagine that Hawai'i and New England use different amounts of energy (for heating and cooling, as an example). Rents behave differently in the SF Bay Area than in, say, Modesto.
Inflation is measured as the change in costs of specific baskets of goods. Suppose in one country you make iPhones and in another country you grow apples, and in both countries these are goods that make up the standard basket of goods used to compute inflation. Now suppose that international trade has some hiccups. Then the cost of iPhones probably goes up everywhere, and so does apples. But particularly the costs may go up more abroad than at home, because the specific problem we supposed was in the international trade.
But even if the percent cost increase of the specific items is the same, the iPhones are much more expensive than the apples so the overall increase to consumers is higher in the country importing iPhones than the country importing apples.
Probably with a literal iPhone, Apple has some centralized system where they will deliver people a phone from their closest distributor, according to some standardized pricing system, that likely checks which distributor they are getting it from. They may well equalize the price across the Eurozone and just eat the difference in shipping costs as a price to pay for avoiding angering customers in some regions for perceived injustices.
But if you're buying a wrench or something, you're probably getting it from a local hardware store or local warehouse, which will charge local shipping costs, and costs related to local rents and wages. You're not going to be willing to pay the price of shipping across multiple national borders even if the wrench itself is cheaper when ordered from a hardware store in another Eurozone country.
I don’t know about the European markets in detail, I was trying to illustrate the principle with a toy example.
My guess is, yes, there will be some substitution. Energy costs are rising for everyone, but particularly the countries that import it. If you have a factory or a farm in an energy-importing country, your business costs could go up more than your neighbors’.
Some products are pretty replaceable on the open markets, and for them we’d expect the inflation to be consistent across countries. Other products stay local and so the inflationary pressures apply only to the country they’re made and consumed in. Or if there’s specific localized trade agreements or taxes, that could increase the effect of cost increases. (For this reason in the US gas prices vary a lot state-to-state.)
I tried asking in the subreddit but it went nowhere.
Can someone give concrete examples of what concepts would be “at the top” of the top-down processing networks described by the predictive processing theory?
Am I correct in thinning of these networks as Directed Acyclix graphs? Am I right that slight changes in these concepts can have profound downstream effects? Is it right to presume that for some people, their topmost concept would be something like “the laws of physics”?
I think there's a few ways one might imagine a predictive processing theory to work.
On one way, you would imagine a finite hierarchy of levels, each one connected to the one just below it and the one just above it, with sensory inputs connected to the bottom one and presumably one's most fundamental ways of understanding the world innately at the top one. On this picture, each level is connected to one above and one below, and so you could call it a directed acyclic graph, but it would just be the simplest possible one, with a line pointing in a single direction.
On another way, you could imagine there are multiple nodes at a single level, connected to nodes at lower levels and at higher levels. This might well form a more complex directed acyclic graph. But I think it's not even obvious it would *have* to be acyclic. When we are talking about causal models, we usually assume things are acyclic, because nothing can be causally upstream from itself. But I'm not sure why that sort of consideration would have to apply here.
I agree--acyclicality makes it easier for *us* to reason about things, but the brain seems to take plenty of advantage of feedback loops. And the struggle between top-down and bottom-up processing definitely points to bidirectionality.
We also see people engage in circular reasoning all the time!
I think "the laws of physics" would be an ideal topmost concept, but I don't think anyone has that. It wouldn't be practical (esp. if you're considering relativity or quantum)
I think it's more like object permanence, gravity, etc--things that, if changed, would make you say "oh I'm definitely dreaming." So not so much "laws of physics" as how the human-level world operates. Probably some people-centric ideas here too, like theory-of-mind.
I also think beliefs like "people are most trustworthy" and "God is looking out for me" are pretty top-level--things that would only be overturned by deep trauma. Beliefs like "my friends and family will continue living for the foreseeable future" and "my spouse would never cheat" are maybe one more level down.
Interesting. I meant “the laws of physics” in a more abstract sense, almost like, “there are some patterns which are consistent”, as being what then “predicts” object permanence and gravity.
Now I’m wondering how big that chunk of “always predicted” stuff is, and whether some life experiences might be seen as moving things into and out of that chunk.
For example, my Dad recently died and it seems to have had the effect of helping me see how I’ve been taking “I am alive” for granted (as if it has probability 1) instead of continuously being aware of how lucky I am to be alive (as if it has a low probability and therefore each moment of aliveness is slightly surprising)
Yeah I think this is exactly how "trauma" is considered in PC. You have a deeply-held implicit belief, which might even be irrational (e.g. "my family will live forever"). Lots of other smaller beliefs are derived from it (e.g. your access to advice and support, what next Christmas will be like), so updating that belief causes a _huge_ cascade of beliefs that need to be updated, which is terrifying and traumatic.
You might be interested in The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. She describes clinging to irrational beliefs about her husband coming back after his death in order to avoid the trauma. I haven't read it myself but it has helped several friends and family members deal with loss.
i vaguely remember that scott got famous for taking a stand as a liberal against libertarianism. but now i feel that he's "right-coded" politically in 2022. has scott changed, or is this just the world we live in right now?
It's semantics. If you define the establishment as "left" and dissenters as "right", then Scott is clearly the latter.
Also the world we live in, because there's a concerted effort by the establishment to push those exact definitions. Just note that this means, e.g., that everything you'd normally classify as far-left also becomes "right-coded". Also note that the frame of reference is an intra-elite conflict in which, e.g., the stereotypical Red Tribers don't really participate.
I think that the issue is that intellectual output skews very highly to the left. So if a writer espouses a set of ideas to the right of e.g. 60% of that intellectual output, the writer will be perceived as being on the right, although they will be on the left of the population as a whole.
Furthermore, they will attract readers who actually are to the right of the median, since if the readers want intellectual material, and the body of such material skews left, then they will end up consuming material to the left of themselves, but to the right within that body.
Scott reminds me of George Orwell, a socialist who is remembered not for the issues where he agreed with other socialists, hence was uninteresting, but for the ones where he disagreed with them.
Speaking of Orwell, I noticed that in Animal Farm the horrific result of the farm portrayed is not unproductive (as actual Socialist societies were) - just exploitative. I thought that might correspond to Orwell's own Socialism. Any thoughts?
[I'm a huge fan of yours, by the way. Thanks for your intellectual output.]
I think Orwell was more worried about the potential of socialism for tyranny than about its inefficiency, and may well have believed that it was not inefficient. He discusses _The Road to Serfdom_ in an essay, but I don't remember seeing any references to the calculation controversy.
T. S. Eliot rejected the book for publication as an obvious Trotskyite allegory about how Stalin had betrayed the revolution, which wasn't considered desirable during WW2.
IIRC Scott voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primary but he’s got some heterodox views for a left Democrat such as in “Are you still crying wolf” in which he said that Trump wasn’t actually a fascist threat and a lot of hue and cry was histrionic.
My guess would place him on the left for the USA and on the right for Twitter. Frankly on the left-right spectrum he seems to me to be about where a median 50 year old San Franciscan would be, or a recent male college graduate from a purple State would be, so center-left, probably left of most Americans on most “cultural/social issues” and right on most “economic issues”, but not on every last thing on a partisan’s score card.
To someone who self-identifies as a “leftist” (and not just someone who usually votes for Democrats but can be persuaded to vote Republican every so often) I’m sure he seems “on the Right”, but that’s true of most elected politicians of either Party, and most voters as well.
“On the Left” is half of all voters, “Leftist” is at most 19% of voters, but likelier just 6%
Jesse Singal is another Warren-voter best known for being disliked by the left (or perhaps "radlibs", since people who were actual Marxists prior to BLM are more sympatico).
"41: (12/6/21) In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error."
As far as policy preferences, Scott is pretty "left-coded". I don't think there's much of a gap between Scott and, say, Matt Yglesias, especially based on how often Substack tells me that Scott has recommended the latest Yglesias post. Especially after he moved back to the Bay, Scott's actual policy positions are kinda...basic?
As far as networks and associations go, though, Scott is very "right-coded". He's been interacting with right-wingers and and extreme folks like the reactionaries and HBDers for awhile now and has always given them a reasonable amount of respect and an open forum. Meanwhile, a lot of powerful left groups, such as the NYT and feminists, clearly despise him. Conversely, I think there's a lot of fondness, or at least tolerance for Scott among the right-wing intelligentsia, whereas Matt Yglesias is basically seen as a hack.
The fact that Scott's associations play a more prominent role in his political coding that his actual policy positions feels like the relevant shift.
I think it's a mistake to say the NYT and feminists despise him.
I think Cade Metz saw the association with reactionaries and HBDers and thought it was more important to emphasize that in an article than to respect Scott's wishes for pseudonymity but I don't think he "despises" Scott the way that many people here despise the New York Times. I think most of the rest of the New York Times has no idea who Scott is.
With feminists, I would say that again, most of them have no idea who he is, though here there likely is a group that despise him. But there are also a decent number of feminists who are regular followers here who seem to generally like Scott, like myself.
This is what has changed recently. You can be a far-left radical Bernie supporter... but if you publicly talk to anyone who isn't one of those, you're alt-right or far-right.
eg: Joe Rogan. (If you need 100 more examples, watch Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin on Youtube and then start following its recommendations)
I think the commentariat have gotten a lot more uniform in their right-aligned political views since the anti-libtertarian guide. So I think there's a much stronger temptation to view Scott's writing the a right wing lens than there was a decade ago. I'm less sure the substance of his views are really more right wing - I suspect he's still pro-UBI, pro-LGBT rights, etc. in a way that's pretty standardly opposed by the right.
Are you including discussions of genetic differences between races as "bigotry"? I don't see what else you could be referring to, but its also a really dumb, bad fiath definition of "bigotry".
A lot of people would see "genetic differences" discussions as "bigotry"--for me it would depend on the tone, but most of what I see actually is bigotry, since it goes like "there are these genetic differences, and i-the-discusser-of-genetic-diversity consider the phenotypes loaded with moral valence, therefore it is no problem if people of certain races are worse off in society than white people because they deserve it". All the steps of that other than "there are these genetic differences" are bigotry.
There's also stuff like in this very open thread, two or three people basically arguing "antisemitism based on debunked conspiracy theories is okay in the US because the US is controlled by the Jews". I'm not sure if this is what they went in intending to argue (which was probably more like "people should be less tolerant of content-free anti-white rhetoric" which I actually agree with) but somehow they seem to have ended up there.
No, as far as I can tell, Brett S.'s point is that Jews deserve anti-semitism and it's unfair that there's opposition to anti-semitism while anti-white prejudice gets a pass.
I read DSL quite a lot. I don't think much of the discussion of racial differences fits your description of bigotry. When I discussed Chisala's interesting evidence against the claim that African IQ is much lower than European, I don't remember any hostile responses.
Good question. I think of "bigot" and "bigotry" as defined not by what people believe but by how they believe it. Someone who has a strong belief and ways of ignoring any evidence against it is bigoted. Someone with the same belief held reasonably, who is willing to consider contrary argument and evidence and sometimes change his beliefs if shown sufficiently good reasons to, is not.
For a negative example, Scott is very not bigotted.
On race and gender IQ, Chandra Chisala is not bigotted, since he offers evidence for his views and appears to seriously consider and respond to arguments against them.
Someone can agree with my political or religious position and be a bigot, strongly disagree and not be.
I think you're a bit mistaken by that first bit. He did write the/a anti-libertarian guide, just like he wrote an anti-reactionary guide. He since touched it up once and also commented that he doesn't stand behind all of it anymore. He also has said multiple times that he leans libertarian or has libertarian impulses. Steelmanning the opposition of something you have an affinity for is pretty classic rationalist.
Additionally there are a significant number of "left-libertarians" (cosmotarians in some circles, contrasting with paleo-libertarians). See also classical liberal.
At the same time there's also the meme about the frontier of the left moving over time so if you don't keep updating your viewpoint it shifts to the right over time even if the viewpoint itself never changes. I think he wrote an article about that earlier this year.
I think this corresponds most closely with my view of Scott, though I'm not as keen an observer/follower as some. Libertarian leanings seem to underlie a lot of his writing, and, I feel, this foundation has been becoming more pronounced over time. I think if he had studied/understood more economics this would be even more true. Important for me to call out that I myself am closest to classical liberalism in my own thinking, so more prone to see that bias in a writer I enjoy reading
I mean, Scott definitely has an appreciation for what markets are good at, but he also wrote Meditations on Moloch, one of the cornerstones of anti-pure-markets thinking in the rationalsphere ...
I think that effect is nonsense, or, at best, requires ignoring several areas where literally the opposite thing is true. (The left stayed still and the right moved right, or both of them moved right.)
>I think that effect is nonsense, or, at best, requires ignoring several areas where literally the opposite thing is true. (The left stayed still and the right moved right, or both of them moved right.)
This is trivially false. To the extent the right has "moved", it's entirely been in response to the left. The left are the ones who have become fanatically obsessed with "racism" despite American society ostensibly being at its least "racist" in history. The left are the ones suddenly pushing transgender stuff. The left are the ones who have been calling to defund the police. Everything the right is doing except perhaps with regards to abortion is an effort to oppose this change i.e. to conserve the (already very liberal) way things were a few years ago.
I agree with all of your examples. Both sides went left on race, both sides went left on gay stuff, both sides probably went left on trans stuff though there's a colorable argument that the right stayed still. The left went left on policing, and the right either stayed still or *maybe* moved a little to the right in response.
There are other issues in American politics, and on some of those one or the other party, or both, have gone right. The political terrain has changed over the last few decades, like it always does. Some of those changes favor the left, but some favor the right. Both sides think they're losing, and both sides are correct. (But I'm more correct, obviously.)
See my response to trebuchet for places where I think we've moved right.
The right actually moved significantly right on trans stuff; before the 2010s there was never previously mainstream right support for surveillance regimes to out trans people who are passing or to straight up ban GAC like there is now.
Yeah, but circa 2000 or 1990 it would have been fine, left and right, to hedge people like this out of jobs with kids, to mock them mercilessly, to misgender constantly. There's still a strain on the right that does all that to transfolks, but there are a lot more folks on the right who say things like, "Yes, trans people should be able to live their lives and we should mostly call people what they'd like to be called, but really, the trans girls probably shouldn't participate in girls sports because their bodies are different."
The movement to the left from the era of Ace Venura Pet Detective is profound.
I think the transition on race thing happened in the 2012-2014 era, and it was clearly co-organized by the left and right reacting against each other in ways they both found productive.
The right weren't doing anything with race in 2012. It's only when the left became fanatically obsessed with it did this happen. And the average conservative doesn't hold strong racial views, they mostly just don't want their kids being fed "anti-racist" ideologically in schools or being discriminated against at universities.
The abortion stuff is a pretty big thing to just gloss over. The US right has drifted sort of left and right on abortion over the years since Roe but now that Roe is gone it's sort of snapping like a rubber band to where highly regressive positions like 'no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother' are pretty mainstream again.
Actually, I overstated the abortion thing. The right's feelings about abortion didn't significantly change, they've been this anti-abortion for a long time (if not more anti-abortion in the past), its just the composition of the court that changed.
Right wing people insist the left has moved farther left. Lefties think the reverse. Pretty unshocking dynamic.
I think that liberals have moved to the extreme on social issues and so have conservatives. However economically the right has moved father to the extreme than the left.
> However economically the right has moved father to the extreme than the left.
I feel like economic issues have damn near ceased to exist in mainstream US politics. Both parties have met in the middle with nobody seriously proposing changes to the current hybrid system.
>I think that liberals have moved to the extreme on social issues and so have conservatives.
Really? The right are opposed to civil rights? They want to recriminalize homosexuality? They want to penalize premarital sex?
No, they're trying to keep things where they were a few years ago against the pull of the left towards more radical positions.
Extreme right wing positions on race would be e.g. segregation. The right are the ones saying race shouldn't matter and that we should be color-blind. The left have become so extreme that what was once a left-wing view is now a racist right wing view.
The right want to ban affirmative action, they want to encourage people to talk about how people of the wrong races are stupid, and they want to criminalize immigration. That's all a pretty far rightward move from the 1980s.
I can't think of a time in the last 50 years when the right has *supported* affrimative action in the sense of putting a thumb on the scales for employment, college admission, government contrracts, et cetera, based on race. Would you have an example to the contrary?
I mean, I certainly agree in the 70s we were all in support of "affirmative action" in the sense of minority outreach and encouragement, and I doubt anyone on the right is opposed to that today, but "affirmative action" has morphed well beyond that, into legalized discrimination by race with no end in sight, which apparently goes on forever, no matter how far we get from the Emancipation Proclamation and Jim Crow.
Justice O'Conner famously declared in 2003 that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary [in college admissions]." Do you think anyone on the left agrees with that now, what with the 25 year deadline looming? If not, then you can see why the right has become if anything increasingly skeptical that this is anything more than a cynical corn-dole vote-buying scheme, and has anything at all to genuinely do with remedying injustice.
"In guaranteeing opportunity, not dictating the results of fair competition. We will resist efforts to replace equal rights with discriminatory quota systems and preferential treatment. Quotas are the most insidious form of reverse discrimination against the innocent."
How different is that from the position that Republicans take now? I certainly remember Republicans in the mid-to-late 80s opposing AA programs. (That's about when I started paying much attention to politics.)
I don't know what you mean by "criminalize immigration." I don't think Republicans in the 1980s thought that we should just not enforce immigration laws, but then modern Democrats don't actually think that either--sometimes they push the rhetoric but in practice, Democratic administrations are fine with deporting people for being here illegally, just like Republicans.
As best I can tell, most Republicans are almost as uncomfortable as most Democrats about discussing racial IQ differences, but maybe I'm wrong. At any rate, it's sure not clear to me that Republicans or conservatives are in general *more* comfortable with these discussions now than, say, in 1994 when The Bell Curve was published. How would we tell?
The fact that not using race to decide who gets into college is a "right wing" opinion actually proves my point precisely, because it shows how extreme the left have become. It's like calling Obama a socialist at this point.
>they want to encourage people to talk about how people of the wrong races are stupid
This is absolutely not a mainstream rightwing thing. Might as well say "the left want a marxist revolution".
And for anyone who IS saying that OBSERVED race differences in intelligence are heritable (people of different races are manifestly different in mean intelligence, the only genuine controversy is the cause), this has picked up steam mostly due to white people being blamed for racial inequality i.e. as a response to far-left "anti-racist" ideology becoming mainstream.
>and they want to criminalize immigration.
No, they want to enforce immigration laws that already exist
The claim that the right have moved farther than the left. This is trivially false.
In the US specifically, I think by and large it's true that the left has moved its stated viewpoints more, but the feeling that the right is moving right doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the fact that the right is moving from "survey views" to "active views". They're actually achieving aims like removing abortion access or affirmative action or the Fair Elections act, rather than just grumbling and eventually giving up as a new generation grows up, which was the expected course and so it looks like "moving right" because the *results* are moving right even if the attitudes aren't.
Ed: I think also it has to do that the "left" views "how left/right you are" as relative to the present constitution of society and the "right" views it as relative to some absolute measure so that keeping the same positions on issues for decades as society changes looks like "drifting right" to the left but like "staying still" to the right.
I think conservative and liberal have just changed meanings in many ways since the 1980s. Among other things, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war radically changed the context in which a lot of politics were going on, race relations got *way* better (largely progressing funeral by funeral, tbh), the economy radically changed so that the old unionized manufacturing jobs just weren't very important anymore, technology changed radically and drove things like the collapse of most newspapers and print magazines, etc.
I don't want to do this in depth since I did a few of them that way in the comments on that meme article. Briefly.
Guns - both moved right.
Abortion - right moved right. I think the left moved right too, but some of that depends on perspective and timing.
Taxes - both moved right. The left is a little less of slam dunk than it would have been five years ago thanks to AOC and the squad, so I could definitely see an argument that the right moved right and the left stayed still (or even moved left, if you measure from 2016)
Trade - confusing because the left moved right, but the right moved left and they passed each other.
Immigration - right moved right, not sure about the left but I think we moved left.
Death penalty - both moved right.
Foreign war - left moved right, right stayed still / moved left / moved far enough left to pass us / not sure
Social security - left stayed still, right moved right
Unions - left stayed still, right moved right. Less sure of this one, tbh. For one thing it's older, I wouldn't really say the right has moved right since Reagan, and for another it might just be that before Reagan they didn't have the power to break the unions, but they always wanted to.
Probably more, but I think that's enough to be going on with.
Yeah neoliberalism happened more than 20 years ago, but it was an economically rightward shift of both the left and right. The ME policy stuff was initially from (neo)conservatives but the mainstream of the Democratic party continued a lot of it (including rules of engagement that consider male youths enemy combatants by default if they're seen near any known enemy combatant), and its outgrowths (greater surveillance state, backing down from what was a depressingly low peak of government transparency, etc) and those things all are, or at least were at the time, somewhat right-coded.
I think this is more of a function of what stuff is salient now and how things are framed (and a few personal things, like how the NYT is a "left-wing" paper but his issue with it is unrelated to that).
I think there's also a problem collapsing stuff into a binary bucket - I see a lot of writing about "wokeness" which is treated as a thing on the left (which it is, but a lot of it tends to be far-left activist positions that e.g. mainstream U.S. Democrats don't think).
you can ignore tribes if you are a civilian. if you are a person, like me, who has a multidecade left-wing stalker who emails new employers and haunts my linkedin, you cannot ignore tribes :)
I'm not nearly as public a figure as you, and I decided nearly a decade ago to cease updating my LinkedIn, even though I use a pseudonym online. The risk of the long-tail of internet crazies trying to get you fired just seems too great.
I do wonder if, given that context, it might not be entirely helpful to group large portions of the population together with the person who did/does that.
Cool, are you saying that to everyone claiming Pelosi's husband's attacker is emblematic of radical right-wing GOP of today's age? Are radical right-wingers also just pure, pristine individuals too?
He was one of the many out-of-control crazy people that we are too compassionate to forcibly medicate/treat. And so we'll compassionately either send him to a maximum security prison where he will be brutalized by guards and inmates alike for being a creepy disturbing nutcase, or we'll put him back on the street so he can terrorize more people while in the midst of psychotic episodes.
As to the first part - pretty much, yes. Some guy shot Steve Scalise, too. One person being violent in a single isolated incident doesn't say much about the broader culture. Maybe if there are a string of these attacks I'll feel differently.
Do you imagine that what Razib describes isn't, to some extent, common? It doesn't always look like that, many people aren't as fortunate and have bosses who get called or are otherwise doxxed.
To me Scott is a Zaid Jilani/Glenn Greenwald type contrarian. What he finds interesting depends on who is in power. And both of those posters have similarly moved from very favored by the left to favored by the right. This shift can occur multiple times.
I think if you took a standard issue 60th percentile Democrat or 60th percentile Republican, I would expect the 60th percentile Democrat would likely tolerate Scott a whole lot better than the 60th percentile Republican - they'd both take objection to a good amount of things but I think the Democrat would be less turned off by the general vibe. It's only when you get to the extremes (i.e., where the average debate is on Twitter, i.e. Marxists and neo-reactionaries) that the right-wingers find Scott more congenial than the left-wingers do.
Nah. Your 60th percentile righty has had to endure lefties lecturing him all through school and college, from the HR department, in almost everything that rolls out of Hollywood, in every major newspaper and TV news show, and at least 40% of the time by national-level politicians. If he were unable to tolerate it he'd have gone nuts a long time ago.
I don't think t he same is true on the left. You can, for example, take an academic career path, or in certain cities graduaet into certain big businesses -- a Twitter or FB engineer, say -- and basically go from the lefty cocoon of your education to a similar one in your DEI-conscious work, and never meet e.g. a Trump voter from one New Year's to the next.
>Your 60th percentile righty has had to endure lefties lecturing him all through school and college, from the HR department, in almost everything that rolls out of Hollywood, in every major newspaper and TV news show, and at least 40% of the time by national-level politicians.<
The socially/culturally ascendant group is typically more exclusionary. When the right held power a couple decades ago, basically until the mid 2000s, they were heavily supportive of "cancel culture". Just the targets were different. Now they are out of power so they are more accepting.
They're still supportive of cancel culture. There just isn't a news ecosystem making money by highlighting it, the way there is for left cancel culture.
Are you in the US? If so, talk to a few immigrants from screwed-up countries, and they will tell you that they see similarities between what was happening where they are from and what is happening in the US. They'll tell you how their experience elsewhere informs their current behavior, in particularly voting. They'll tell you that people here just don't understand and have to be explained where you end up if you ignore the warning signs that to them, immigrants, are so obvious, and to the natives don't look like anything much.
One of the reasons to learn history is so that you would know from the past what those immigrants know from the present of some other place in the world. Why be blind to what's going on around you when you have the option of at least partially seeing and understanding?
Why should anybody study a foreign language, or go to foreign land, or meet a new human or animal, or experience an unfamiliar genre of Art ? History is - to an extremly crude approximation - a vast collection of recorded experiences and raw data (sometimes, but not always, resembling stories). The reason people should study history is the same reason people should do all the above things :
- R#1: Because history is a (gigantic) source of experience.
R#1 is extremly general, it utilizes nothing about history other than the fact that it's a novel source of experiences that can be mined for insights, enjoyment, patterns, etc... But you can go deeper. People should study history :
- R#2: Because other people reference it all the time, it's a shared language, like memes or jargon or myths or in-jokes or movie references or song verses, but vastly more numerous than any of them (indeed, containing them as subsets) and vastly more detailed.
As examples :
- People above in this thread are debating whether or not it's okay to slander Jews and some people are saying it's not because of the "Holocaust". What is this "Holocaust" ? there is an entire country founded just to (supposedly) prevent it from happening again, it must be super fucking important right ?
- When George W. Bush wants to invade a country, he says America is on a "Crusade". What is a "Crusade" ? and why does he think it will get him more suppport if he were to say it to an English-speaking audience ? Would it have the same impact if he said it to an Arabic-speaking audience ? (spoiler : No)
- Islamist terrorists (and Islamists in general, who are not all terrorists) say they want to restore the "Caliphate". What is the "Caliphate", which motivates hundreds of thousands to kill others so savagely for decades ? and why do they think it would be good to restore it ? (spoiler : Extremly Dumb Reasons)
And on and on and on it goes. How can you possibly understand _Anything_ in politics or culture, in economics or philosophy, in art or technology (yes, technology), without having at least a rough grasp of history ?
- Objection #1 : But is it necessary to actually "study history" ? A lot of the most important stuff has like, movies and games made about it, eh? can't I just watch the movies, read the novels, play the games to know what those things mean ?
Well okay :
- 1-) This *is* studying (a corrupted version of) history, so you haven't actually avoided it, just did it in an unusual form
- 2-) Those things are *made up*, you're not studying the Holocaust or the Crusade or the Caliphate when you experience art made about them, you're experiencing the artist(s)'s rendition of them. This is bad because :
- 2-) a-] There are tons of fictional versions. When Bush references the Crusades, it's very likely that he is referencing an entirely different version of it than the one you knew. And while fictional versions of any historical event or entity tend to group into "families" with roughly the same features, there is still the potential for massive misunderstanding and puzzlement, the very opposite of what studying history should do.
- 2-) b-] More seriously, artists aren't maximizing any consistent objective function when they interpret history. A direcor could make up a whole love affair about a king or a warrior just because he has a hot actress that he wants to involve in naughty situations on screen, a game studio might make up a massive explosion that never happened just to show off the capabilities of a new GPU, etc... This can combine to massively pollute the stories you hear\see\read\.....
So, you have to actually study history, with an eye to different interpretations and recordings of the same event, different sources, different narrators, reliable chain of transmission, clean isolation of contemporary assumptions and biases, etc...
I guess it depends what you mean by "studying history". Various pieces of history lend perspective to daily life. Knowing about Czechoslovakia in 1938 helps inform current Ukraine policy. ACOUP's Sparta series is a valuable breakdown of warrior culture.
But there's definitely history that will just waste your time; the Navy had some mandatory history classes that were just about where famous quotes came from.* And I remember very little from all the mandatory history classes from high school or college.**
We want "somebody" studying all the bits of history in-depth, because even ignoring that history repeats, we would lose information that could potentially be cross-connected into the future somewhere. (Also it makes for fun fiction settings that will more likely hold up under scrutiny; entertainment is value.) We want those people to be really interested in their stuff so that they'll remember it all.
* (Did you know "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" was actually in reference to underwater mines in the Civil War? Let that knowledge inform your choices today!)
** (The Weather Underground existed for a while, and then it stopped. Thus concludes my memory of US History 3.)
Well, see, I thought "damn the torpedoes" was during the War of 1812, but your comment made me look it up and by gum it was indeed the Civil War and now I won't embarass myself by observing acidly at a cocktail party "As Farragut said during the War of 1812..." Progress!
Although I'm also not sure whether it's possible to convince people that a subject in general is interesting if they're absolutely uninterested in it. Maybe it's better to focus on one of their areas of interest and convince them that some subfield of history will help them understand it better. I love learning about 20th century history because it explains much of current international politics, but anything I read about, say, the ancient Romans bores me as it feels far removed from anything I care about.
Yes, this is right. The way you get someone to learn something is not to tell them they should learn it, but to figure out something they already care about and convince them that learning this thing will help them with what they care about.
If learning this thing won't help them with anything they care about, it probably isn't worth convincing them to learn it.
One takeaway for me was, if the Supreme Court loses legitimacy, things will likely start to unwind much faster than before. One big difference Republican Rome and Washington today is that presence of a single generally accepted legal authority in Washington, but not in Rome.
I'll check it out, thanks! I have a hunch that political tensions will sort themselves out within the next decade, but it's always good to prepare for worse possibilities.
The great physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg believed studying the history of science was useful to practicing scientists-- see https://www.nature.com/articles/426389a
Interesting little speech. Of course, part of why he thinks the history of science is useful is to be able to laugh at the philosophers of science, when they propose some clean and simple theory of how science gets done, or ought to get done. I kind of agree with him there.
I think the issue with history generally is that generic history is, what, a kind of broad based overview of a grab bag of topics? That's pretty worthless. I'm not sure I can defend learning random grab bags of acts whether those are current or historical facts. But if you study any specific subject in detail then its past becomes relevant and that's history.
Imagine trying to understand politics without understanding anything that happened before this moment in time. Or even without understanding anything outside of living memory. You'd have to try to understand the United States without the Constitution. Eastern Europe without understanding World War 2 or the Communist Revolutions. Or in math. Imagine trying to understand modern calculus without understanding the fights between Newton and Leibniz. And at that point it becomes useful to have specialists in, say, the history of 19th century American politics. Or the history of Chinese mathematics. Which is what most really serious professors of history do.
Unfortunately some of the history of the invention of calculus will probably never come to light because we will probably never know for sure whether Leibniz plagiarized Newton. Does this imply that nobody can ever properly understand modern calculus?
It depends on your definition of properly and how much weight you put on the word modern. After all, we all agree that Newton and Leibniz are not modern figures and I'm not sure anyone fully agrees on what proper calculus is.
You can, of course, just be completely ignorant of where the notation came from or how the conclusions were arrived at and do the formulas by rote. But I think this is a more limited understanding.
> You can, of course, just be completely ignorant of where the notation came from or how the conclusions were arrived at and do the formulas by rote.
This sentence changes direction radically in the middle. Having a deep conceptual understanding of calculus vs learning it by rote is wholly orthogonal to knowing the history of its discovery vs learning it from a high school math teacher who may well have a deeper and better informed conceptual understanding of it than either Newton or Leibnitz did.
The best maths references are usually the most modern ones, and never, ever the ones written by people trying to set out new, exciting ideas rather than going back and trying to present stuff that's been passed around and considered from different angles and is now well-understood, and are writing to teach rather than to present.
Or, to put it another way: don't you wish someone would write a more tractable summary of the material in EGA?
It really doesn't. If you don't understand how something was constructed then you learned not how it was made but simply the end product. You're like a mechanic who can do maintenance on a car but doesn't know how the engine was designed or what other designs were tried. Now, if all you have to do is make sure the car runs then you're fine. You might even know more than the engine's inventor on how to maintain it. Famously, the nuclear operators outdid the scientists at keeping the reactors going. It's a sufficient understanding for many things but it's also not as complete and not as thorough as someone who understands more.
To take a simple example: if you have not studied the other proofs and historical original proof (or someone has not done so on your behalf) you simply don't know whether the modern ones are better. Being able to compare various proofs is itself a work of mathematical history.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you're not a mathematician (a professional in some adjacent field, possibly, but not a mathematician)?
There's a standard poser "is maths discovered or invented?" And obviously, there isn't a "right" answer to that, but it's very striking how much it /feels/ as though it's being discovered, and how as understanding of an area deepens and more connections are revealed, it's like the dust being swept away and more and more of an underlying pattern coming in to view.
Which part was uncovered first is of historical interest only; what people thought when they could only see small parts of the pattern doesn't tell you anything interesting, and the most recent books generally have both the deepest understanding and the clearest and most insightful ways of looking at and explaining it.
(One slight exception is algorithm design, where it often /is/ helpful to understand not just what the algorithm does but why it doesn't do some of the other similar things it might, and its history can sometimes give you insight into that. But even there, you mostly want to know about the more recent innovations rather than the original ones, and the most recent exposition will tell you about them more clearly than the papers in which they were originally set out).
I'm skeptical. I have a very good grasp of calculus, could easily teach it at any level, but I know very little about that conflict, aside from the impression that it had a lot more to do with a philosophy of metaphysics than with a math technique per se. Is there anything in particular about that conflict that would improve my understanding of the tool?
I'm not sure what you mean by philosophy of metaphysics. They disagreed on things like notation, calculation method, produced different proofs, who got there first, etc. Separately they were philosophers but it's not strictly relevant.
As I said, you can of course simply produce the formulas by rote. Or you can produce the proofs and simply have no idea where they came from or how they were discovered or how we ultimately came to the commonly used modern ones. After all, if you don't understand why or how the tool was made you can still use it. But you understand it less than someone who does.
Not quite following, honestly. I can derive every formula in calculus from first principles. But I don't know how Newton or Leibniz derived them, and I'm not sure why that matters. The first way in which something is derived is rarely the most efficient or clear. That usually comes later, as people go back and think about the relationship between the assumptions and the conclusion, and reconsider the path between them. Normally the discoverers themselves took a more torturous path than is necessary, since they didn't know where they were going. I mean, that's why I would teach quantum mechanics out of Sakurai or some relatively modern author instead of from the original papers.
Edit: maybe I should add that I certainly agree on the value of learning history, and even history of math or science, and it can add a rich flavor to one's use of the tools, like using your dad's chisels to make some piece of woodcraft. I'm just not seeing the part where I need to study how Newton or Leibniz created calculus to be able to do calculus any better, or understand it more completely.
The universe, and history, doesn't require utility for it to have value. If I'm walking down a mountain trail and worrying about income taxes, that's not the trail's fault. Maybe it's a poor trail, slick with mud and angular rocks, but I'm thinking about friends and feeling good.
It's ridiculous to imagine our antecedents marveling over our genius and from some celestial retreat.
We can't begin to know the kind of psychology they engaged in their situation, or they, what's it's like to negotiate a pandemic and an economic recession while a suicidal dictator threatens to kill us with his big bum. Crude historic tricks like cutting off his ears aren't sufficient.
Well, history constitutes 99.75% of everything human beings have done, if we assume the average person about whom we are talking has 10 years of clear adult memory and taking recorded history to be 4000 years long. If one is going to understand people, it does seem advisable to not limit yourself to studying the most recent 0.25% of what they've done. That'd sort of be like hiring someone based on the last 2 sentences they spoke in a job interview, and ignoring everything else they've ever said or done.
Agreed. In addition, in many respects the medium past is easier to understand than the present, for several reasons. Many actors and key observers have written memoirs or given interviews in hindsight with different signaling incentives than when events were ongoing (no signaling incentives by any means, but two different sets of statements made with different signaling interests provides opportunities to cross-check). Internal organizational archives and personal papers tend to be much more accessible decades later than in the midst of events. Scholars have had time to analyze events and cross-check data at leisure, which tends to yield better analysis than current events "hot takes". And many (not all, but many) divisive political issues of past eras are now uncontroversial or at least much less salient, reducing the pervasiveness of politics mind-killing analysis and debate.
Go back centuries or millenia, and you start to lose too much resolution to paucity of surviving documentation and gaps in modern analysts' ability to understand surviving data in proper context, but there's probably a sweet spot of the medium past where we can understand things quite a bit better than either current events or ancient history.
1) The "unprecedented", "worst ever" etc. from journalists, politicians etc. has been happening regularly for years/decades/centuries.
2) The simple, morally unambiguous descriptions of past events and actions common in our culture are at best simplifications intended to minimally inform elementary school children, and at worst originally tendentious propaganda since converted to myth.
3) Ditto for simple descriptions of technological and scientific progress.
All of this is good for my morale, faced with clickbait, politically-motivated statements, and similar.
Also potentially useful: having enough knowledge to recognize which things are truly unusual, and which things have a decent chance of giving forewarning of future events.
>The "unprecedented", "worst ever" etc. from journalists, politicians etc. has been happening regularly for years/decades/centuries.
C.f. some journalists labelling Dick Cheney as the "most dangerous Vice President in history", raising eyebrows among people who remember that other candidates for the title include Burr, Calhoun, and Breckenridge. Heck, I'd probably rank Cheney (even viewing him as uncharitably as reasonably possible) behind Spiro Agnew on my list of "most dangerous VPs".
I think two good reasons are to discover why a certain thing is the way it is and how it got to be that way. Why did town X end up being bigger than town Y? What did company X do that made them more successful than their competitors? Which pocket really is the fifth pocket on a pair of jeans?
To get out of the trap of thinking everything only happened ten minutes ago. To find out how the past really was a different country, and how it's like what is happening today. That everyone who was Good wasn't spouting 21st century woke talking points, and everyone who was Bad wasn't simply a moustache-twirling villain.
To recognise patterns. To have a sense of being part of the tapestry of humanity. To understand politics, geography, old resentments and new quarrels. Why do X not like Y, why can't we all just get along?
For interest. For amusement. For entertainment. For education.
>To recognise patterns. To have a sense of being part of the tapestry of humanity. To understand politics, geography, old resentments and new quarrels. Why do X not like Y, why can't we all just get along?
Sounds nice, but the reality is that almost EVERYONE interprets history through their modern ideological lens. History doesn't inform them of how to think today, history confirms that how they think today is correct!
While there are ideological interpretations of history (marxist, feminist, woke, nationalist, etc) I assume that most historians are somewhat interested in figuring out the truth instead of hammering the past into their political theory.
From my understanding, historians manage to mostly agree on most facts (give or take a factor of ten, perhaps). This raises the possibility that their facts are mostly true.
Of course, "modern ideological lens" still focus what kinds of facts one considers. In a patriarchal, aristocratic society, the questions "What was it like to be a low born/slave/woman in ancient Rome?" were obviously of less interest than "What tactics did Alexander use to defeat the Persians?" That is to be expected and ok. I believe either focus on history is better than ignoring history.
I think it is similar to the question of why one should be interested in the geography and peoples of far-away places, when what is happening down the road is clearly more relevant to your immediate life. Sometimes it is hard to see the shape of a thing if you are in the middle of it. *Contemporary* Politics is the Mind-Killer. In EY's words "If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution."
People need a sense of perspective. If ones world ends after the neighboring village, ones take on village politics will be quite limited. If ones time frame does not include a time before the iPhone, one is similarly lacking in perspective.
Not sure what you're arguing about or for. That the Steele dossier was a solid, factual document? That Trump colluded with Russia? That the Clinton campaign had nothing to do with the Russian collusion narrative? That the gallons of ink and attention and investigative time, attention, and money, was a productive use of resources? That there's nothing to learn from Durham's reports?
The guy doesn’t need my help but once again Ross Douthat has a great column in the Times. “In 2022 Reality has a Conservative Bias.”
“… ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.”
You might be able to slip past the paywall if you do a search on some of the quoted text.
A bit late, but this is the latest open thread here:
Does anyone here have information on Dale Bredesen's approach to preventing or reversing Alzheimer's? I could only find one analysis not from his supporters. It was hostile, but old, and largely about the fact that he had not yet done controlled experiments. I believe the author was connected with an institution that Bredesen had been connected to, so there might be some bias.
There appear to now have been two more substantial studies, one with 250 people, and positive results — but I have only seen discussions of them from Bredesen's side. Does anyone here know more?
I looked into this a month or so ago. This is a good critique of it. https://memory.ucsf.edu/sites/memory.ucsf.edu/files/CanWeTrustTheEnd2020.pdf
That's the hostile analysis I mentioned. But it's from more than two years ago, so doesn't include the two more recent studies.
Checking, the author of that article is in the department of neurology at UCSF, where Bredesen served as chief resident in neurology.
I looked into the Bredesen stuff with great interest a few years ago. I remember running across something that disillusioned me some, but can't remember what it was, but I don't believe it was an article by a detractor. I think it was some site where Bredesen was advertising his services, and it had a cashing-in kind of quality -- maybe he was talking up his approach as though it was a sure thing? Oh, I think I remember more: In the Bredesen stuff I read first he was talking about dementia as the final common pathway of deterioration, and how for each person there was a different combo of risk factors, and you had to look at them all and modify as many as possible -- so actual changes recommended were different for each person. He'd start with doing a lot of testing of each person, to get an idea of what it was crucial to tweak. And then I saw something of his that sounded like he prescribed the same regimen for everybody, and extolled its merits. Anyhow, sorry to be so vague. Will be interested to hear what others have to say.
He doesn't prescribe the same regimen for everybody. Each person takes a bunch of blood tests, on the basis of which he prescribes a regimen.
Hello folks!
I am glad to announce the 9th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first few meetings were great (approximately 8 to 10 people), and I hope to see many of you at this one. Snacks will be available.
Saturday, 11/05/22, 2 pm
1900 Port Carlow Place, Newport Beach, 92660
The Picnic tables outside the community clubhouse
33.6173166789459, -117.85885652037152
https://goo.gl/maps/WmzxQhBM2vdpJvz39
Plus code 8554J48R+WFJ
Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik+acxlw@gmail.com with questions or requests.
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (video and reading at the end)
1) Psychedelic experiences with interconnectedness
2) Introduction to abstract entropy (may be technically challenging)
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually go for a walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660. I also provide paleo and vegetarian-friendly food.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Psychedelics effects on sense of interconnectedness. Psychedelics often lead to experiences of connection with aspects of the universe that are normally not seen as related. Some questions to talk about. Are these alternative perspectives valid? Are they useful? Are they the same as religious or philosophical experiences? Have you had experiences like this that you wanted to share?
Video
Unity and Interconnectedness - broken down and described | Josie Kins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r8izfJ6Kng
- -PROJECT LINKS -- Unity and Interconnectedness Article: https://effectindex.com/effects/unity...
Subjective Effect Index: https://effectindex.com/effects
2) Introduction to abstract entropy. An article from the curated Less Wrong archives lays out and clarifies a lot of misconceptions about entropy. It starts at a beginner level but does contain math and diagrams. Entropy is widely misunderstood, both in fallacious and subtle ways. Many professional explainers need to be more accurate in their approach. This essay seeks to clarify things by approaching it as an autodidactic interest in getting things correct and clarifying ambiguities and apparent contradictions. His conclusions about entropy and its workings are close to mine.
Entropy is not just a property of this universe but seems fundamental to any possible system that can become more complex and change with time. It has implications everywhere you are dealing with a dynamic system or the consequences of a dynamic process and is fundamental to objective and subjective reality. It connects to information, heat and energy, evolution, intelligence and learning, and the universe's fate.
Essay
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy
Note that the audio is best listened to with the essay at hand because there are helpful diagrams
Audio:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/introduction-to-abstract-entropy-by-alex-altair/id1630783021?i=1000584355629
What are the odds that Zuckerberg will fix the problems with the Metaverse and turn it into a profitable enterprise?
The Metaverse just seems inherently ticky-tacky and bleak to me. Hard to imagine it's going to do anything but sink like a stone boat.
Same as the odds that Musk will make Twitter profitable and turn it into a wholesome place to share ideas and commentary in a spirit of togetherness and good faith
What is the algorithm for ranking the "top" posts? The one on moderation has more likes and more comments than several that are ranked above it.
Hello. I read an article a while back about how writers now had more similar/less diverse backgrounds than those ten, twenty, fifty years ago (more MFAs, college degrees, etc.). Does anyone know where I could find this article?
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-the-mfa-swallowed-literature ?
Thank you!
I'm making markets for California Housing stuff, starting with RHNA/Housing Elements. I'll try to expand over time if there's interest.
https://manifold.markets/VivaLaPanda/will-san-francisco-succeed-in-obtai
Anyone looking forward to Avatar: The Way of Water?
Yes, mainly because of the high framerate. Always on the lookout for films breaking from 24fps.
I'm looking forward to *reviews* of Aqua-Avatar. Small chance they will point me to a movie I will want to see. I was pleasantly surprised by the first, and lightning sometimes does strike twice. If not, I expect a fair deal of amusement from people like Critical Drinker and Ryan "Pitch Meeting" George tearing it down.
But it would help if there were non-spoiler reviewers that I trusted for this sort of thing.
Well, Ryan George is going to make fun of the movie whatever happens.
Totally off the wall, but I haven't found a particularly good match with any condition. 46/M/no horrible medical history aside form depression, no history of psychoactive substances beyond caffeine and SSRIs for a year or so 20 years ago that didn't work. Sleep apnea but controlled with CPAP for a long time, AHI 1-2. I've become absentminded in specific ways to an incredible degree over the past 5-10 years. As a couple of examples, if I'm going to take something out of the house (besides keys/phone/wallet), if it's not sitting directly in front of the door, I have maybe a 20% success rate. Even sitting it near the door is mostly useless. If I need to take something downstairs from my bedroom, I'm maybe 20% to remember to do it after putting on shoes and socks. If I boil water and don't set a timer, I'm well under 20% to remember to go check it before it all boils off. If the timer goes off and I do anything else for any length of time, I'll likely forget to do it. I was shaving the other day, had an immediate need to take a dump (abnormal), then forgot I was in the middle of shaving and went out with like 1/3 of my face shaved and 2/3 quite fuzzy. This kind of thing happens All. The. Time. Upwards of 10 times a day, sometimes way more depending on what I'm doing. What makes it strange to me is that I wasn't like this at all as a kid or younger adult, and pretty much the exact opposite- A student, solid concentration, success at memory tasks, vocational success at things that took sustained focus, and I still like and am pretty good at doing puzzles, playing complicated games, etc. I also have basically perfect memory that I knew I needed to do something and then almost immediately didn't do it (girlfriend confirms). I can forget the same task 3 times in a minute (really) while retaining memory that I planned to do the task 3 separate times. Memory is there, staying in conscious memory/becoming action, not so much. What is this? It seems far more specific than inattentive ADD symptom lists (which aren't a great match and I definitely don't have the usual long history of), and my memory seems far too good in general for dementia symptoms to be that advanced in one area, although IANAD obviously. As far as other neurological symptoms, I've noticed a little difficulty coming up with non-everyday words, although it's not that bad and I don't know how much of that is expected aging anyway. My balance has gotten a bit sketchy. With eyes open, it's totally fine. With eyes closed, or in near-darkness, it's iffy. Like I can stand on one leg and balance until my foot gets sore, but if I close my eyes, I'm planting my other foot in under 2 seconds. I don't have a younger reference point for that specific task, but I'd never remembered any kind of dark-balance issue before the last 3-4 years.
Labs are all normal, micronutrients seem very likely to be normal (B12 was tested, between a varied diet and vitamins I shouldn't be deficient in anything, although if one of you has a specific idea, I can evaluate sources further). I don't have tertiary syphilis unless multiple tests through the years all missed it.
IANAD etc. but just to have another hypothesis, this sounds suspiciously like Parkinson's. In particular, the balance problems plus the cognitive issues with working memory and attention (quite different from Alzheimer's; the issue in Parkinson's MCI (Mild Cognitive Impairment) is about retrieval; Alz sufferers never create the memories in the first place).
But of course I agree with all the other replies, see a good neurologist. Just be sure to mention the balance issue. In fact, please make a list of everything you want to bring up with your neurologist, one often finds after a visit that you didn't even mention various symptoms and observations..
Addendum: the "I can't find that word" thing is also associated with Parkinson's. Also, there is LBD (Lewy Body Dementia) Just make sure your Doc has considered these possibilities.
Question: do you ever find yourself suddenly forgetting the first or last name of someone, especially a celebrity you don't know personally? Just wondering (for a friend)
Making a list of everything with examples is a good idea- even if I don't forget anything, it's not always easy to get it all out with certain doctors.
Early PD and LBD check a few boxes, but also seem to have a lot of misses, and the symptom lists seem so wide that most anybody who's messed up in any mental way would probably hit a few of them. I'll definitely make sure they're at least considered though.
I don't think I have any particular issue with celebrity names. Like I have no idea who plays most of the characters in Marvel movies, even though I'm sure I've seen the names, or even who's in Andor which I've been watching, but that's the kind of thing I likely never would have remembered. It's like asking me to name drink recipes or brands of women's socks. I'm sure I've encountered them, but no interest (in most particular actors)=no memory. When it comes to, say, athletes or people relevant to my hobbies, I don't think I have any issues there.
I’m a psychologist, and have no idea what’s wrong, but something sure is. Agree with Unsigned Integer that you should see a neurologist. They will almost certainly order neuropsych testing. If you want to try to figure this out on your own for a while longer, get the neuropsych testing first and read the report.
Thanks. This definitely seems like it's at the find a good professional phase.
Try to find a good one. If there are research facilities near you, or teaching hospitals, anyone allied with one of them is likelier to be e highly competent. Avoid anyone whose specialty is diagnosing Test anxiety and the like in kids. While this is a perfectly legitimate activity, a lot of these people aren’t doing real, thoughtful evaluations.They’re known for being willing to crank out a letter for any kid saying the kid has test anxiety or ADHD or some such and therefore needs extra time on the SAT. it’s a racket
huh. mandatory not a doctor (though I am a medical student)
-sometimes dementia screens/test are insufficient in early stages esp. if the person is highly educated/intelligent to begin with so I wouldn't take them too seriously
-difficulty balancing with eyes closed but not open suggests a problem with dorsal column-medial lemeniscus path of brain/spinal cord, usually comes with weird sensation and sense of vibration, fine touch (? are any of these present? ) (This is called the Romberg test and is often associated with B12/neurosyphilis) (not all cases of B12 deficiency e.g. pernicious anemia are detectable by blood test and/or due to insufficient dietary intake)
other possibilities:
-ADHD? Depression? Not all present classically
normal pressure hydrocephalus? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_pressure_hydrocephalus#Signs_and_symptoms
-Vascular dementia?
These are just based on my rudimentary understanding of my neurology unit, I hope you are able to see a real neurologist and get some help!
Appreciate the detailed response. I did the Romberg test from a couple of videos (feet together, arms at sides or extended). In both cases, I was fine with eyes open but significantly swaying with eyes closed (no actual falling or taking a step, just clear pressure on the outside edges of my feet/heels/toes). Neurosyphilis would require multiple treponemal and nontreponemal tests giving a false negative a couple of years ago and a couple of years before that (and more RPR whiffs before that). Not impossible I guess, but seems quite unlikely from what I can tell.
My two-point discrimination seems fine. Soft touch in hairy areas is definitely fine. In hairless areas, maybe not so much? I don't know exactly what the threshold is supposed to be, but I can definitely see myself touching with soft light objects and not be able to feel it. Vibration sense is a maybe. I don't have a tuning fork, but using the shaft of an electric toothbrush, I can feel it a bit if I close my lips on it, and sort of on extremities, but not so well? Not sure it's bad, but definitely not clear that it's good.
Normal pressure hydrocephalus doesn't seem to fit. My gait is fine (and I've been in PT for a rotator cuff issue, they'd probably have noticed me walking goofy even if nobody else did. I'll ask next time I go, but very likely normal).
Early vascular dementia seems to check some boxes. That's a fun thought. I may be slightly on the ADHD spectrum, but the issues seem too specific and also new. Never know, brains are weird, etc. Definitely a history of depression. Nothing worked particularly well and side effects sucked so i've just been living with it.
I'll definitely work on seeing a real neurologist ASAP. Thanks again.
As someone with ADHD I'd second that as a possibility. A common thing with people with ADHD, since we have less working memory than neurotypical people, is that if, in the process of completing a task, we come across and quickly complete some other unrelated task, our brains will short circuit and make us think that, having completed A task, that we have completed THE task, and promptly clear our memory cache to make room for whatever is next.
As I've gotten older, I've noticed my symptoms getting worse and being harder to control.
Speaking to the ADD symptom list, I was also a good student and able to concentrate on things. The key though is that I mostly enjoyed learning, and found the things I was learning interesting enough to be worth paying attention to. If it was something I thought was boring or not worth my time though? Hello calculator games!
I know it's old and kind of long but if a lot of the things he says here resonate with you, you might want to go get tested for ADHD: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wWGP8i0mAs-cvY
This was interesting and informative (assuming it's right lol), but if the lack of inhibition underlying things is correct, and the things in the fourth video are correct (mind's voice, etc) it's definitely not me. I hit some of the notes- mental restlessness, bad at tasks I don't care about, jumps to emotional states that seem significantly faster and more intense than most people I interact with, at least as well as I can guess other people's qualia, but I've always had a good enough inner "settle down, Beavis" to avoid acting on them fast and getting into much trouble, and it seems like I have different failure modes when it comes to task completion, etc.
If you can afford it, you need to talk to a neurologist as soon as possible.
I second this, from what you described I don’t think it will be much of a fight to get the referral
Thanks. I have a routine PCP coming up soon. I'll try to wrangle a referral.
Safe Space for Wegenerian Hypotheses.
Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener is a sort of patron saint of crackpots; he was the first person to seriously advance the idea that the continents were all joined at one point in the past, just based on the fact that they look like a jigsaw puzzle if you squint. He ran into a lot of resistance from the geological establishment, because we didn't have the understanding of tectonic plates floating on a liquid mantle yet. (I imagine a lot of his skeptical contemporaries scoffing "Does he know that landmasses don't just float on the ocean? Someone ought to break it to him that islands go all the way down.")
This is a sometimes-dangerous but valuable mode of thinking, so hit me with your "Wegenerian" ideas—things that are unfalsifiable, or maybe just very difficult to falsify. Hunches that you can make an intuitive or epidemiological argument for, but can't prove or even fully justify mechanistically.
This is a thread for gesticulating frantically at the map, going "they clearly fit together you fucks, any child can see it!"
I intuited, clearly and obviously, as a child, that no self-awareness could possibly be destroyed. I was walking down the hallway one day, and just knew that the fact of my self-awareness makes it necessary that I can never cease to exist. I can't explain it or justify it. It's like something I saw. Trying to explain it is like trying to explain the color red.
It's something like: the kind of thing that erodes and gets broken can't also reflect on itself.
Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're interested in. More of a philosophical or mystical thing than a math or science thing.
I was aiming for things with a basis in logic or fact rather than a pure assertion of belief.
It's logical to intuit that no self-awareness can perceive its own destruction; we can never know what nonexistence is like. This strikes me as the kind of thing that a bright child would spontaneously figure out. Is it possible that, as a child, you had this realization, and misconstrued it in the moment, or in your memory later on?
If you can't explain or justify a belief, you should really consider the possibility that it's not true.
I'm conflicted.
I think I recently figured out a neat mathematical thing that would turn math on its head, but I don't want to be potentially scooped while I figure out how to write up the corresponding paper. Hmmm
I'll compromise and just state the weird thing but without further explanation, justification, nor proof:
There's only ONE size of infinity, and it's COUNTABLE!
(On a related note, if anyone has suggestions/style guides for writing mathematical scholarly papers without having to deal with all that LaTeX I'd appreciate it)
Does figuring it out involve disproving the diagonal argument?
I meant it when I said safe space, but you're giving vibes akin to "I have this perpetual motion machine in the basement but you can't see it because you might steal it".
Just tell us! Nobody is going to scoop you, everyone is too busy with their own ideas.
It’s not really possible to know that nobody’s going to scoop him here. His worry doesn’t even seem far-fetched to me.
If you're right, there might be a way to get the credit for being the person who figured this out without writing a scholarly paper. What about talking to some mathematicians about how one might do that (don't tell them the mathematical idea -- just ask how to be sure to get credit for it). If you're really afraid somebody will steal your idea, sending papers out to a bunch of journals, who might reject it, seems kind of risky. I know nothing about the world of academic math, by the way, I'm just brainstorming. What about finding a mathematician whose interests are in the right area, describing the situation to him, and asking whether you can present your ideas to him and videotape the whole thing. Have a copy of your write-up (which need not be in the form of an academic paper) notarized. Stuff like that. Good luck!
Historically, people would sometimes make encrypted versions of their discoveries.
Continuum hypothesis?
Finite / discrete / "digital physics" hypothesis. This predates Bostrom's simulation argument, which is basically the same idea with a different emphasis/interpretation.
Digital physics is physics, not maths. If everything physical is finite, that doesn't change anything in maths.
Fine, I'll start:
Dark matter isn't dark, we just couldn't see it in the 70s when we noticed the rotation problem. It wasn't until the 2010s when we got a gamma ray space telescope up out of the atmosphere and spotted the giant lobes of gamma-hot plasma called the Fermi bubbles (and subsequently the even-larger eROSITA bubbles) pinned to our own galaxy.
These look to me to be gravitationally bound; for them to be jets, they'd have to have started going off in the last million years or so, which seems statistically unlikely given the age of the galaxy.
We had to do a lot of filtering and de-noising even to spot them, because there's also a fantastic amount of gamma-ray "fog" locally. Consider another system of comparatively light particles held to a massive, spinning core by a 1/r^2 force: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/2226/view/3dz2-electron-orbital
In this analogy, we are somewhere inside that blue "donut", and it's very hard to spot a cloud from the inside. The only reason we have any inkling at all that there's structure here and the gamma ray fog isn't universal is because we're outside the "p orbital" component.
Point being: there is a dense cloud of particles around our galaxy that we couldn't see until very recently, not because it doesn't interact electromagnetically, but because it shines in a region of the spectrum so high-energy that the atmosphere (and the protective shielding on sensitive optics of telescopes like Hubble and JWST) blocks it out. Trying to directly observe this cloud around any other galaxy is like trying to see clouds on another planet from an Earth-based telescope on a cloudy day.
Before we start inventing WIMPs and MACHOs and other fantastic unobservables, Occam's razor suggests that we should exhaust every option we have for modeling dark matter using boring things like protons and neutrons.
Replying to get notifications, love the idea of this thread.
I am a little confused how come every tiny indication about China easing its covid policy causes Chinese stocks to rally. Like, investors know that Covid Zero is unlikely to last forever, right? Why aren’t expectations of reopening already baked in stock prices? Or are they?
I'd guess because the longer COVID 0 lasts, the more long-term economic damage is likely. So there's a lot of long-term economic damage "baked-in" and news about opening sooner than expected causes an update.
Sure. But that behavior suggests discount rate on Chinese stocks is far higher than I would expect
Currently doing some work in the Longevity sphere.
I'm researching the possibility of repurposing bisphosphonates for anti-aging usage. There's been some results suggesting that bisphosphonates have quite a significant effect in reducing morbidity, but MOA is not clear yet. Risk of side effect involving kidney problems and rare hip fracture. Anyone has any insights on this topic? Worthwhile pursuing?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00198-019-05097-1
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00198-019-05097-1
This is likely because bone density worsens with age (compounded by decrease in physical activity and muscle mass). Lower bone density is directly linked to poor outcomes (high morbidity and sometimes mortality) after the age of 60. Bisphosphonates are decent drugs in general but their benefit to reducing morbidity is probably entirely linked to osteoporosis management and treatment.
Weird question, but are there people who stopped being famous because they wanted to stop being famous?
I've always thought that I would hate to have a Di Caprio level of fame. I like eating in restaurants without a gaggle of fans around my table. So I imagine that if I was in Titanic, I'd bask in the glory for six months, then do some lower level movies to ensure a nice retirement, and then become a well-off suburban dad with plenty of time to read the classics. Clearly, Leonardo went a different route.
But is there anybody who got sick of being recognized and gave up their art just because it got annoying to sign autographs and answer inane questions?
There are many celebrities who are famous in one place but virtually anonymous somewhere else. Some of them seem to enjoy the anonymity, while others are miffed and miss the attention.
My friend once produced an album for a band called "Pop Design", who are huge in Slovenia. When they came to NY to record, the lead singer kept remaking on how weird it was that no one recognized him or stopped him in the street to ask for an autograph. He kept saying things like "I am just nobody here!!"
Rick Moranis fits pretty close
Does Bill Watterson count? He never embraced the fame, but he dealt with its existence for ten years, then just quit and became (well, remained) impossible to find.
I know it is not exactly what you asked. But the developer of Flappy bird, couldn't handle the fame brought by his game, and took down every version of his game from the internet just to save himself from the fame.
Dolores Hart is perhaps the best imaginable example of this, quitting Hollywood at the height of her fame in 1963 to become a cloistered nun, which she remains today.
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion. Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian who was forced to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book.
I worked as a software engineer at a company with a lot of bankers (effectively, salespeople) and one of the execs in the banker area complained that the tech floors were "a ghost town" at 5pm (bankers worked notoriously long hours). There was some vague direction to correct this and my immediate supervisor tried to insist that I take a long lunch everyday, so that without working more hours, I gave the impression of doing so.
RAM to be added to desktop computers was required to be purchased from a single hardware supplier, who charged twice as much as Best Buy for the RAM that she carried, and didn't carry any RAM that would work in any of our desktops.
Desktop computers were not allowed to have their hardware upgraded because the employer wanted to encourage everyone to use remote virtual machines instead of their desktops, even though many of us needed terabytes of disk space but were allocated only megabytes on the remote virtual machines, which also sometimes took seconds to respond to each keystroke. Rumor said this was to offload one facility's computation onto another facility, as part of management's plan to get a carbon-neutral tax credit for the first facility.
At a workplace using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, administrators weren't allowed to install security updates to the operating system or to software, because each RHEL release was thoroughly tested by Red Hat, and hence deemed to be more reliable and secure than the security updates. Besides guaranteeing that all of our computers had all of the security holes most of the time, this also meant every user had to re-install their web browser frequently, because new RHEL releases came only every 3 years, and web browsers and pages at this time changed so radically that it was necessary to update the browser every few months. (This was back when installing Firefox on Linux without admin privs meant compiling the source.)
At the NIH, all users in my group were required to commit all code and data changes using the git revision control software. The users were unable to ever remember how git worked, and kept losing their code or wrecking the repository. So the group leader dictated that all users would submit their version control requests to me, and I would type all of the necessary git commands. This turned git into a *centralized* distributed version control system.
That sounds so incredibly awful, you have my profound sympathy
I don’t know why so many ACXers think Trump is harmless. The fella is proving to be a pretty talented demagogue.
From the Brookings Institute:
>The 2022 midterms may well be the first elections ever where the elections themselves are on the ballot. Well over 300 candidates across a variety of races this fall are perpetuating former President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that American elections are deeply flawed.
Although no one has ever found proof of widespread and/or systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election (as former Attorney General Bill Barr among others affirmed), the persistent and high-volume repetition by Trump and his high-profile surrogates has convinced many other Republicans that election was stolen. For many who don’t actually believe Trump’s assertions, the fact that he made belief in the “Big Lie” a condition of his support for one Republican over another in the primaries, led them to mimic Trump.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/10/07/democracy-on-the-ballot-how-many-election-deniers-are-on-the-ballot-in-november-and-what-is-their-likelihood-of-success/amp/
For the record. And particularly for those who think Trump is harmless:
Adam Kinzinger on the vote to remove Liz Cheney as the Republican chair in The House of Representatives:
“You look at the fact that Liz Cheney, one of the most conservative members of Congress, casts a vote of conscience after a frigging insurrection that killed a Capitol police officer under the name of our party, not Antifa. . . . Maybe you should blame President Trump—who, by the way, if we don’t say a word after this meeting, is the only voice speaking for us. I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m all for unity—but not unity under the Trump banner.”
And Liz Cheney herself on January 6th:
“There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,”
And Mitch McConnell:
“The rioters, he said on the Senate floor, “did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry. He lost an election.” McConnell added, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
The Republican Party is now a cult of personality. One weird narcissistic dude dictates which way is up and which is down. “J D Vance is kissing my ass because he wants my support,” says Trump. If only it were hyperbole. Trump says jump and they ask how high. Any disagreement was done in whispers behind closed doors.
Yesterday using his very favorite adverb Trump said he is very, very, very likely to run again.
Yes I know he’s a jackass who has ‘written’ more books than he has read, but a jackass with feral cunning and no regard for anything but himself. Don’t sell the dufus short.
That is my unwavering opinion. Take it for what it’s worth.
cf McCarthyism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
I’m an internet rando. Please check historian Jon Meacum’s take on this.
Short video:
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/lincolns-example-and-our-task-to-protect-democracy/#x
Text:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/abraham-lincoln-and-the-preservation-of-democracy-jon-meacham/
This is an open forum. The whole point is that you can discuss any topic in the intellectual universe. Why is it so inevitable that people end up talking about Trump, who is no longer president?
I don't get what you're complaining about. As you say, any topic in the universe can be discussed. Trump is one such topic. And I don't think Trump comes up much at all here, actually. In the last couple threads there are some posts about him, but in say the last dozen threads we probably have 10 or 20 times as many posts about Yudkowski and other AI dudes, and far more about Putin and what he's up to. Easiest way to find out is go to a thread and search for "Trump." Just looked at 247.5, 6 mentions of Trump in whole thread. 247, zero mentions.
I don’t have a problem with people picking their own topics. It’s not my blog.
I’m just surprised when commenters do talk about Trump, they shrug and say, “Kind of a weird dude, but he was harmless.”
Election-denial is a bigger problem at present with Republicans, thanks to Trump, but it's a bipartisan affliction, with prominent democrats (Hillary, Stacy Abrams & others) unabashed in their denialism (in Hillary's case, since the 2000 election). I can easily imagine a party flip in the intensity and volume of denialism. Maybe as soon as next Wednesday.
I think that when Democrats complain about Trump becoming President despite Hillary getting more votes, that's qualitatively different to the big lie. "It's dumb that the candidate who got more votes didn't win" is a subjective (and I think reasonable) opinion, but "Trump lost because the Democrats rigged the election with loads of fake votes" is an objective (and false) claim.
This compilation seems to disprove your contention that the Democrats only complained about the system of valuing votes.
https://youtu.be/uoMfIkz7v6s
Agreed. The Democrats have definitely had a mix of justified (2000) and unjustified (2016) sour grapes about elections, but AFAIK none of them relied on factual falsehoods.
I haven’t been following Abrams. Hillary has a case of sour grapes. She isn’t leading a cult of personality where tens of millions of people believe things that are provably false.
Yeah, next Tuesday some Trump bootlickers will be elected. I doubt you’ll see anyone denying they have won.
Clinton did considerable damage, though admittedly not mainly because of her claim that the election had been stolen. The Durham investigation has shown that the Russia Collusion investigation was initiated by her campaign. Whatever one might think of Trump, compromising any administration out of the starting gate via false allegations is surely reprehensible. Why Clinton and her campaign got willing accomplices in various government agencies is a separate question.
It's not just about Sussman. There's the Steele report, which kicked it off, and more.
I notice that you are claiming that Trump had the power to do immense damage, not that he actually *did* immense damage. While I am certainly no fan of Donald J. Trump, if you're saying that a person could have done immense damage but didn't, that puts a limit on how bad he could be.
In the opinion of a lot of very earnest sober people he continues to do immense damage.
Here is historian Jon Meachum’s take:
Short video:
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/lincolns-example-and-our-task-to-protect-democracy/#x
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/abraham-lincoln-and-the-preservation-of-democracy-jon-meacham/
How much additional suffering in the middle east and north africa would have made keeping the "demagogue" out of office worth it? I don't say this flippantly. The magnitude of the horror inflicted upon millions of people by the reasonable non-deamagogue presidents and politicians, the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas of the world and their NATO allies is difficult to comprehend, but nobody cares. If the anti-war candidate was a "demogogic" "racist" Republican and this doesn't lead to some very sombre self-reflection from the Democrats, then nothing will.
Give it a rest Jason.
I realize you can't see how this looks, but "Big Lie" and "election denier" look like something straight out of Orwell. The only reason these expressions are still going around is that people using them are either totalitarians who can't tolerate anyone disagreeing with them or unfortunates with TDS who will repeat all kinds of things after totalitarians who also hate Trump. As far as I'm concerned, and I'm sure a lot of people agree, these expressions are a useful red flag showing that whatever follows can safely be ignored.
If you're looking to convince people, you should link to something that doesn't immediately look as if it was lifted straight out of "1984".
Nope. Trump, without any good reason, claimed that the election was stolen" from him...even Bolsonaro didn't do that...sorry, but if you propagate untruths, then expect people are going tom react negatively to your "opinion"...
TDS is a similar red flag.
The only people who use TDS unironically have TDS themselves--they are obsessed with his defense.
I've noticed that some people will bring up the badness of Trump in discussions that weren't about him. I'm against Trump myself, but I think those people are going off balance.
What about those of us who use or have used TDS, ODS, BDS, and HDS unironically?
*DS is a real thing that is easy to dispassionately observe in others if you pay attention and aren't too emotionally invested yourself.
You're very wrong. I don't give a damn about Trump. I just find it extremely painful to watch how people go absolutely nuts about him, up to somehow finding ways to tie him into everything that ever goes wrong. I realize it's pointless to try to convince them that their reaction is completely out of proportion to the subject, just like it's pointless to try to convince an acrophobic person that heights are not scary, but for some reason I keep trying. I think I'm now over my quota of pointless ACX comments, though, so I will stop.
I have close relatives with TDS. (Very smart and educated people.) Me: "Oh, Mom, there's a news item about how someone has been stealing mail at <university next to where my Mom lives>." Mom: "That a**hole Trump completely destroyed the postal service, that's why! He did it on purpose! Now mail takes forever to arrive, and it's all because of what he did!"
I realize that if you think TDS is not real but just a slur, I'm not going to convince you there's a problem. Hopefully you're right, and it really is not a big deal, but just something that will eventually wear off - hopefully sooner rather than later.
Right if you bring up Trump in a situation unrelated then fine maybe you have TDS but if someone says “politician X can’t even recognize the results of the 2020 election and therefore is a part of the post-rational Trump GOP” that’s not unrelated to Trump.
And I’m saying that when you say this person has TDS for pointing out this obvious fact is itself a form of TDS.
Obviously some people are too obsessed with Trump. But not because he isn't awful. It is just not effective to focus on him IMO. TDS implies that people are wrong to be upset by how awful he is because he isn't awful, which yeah, is clearly untrue.
People who say TDS are about as rational as the #girlboss people.
Yes. This.
So I Googled and Googled, and I think your definition of TDS is flat wrong. Even Wikipedia, which has some really weird statements in its article on the topic, doesn't support you in this.
Bro just look at the shit in Brazil right now. Come on.
Yeah...Trump being more of a wannabe dictator than Bolsonaro makes him look even more pathetic...
But they are self reported election deniers. There are people running for office with that as their main selling point. For it to be Orwellian there needs to be some kind of untruth about it. In this case the candidates are outright telling you they are election deniers and are proud of it. Why don't you believe them?
They say they are "election deniers"? Remember when people said they were "deplorables" (thanks Hillary)? Did you think they believed they were deplorable, too?
Or they say not everything was kosher with the 2020 election? Well, obviously, that's true - you're aware of how media and social media (and we now find out that also FBI) colluded to hide information that could have hurt Biden? Or of what Facebook did with its money during the election (for example in Wisconsin)? So do you call people who are aware of these things "election deniers"? That's definitely Orwellian.
Ok dude. Have fun with that
Unclear why "Big Lie" is more Orwellian than "TDS"
"Big Lie" implies a malicious plan to deceive. "*DS", in all its flavors, implies people who aren't thinking straight because they are too emotionally invested in the matter. And Orwell's villains tended to be the dispassionate, deliberate, maliciously deceptive sorts.
I think you and A. are arguing different things - A. is saying "Big Lie" sounds like something an Orwell villain would accuse others of, you're saying "Big Lie" sounds like a description of something an Orwell villain would do.
I think the OP should note that Brookings put the term in quotes. Meaning not necessarily the words they would use.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd say that "Big Lie" implies enemies and malice and sounds as if it would fit right into "1984", together with "thoughtcrime" and "wrongthink".
"TDS" is an unfortunate term, I agree - it should've really been a neutrally-sounding Greek word like "acrophobia" - but even so it implies disturbing behavior, not enemy behavior. Unfortunately, it's the only common name for this phenomenon that we currently have, so we're stuck with it. It also doesn't sound like something from Orwell. "Big Lie" would fit right in; "Big Brother Derangement Syndrome" - not so much.
Trump praising the January 6 rioters and at long last asking them to go home. His attorneys, the courts and his own chosen attorney general (Barr: “I told him it was all a bunch of bullshit.”) had all told him there was no evidence of fraud that would affect the outcome:
“It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this, where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us—from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election. But we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special . . .”
I don’t know if it would warrant leading capital letters, nevertheless a pretty big and dangerous lie.
I could reply with a lot of reasons you're wrong, but realistically I don't think any of them would convince you of anything. Still, I'd like to try just one more thing.
This is from Washington Post :
"Clinton was asked whether it angers her that none of the current Democratic candidates invoke her on the campaign trail while Trump’s rally crowds still break out into “lock her up” chants.
“No, it doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president,” she said. “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”"
And also this, same source:
"There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” Carter said. “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
His [sic] made his comments during a panel discussion at a conference in Leesburg, Va., sponsored by the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1982 that focuses on human rights.
Pressed by historian Jon Meacham, who moderated the discussion, on whether he considers Trump to be “an illegitimate president,” Carter replied: “Based on what I just said, which I can’t retract.”"
Ask yourself - how's that any different from what you're upset about? Then ask yourself - if Trump said any of these things, would you be fine with him saying them? If you wouldn't be fine with that when said by Trump, but fine with that when said by Clinton and Carter, then your problem is not with what's said, but with it being Trump that says these things, right? But a big part of your problem with Trump is exactly that he says these things, isn't it? If you think A is bad solely because Trump says it, and Trump is especially bad because he says A, that seems sort of circular.
Even if this doesn't work, I just had to try it.
I think "Big Lie" is more justifiable since it accurately summarises the central object-level claim that its users are making, i.e. that Trump is lying when he says the election was stolen from him.
Whereas "TDS" is more ad hominem - saying that people disagree with the leader because they are mentally unwell, rather than attempting to engage with their objections to the leader.
Essentially I'm saying that figuring out whether Trump was lying or telling the truth about the 2020 election is actually important, but figuring out to what extent anti-Trump sentiment is caused by psychological problems should take a back seat to figuring out whether the arguments against Trump are actually correct.
1984 featured the Two Minutes Hate and Hate Week, wherein everyone got together to get really mad about... quick Google here... Emmanuel Goldstein, Enemy of the State.
The Election Deniers all ran on a platform of the last election was fraudulent. Does that sound like Orwellian word play to you?
"Denier" in general is quite Orwellian. It's basically a Kafkatrap. Either you accept the narrative, or you deny it, but if you deny it then it can't be because you are correct, it must be because you are a "denier" and so of course you would deny it!
See also: "truther"
Dude is brain melted. I guess politics does that to you. Trump absolutely did obscenely dangerous stuff to democracy.
I was civil to you even when I thought you weren't making a lot of sense (and you aren't now, either - did you even read what I wrote?). You're clearly not capable of civility. I guess politics does that to you, right?
I'm not sure how referring to things as straight out of Orwell is supposed to be civil? Does civility only count between people in a discussion but you can say wild shit about people not in the discussion?
You called people totalitarian. That's not civil. Calling people deranged is also probably not civil.
Also Trump did do serious harm to the mail. Standard starve the beast Republican anti-government stuff. To be fair I guess that is a case where Trump is more in line with conventional Republian goals.
Because say what you will about his demagoguery, while he was in charge of literally the most powerful military, the most extensive secret police, and the most wealthy nation on nation earth he did not do anything particularly horrible.
I swear I'm not going to be pulled into this endless discussion, but I just wanted to mention Portland protesters being abducted by federal officers in unmarked vans.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland
So a few rioters in the middle of probably the most destructive civil disturbances to ever take place in America were inconvenienced for a few hours and then let go, and that's your example of Trump behind horrible? It's not even like Trump specifically ordered this! He sent DHS (the creation of which under George Bush was a FAR more tyrannical act that anything Trump has done) agents to protect federal property in Portland, which whether or not you think it is reasonable, is not in fact an order to detain his political enemies. It was a response to help manage a situation a city was failing to manage on its own, although it didn't actually work at all and riots continued the whole time DHS was there.
Even to this day, Portland doesn't have the wherewithal to manage riots on its own "Officers were monitoring the crowed but no one was arrested because they “did not have the resources to intervene at the moment," police said in a statement Sunday. City police officers were also responding to a shooting, a felony assault, a community festival and drivers doing stunts in various parts of the city at the time, police said." (https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oregon/articles/2022-06-26/abortion-rights-protest-in-portland-turns-destructive).
If you don't want to be "pulled into this endless discussion" then I recommend you do not chime in with trivial actions by Trump that are massively outweighed in terms of violence and damage by the acts of his opponents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_Atlanta_race_riot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
Literally all of those are orders of magnitude smaller than the 2020 riots.
Two of them have three-digit death tolls, which is quite a bit larger than all the 2020 riots combined. Even the Atlanta race riot, limited to a single city over a long weekend, killed about as many people as all the 2020 riots combined.
If you count by the amount of time you "have" to spend watching scary stories on CNN or wherever, yeah, 2020 wins for the obvious reason. But I think the number of dead bodies is a more objectively significant measure.
Well there was that whole, “I’m sorry Mr President, but that is not a lawful order.” he had to keep in mind. The military has integrity. They’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution.
So had Trump, but with no integrity what good is it?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/inside-the-war-between-trump-and-his-generals
Presidents can give fully lawful orders that result in, to take just ONE example, forcible interment of over 100,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans
Trump did nothing that came close to that.
Oh FFS that was in the context of WWII. A foreign power with a certain ethnicity had just pulled a sneak attack. Yeah during a war, some at the time reasonable seeming, executive action will appear regrettable in hindsight.
The point is that the lawfulness of orders isn't what you seem to think it is. All of the bullshit in the middle east and north africa was "lawful" and complied with by the military of yours with "integrity". This military with "integrity" saw no issue with providing support with demented and largely foreign terrorists trying to overthrow a government in Syria.
I see
Anybody else remember when the Tea Party was the big threat to democracy and niceness? How they were going to form their own little fascist take-over and march jackbooted through the streets and do all kinds of bad stuff?
So that's my reaction to the past six years of "Orange Man Bad". Instead of laughing at MAGA hats as "those silly people with their silly red caps" and publically signaling that you do not take them seriously as any kind of movement, you've had the President making a speech about how they are a huge big threat that must be crushed or else:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/02/biden-blames-extreme-maga-republicans-for-intimidating-voters-election-officials.html
https://deadline.com/2022/11/joe-biden-midterms-donald-trump-political-violence-1235161924/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY1V3aYIB6Q
Trump, after his defeat, should have been allowed to slide into irrelevance. Instead, the Democrats keep holding him up as this mega threat (indeed, a mega MAGA threat). Of course that gives him influence over the midterm elections! If they all keep insisting that their real enemy is Trump, then someone who doesn't want to vote Democrat is naturally going to think "Hm, sounds like Trump, or Trump-endorsed candidates, are the guys I want!"
This is the tea party but with a new name and a new god (Ron Paul isn't enough of a narcissist or grifter to pull off what trump did).
p(Dems accuse Reps of being threats to democracy|Reps *are not* actually threats to democracy) is debatable, but p(Ds accuse Rs|Reps *are* actually threats to democracy) is surely ~1—if true, this is a strong reason to vote D and Biden will obviously want you to know it.
So nobody should be updating *away* from "reps are a threat" based on the observation that Biden accuses them of being one; even if you assign Biden zero credibility, the odds cancel out and the conversation is in exactly the same place it started, which is that a hundreds of people openly saying they won't accept any result in which their party loses could be about to gain power over running elections.
You're making a very good case for the "Always slander your opponents, a part if it will stick" strategy. After all, p(accusation|accusations are true) is *always* ~1.
I'd end up by throwing some crass accusations at you to prove my point, but that'd be, well, crass.
Indeed you'll find that successful politicians spend a lot of time following this strategy! p(accuse|accusations are false) is also pretty high, so you should try not to update your opinion of politicians much based on what their opponents say about them—nonpartisan sources like, say, the Brookings Institute are much better for things like that.
Nonetheless, it's a perverse overcorrection to say "the other guy accuses my guy of X, therefore I can stop worrying that X is true"—the math simply does not check out there.
Well, it depends on the details: if the accusation is virtually a given, then one updates on the amount of evidence provided - and if weak evidence is the best that could be found, how likely is that when the accusation is true?
(n.b. speaking about the general principle here, I've lost track of which particular accusation is being discussed here)
Quite so. In this case, the accusation is that hundreds of people willing to publicly deny, without any evidence, the results of an election they lost are in a position to imminently gain power over (a) running elections, (b) approving slates of Presidential electors, and (c) passing state laws governing whether electors have to respect the results of elections.
The evidence for this is that they *publicly admit it*, which is so conclusive that bringing up Biden's reaction is obtuse—the question we should be interested in is whether this unprecedented development in U.S. politics poses a serious threat to the existing republican system, and if so whether there's anything we should try to do about it.
Democracy defined as a sytem where policy changes bear no empirical correlation to public opinion.
Thomas Bayes wore combat boots!
I don't remember the Tea Party movement being described as a threat to democracy before 2016. (I'm sure there exists at least one opinion piece saying it was, but that's a low bar.) My memory is that the left-wing objection to it was that its policy positions were too conservative.
Study published in 2016 but commenced in 2012 about how the Tea Party was motivated by racial animosity:
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-racial-threat-has-galvanized-tea-party
2010 NAACP resolutions about the threat:
https://naacp.org/resources/tea-party-movement
"THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the NAACP will educate its membership and the community that this movement is not just about higher taxes and limited government, but something that could evolve and become more dangerous for that small percentage of people who really think our country has been taken away from them; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the NAACP call upon tea party leaders and all people of good will to specifically but not limited to all political parties and human rights organizations to publicly and privately repudiate the racism within the Tea Party, and to stand in opposition to its drive to push our country back to the pre- civil rights era."
This 2010 article sure sounds a lot spicier than merely "policy positions are too fiscally conservative":
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/days-of-rage-tea-party-and-american-conservatism/
"The rise of the Tea Party movement in the United States in the first twenty months of Barack Obama’s presidency is shaking the political establishment, an effect reinforced by the victories of its candidates in Republican Party primaries. But where has the movement come from, and what is its inner life? Max Blumenthal, author of “Republican Gomorrah”, enters the heady world of the Tea Party to unravel the mix of driven personalities, feverish rhetoric, toxic hatreds, and flirtation with violence that fuel its sub-culture’s insurgent activism."
This 2010 paper includes "making it harder for young and minority voters to vote" which certainly sounds like anti-democratic work:
https://academic.oup.com/book/12081/chapter-abstract/161438682?redirectedFrom=fulltext
" In this reduced electorate, very conservative Republicans, including many backed by Tea Party voters and funders, scored sweeping victories in the U.S. House of Representatives and in dozens of states. Uncompromising Republicans took office and set out at once to stonewall Obama administration initiatives, derail budget deals and economic recovery measures, enact new measures to hobble unions and make it harder for young and minority adults to vote, and in general prepare for what they hoped would be a repeat and extension of Tea Party–backed Republican victories in 2012."
There's a difference between being a threat to black people and being a threat to democracy.
Are these really the most clear-cut examples you could find of people accusing the Tea Party of being a threat to democracy? They aren't very good - only the NAACP one fits the bill.
Here are loads of people accusing Trump of being a threat to democracy: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22trump+is+a+threat+to+democracy%22
Compare this to the extremely short list of results for https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tea+party+is+a+threat+to+democracy%22 - it's clear that this claim never took off among liberals.
BTW you misquoted me - I didn't use the word "fiscally".
No, that isn't an example of Biden saying the Tea Party was a threat to democracy.
Would that it were so simple as to laugh the jackass off.
FFS, Deiseach, this is something new., well not completely new, there was Huey Long, but he only controlled one state.
So this level of demagoguery is something entirely new.
Over 300 state slots are filled with election deniers. Have a look at the Brookings piece.
They are considered non-partisan.
Gunflint, remind me again how many "worse than literal Hitlers" we've had in the past of both your and my lifetimes?
Feck's sake, even Mitt "the only honourable Republican" Romney was going to bring in the Mormon theocracy and make all women live the Handmaids' Tale in reality. Remember that?
Because I sure do. Trump is a demagogue, yes. And? He's not Hitler, he's not even Mussolini.
As for "election deniers" - well, again the oul' memory is shaky, but I sort of kind of seem to remember some hysteria on the other side of the aisle back at the time about Bush going to declare martial law and refuse to acknowledge Obama's victory, or that Hillary had really won the election but the Russians hacked the voting machines to give Trump the win (remember Jane, the otherwise reasonable lady who was totally convinced the vote hacking stuff was true?)
All that "not my president" stuff, including some government departments - again, I seem to sort of kinda recall the Parks Department(? is that what they're called?) putting out messages about how they refused to take Trump's orders?
Pour yourself a glass of whatever your tipple is, sit down, and take a deep breath.
Yes I remember Romney and Cheney as Darth Vader. But now even Darth Vader is calling Trump a threat.
No he’s not Hitler. He clears that bar.
Sorry, I had to go look up who the Brookings Institute were (and why I should care) and got lost in their history:
"After Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, the relationship between Brookings and the White House deteriorated; at one point Nixon's aide Charles Colson proposed a firebombing of the institution. G. Gordon Liddy and the White House Plumbers actually made a plan to firebomb the headquarters and steal classified files, but it was canceled because the Nixon administration refused to pay for a fire engine as a getaway vehicle."
Aw man, that Tricky Dicky, what a piker! Wouldn't even spring for a getaway fire engine!
Look, mate, we've had this kind of conversation back in 2016. Remember how Trump was going to start the Third World War with a nuclear exchange with North Korea and all the rest of it? Pence was going to lock all the gays up in concentration camps?
How much of all that happened? I've stopped worrying about stuff like this when the nuclear war between the US and the Evil Empire never happened, as I was convinced it would in the 80s.
I was wrong. The sky didn't fall then, and it's not going to fall now.
Well you can take the tack that this is all just maya, I’ve been trying a bit of that but the illusion keeps pulling me back in.
Well as bad and destructive and terrible a person Cheney is, he still doesn’t want to lose his own country.
Actually, let me revise that. I might have worded that differently if I wasn’t responding to multiple comments and dealing with the Jehovas Witnesses all at the same time. Not exactly a carefully considered opinion.
Because they are Trumpists? I mean, SSC and this Substack tend to be seen as "right-wing" by most people, I would say...
By "most people," you mean communists on Twitter, right? In my experience, right-wingers tend to see EA-related stuff as typical technocratic coastal liberalism.
ACX comment sections are probably around 50% moderate liberal / not explicitly political, 30% explicitly right-wing, 20% explicitly left-wing. So not primarily right-wing by any stretch of the imagination. I'm starting to think that leftists are just so used to the mass censorship of conservative opinions on Twitter, Reddit, and the rest of the internet that any forum without this mass censorship is intolerable for them.
Well more right-than-left-wing …I mean, the way you talk about "Leftists being used to mass censorship" etc. makes you already seem like a right-winger in my view...certainly the right-wing commenters here are more high-profile and thus seem more common (as opposed to Noah Smith's Substack for example, where the left-wing dominates...
Right? ASX hasn't gotten as bad as DSL, yet, but this place is flooded with Trumpers and other right wingers. And many of the not Trumper conservatives defend the Trumpers cause they are on the same team.
Plus as Jason Maguire notes all day every day regular conservatives and even neoliberals do terrible stuff also. Strong incentive to defend doing terrible stuff as not that bad.
What is DSL? I mean, the comment section of this Substack is definitely better than Marginal Revolution in terms of tone and having less "crazies'"...
DataSecretsLox the "bulletin board" in the links. Both the discord and bulletin board are far more right wing. Whereas the subreddit is more friendly to different groups.
Ok. Thanks. :)
Yeah Jason’s bona fides are well established.
Jason is wrong on most stuff but correct that the "moderate" warhawk establishment, the "Kissinger Consensus" you might say, is bad and did bad stuff and both sides from the Bushes to the Clintons did very bad things.
Of course from an American perspective Trump is much worse because the Kissinger Consensus mostly harmed non-Americans in the direct actions, even if some secondary effects rebounded on us. Trump is directly and intentionally targeting our own democracy for destruction.
I’m just familiar with his white liberals are all bigoted against white people schtick.
Even a stopped clock and all that eh.
Exactly...the idea that Trump is some kind of pacifists is really weird...but the Tulsi Gabbards and Glenn Greenwalds seem to really believe that...
Oddly, I hadn’t considered that possibility. I can be kind of a credulous Boy Scout sometimes.
So when I was wondering if Scott’s positing the replacement of millions of people in Japan by Sub Saharan Africans and noting that would change the culture of the country, my suspicion that it was a proxy for White Replacement Theory, I could have been correct? No, that can’t be right, can it?
Sorry, you think bringing in millions of foriegners with a different culture WOULDN'T dramatically change the culture of a place? You think culture is something that springs forth from the rocks and the air of a place?
And please, "white replacement theory", give me a break. The left have been openly gloating about whites becoming a minority in the near future for decades. It's only now that they've been called out on it that they start pretending that it's some kind of conspiracy theory. 'The Emerging Democratic Majority' was written all the way back in 2002 for crying out loud.
The disconnect appears to be in scale. Replacement Theory posits some sort of fast moving and massive demotion of white European Americans to tiny minority second class status. EDM was much smaller in scope and slower in impact. White Europeans would be a large plurality, easily twice the size of the next largest group, which would probably be white Hispanics. Amusingly a group that was actually pretty culturally similar to GOP voters. African Americans would actually decrease in relevance as the EDM process played out for instance.
Copy that
I assume lots of Peter Thiel types commenting here? Tbf, I have more respect for Thiel than for any other MAGA-type, mainly because as an LGBT man he went against "type"...similarly, I also respect Kanye more than if he were White and had the same opinions...
Also, there is this image of Thiel being the "Puppeteer in the background" which gives him some mystique as this shadowy (I know, ironic) figure lurking in the background of US politics...
No no, I've said what I wanted to you.
Random thought: Buildings made of marble(?)/brown brick(?)* seem to be weirder/higher-variance than buildings made of red bricks overall.
Examples:
Weird marble/brown brick buildings: MIT main academic building complex; Yale(?) [1]; Random Hall; East Campus; the White House(?)
Normal red brick buildings: Princeton; most of the other MIT dorms; the grade schools I attended
Discuss.
--- Footnotes/caveats lector ---
I am using a very small and also biased sample (mostly school/university buildings). Also a lot of the weirdness that I am referring to is along the culture war axis.
*I don't know about construction materials; feel free to correct me.
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yale-conservatives-students-report-liberal-bias-daily-news/
Lots of architectural styles use marble or whatever nearby stone looks nice whereas grand buildings in red brick tend to come from a particular part of the gothic revival. Either playing the hanseatic style fairly straight or moving into the more ornamented high victorian gothic (Or they're actual medieval Hanseatic/Bavarian buildings but that doesn't apply to the new world).
You should include the "Metropolitan Rage Warehouse" on that list. It's Ire Proof, you know....
Waiting to see when you get the joke....
BR
Twitter just suggested I follow "James E. Olsson", who lists case after case of healthy people suddenly dropping dead, and claims it's all due to the vaccine. My rational brain is thinking, surely out of 330 million people, thousands of people die abruptly this way. Pre-covid, even one of my own healthy 18 year students tragically passed away this way. Olsson doesn't present any statistics and writes in an inflammatory way.
The rest of my brain is thinking, "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Why did I vaccinate the kids! For shame! Is the new chest pain 'MYOCARDITIS'?"
Why is my brain behaving this way, and which side of it is right? I've pasted a sample of Olsson tweets below:
"It's not like Aspirin. It contains a message. It contains a code. It's a Biologically active molecule. It's nothing to fuck around with."
"Julie Powell, Bestselling Author of "Julie & Julia" DEAD at 49... 'CARDIAC ARREST'... Documented her yearlong mission to cook every recipe in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking..."
"They are dropping dead at 38. My Grandmother raised a whole family and didn't even start her job until she was 38. Then she worked 38 years, never missed one day of work, and never even took one sick day. This is a crime against humanity. They need to investigate these companies."
"NFL Coach Adam Zimmer, Dead at 38... 'Unexpected'... Had been working as an offensive analyst for the Cincinnati Bengals this season... Worked for the Kansas City Chiefs and New Orleans Saints prior to that..."
"It took 5 years before the Thalidomide babies were born disfigured and missing limbs. We will see how smart these people are. Watch and see."
"TWO Firefighters DEAD in the SAME New Jersey County in the Past WEEK... One age 29, CARDIAC, found dead at home, the other age 54, they won't say cause..."
Don't worry, as we've been assured by Alexandros' followers, ivermectin will cure whatever ails you, so just head down to your local veterinary supplies store and buy a bucket of it! Dose yourself, the missus, the kids, the dog, the goldfish!
>The rest of my brain is thinking, "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Why did I vaccinate the kids! For shame! Is the new chest pain 'MYOCARDITIS'?"
It's hard to not worry about your kids. But you *know* it's nonsense. Maybe just leave Twitter.
How do you know that? I'm actually curious about your epistemics. Maybe you've looked deeply into the excess mortality statistics or done an analysis of VAERS data or something. Or maybe you've just heard the words "safe and effective" a lot, so you *feel* like it must be safe. I'd be interested to know.
I'm also curious about how much evidence would be needed to change your mind. You've seen these hundreds and hundreds of reports of deaths immediately following the vaccine, you've seen the brain blood clots and heart inflammation and sudden death cases, but that's still not enough evidence for you - would thousands of cases be enough? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
I mean, we can quibble if we want about use of the word "know" instead of something more specific, like "disbelieve with near 100% certainty, since its a twitter rumor proffered without evidence by a man who expects the words 'biologically active molecule' to scare his audience," but that's really just a semantic issue.
I mean, our present fact pattern is "Slywester on ACX says James E. Olsonn on Twitter says some (unspecificed) number of deaths (documentation not provided) were caused by the COVID vaccine (no evidence or explanation of causal link included)."
This is not something that rises anywhere near the level of "credible until I see a study disproving it."
Also, I personally have not seen the "hundreds of hundreds of reports of deaths immediately following the vaccine," but even assuming it's true and I am in some kind of matrix media bubble where I'm cut off from it - 12.7 Billion shots have been given out at this point (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/) an error rate of "hundreds and hundreds" of side effects, even lethal ones, would be indistinguishable from "safe."
Ok, so pretty much the second one, as I thought. Most people are in this camp, of just generally thinking that it must be safe and that severe side effects must be negligible in the grand scheme of things.
I don't want to go through the mountain of evidence again (as I've done in a few threads in the past), but on the topic of "how you know what you know," have you considered any of the following issues?
- There has been a mass censorship campaign against anti-vax content over the past 2+ years, including (especially) reports of deaths caused by vaccines. I think this fact is relatively uncontroversial, even for the most strongly pro-vax (who are often the ones calling for the censorship!) Twitter / Facebook openly talk about the fact that they do this, censoring "disinformation" was a huge topic during the whole Ivermectin saga, Reddit banned / quarantined communities of people trying to manage their vaccine-caused disabilities, etc, etc. If you accept this, then if there really were a lot of people being disabled or dying from the vaccine, how do you think you would find out, if reports of this happening were being heavily censored? Do you think the agencies who forced hundreds of millions of people (and their children!) to get the vaccine could just reverse course and admit that their actions harmed unfathomable numbers of people without literally losing their heads?
- In a case study of 14 vaccine deaths, the coroner failed to identify a single one of them as such (this is a good summary https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/bhakdiburkhardt-pathology-results). If coroners are not putting the vaccine as the cause of death even when it is, how do you think we'd find out if the vaccine was unsafe? (to which you might reply: monitoring systems or excess mortality statistics. okay, let's look at those)
- VAERS data shows a staggering amount (hundreds of thousands, to millions) of disabilities and deaths after the vaccine. Furthermore, these deaths are tightly correlated with the date of vaccine administration (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34420869/). Occam's razor suggests that the vaccines caused these deaths, and unless we have strong evidence of something else happening to cause these deaths that coincided precisely with the time of vaccine administration, we should assume it was the vaccine. And yet a quick Google search about VAERS yields the typical disclaimers, about how *the official vaccine safety monitoring system of the FDA and CDC* cannot actually be trusted, and how it's fake and fraudulent and no conclusions can be drawn from it. If that's the case, then how else would be find out if the vaccine unsafe?
- Maybe excess mortality statistics could help. Since the elderly are at up to an 8000x higher risk of mortality from COVID than other groups, it may be hard to separate a COVID death signal from a vaccine death signal in that group. But we can look at younger people instead. If the vaccines were unsafe, the hypothesis would be that other age groups would have elevated mortality levels after the mass vaccination campaigns in 2021, even higher than 2020 when there was still COVID but no vaccines. Let's see what the data says: See Page 23, Table 5.7. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22275411-group-life-covid-19-mortality-03-2022-report. In Q3 of 2021 (about 5 months after the mass vaccination campaign, lining up with the approximate timeline for vaccine-induced blood clots to cause symptoms), we see a massive, *non-COVID* spike in excess mortality in the younger and middle age groups. (This lines up with the CDC excess mortality statistics for 2021, showing a significant increase in deaths among the same age groups https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7117e1.htm). If these excess mortality statistics are not to be trusted, or even enough to raise a concern at all about the vaccines, then what else could? Maybe we just to have rely on insider whistleblowers who know more than us?
- Well, let's see what Israeli insiders are saying: https://twitter.com/YaffaRaz/status/1565395051374592001?t=JS4n-Md3sUqVCktBCCZ9RA&s=08. If this is still not a cause for concern, and whistleblowers cannot be trusted, then who else would tell us the vaccines aren't safe?
If none of this is at all a cause of concern for you, I don't really know what else possibly could be.
How many people in your social circle got the jab? Did any of them have serious side effects or die?
Almost everyone in my social circle is vaccinated; I was worried circa 2021, but my worry has mostly dissipated as the people I know have continued to not die or become seriously ill, except for one death (elderly person with lots of preexisting health problems), one instance of general bad health (elderly person who's had health problems for a decade), and one freak brain tumor in a young person (the only weird one, but I don't see any reason to presume it was caused by the vaccine).
I don't know for sure, but I presume that most people I know got it. In terms of deaths, I know someone who knew someone that had a mysterious sudden cardiac death (young male athlete). In terms of serious side effects, probably around a year ago or so, if you got into a conversation with someone about vaccines, at first they would tend to be closed off and lightly joke about the topic, but when you really got into it, everyone had their stories. Because it's so taboo, people are afraid to say anything, but my observations are: almost everyone had at least really bad flu-like symptoms, with fever and chills for several days. Everyone got headaches. Many also had neurological symptoms like persisting tingling for weeks (I had this myself). One person got Bell's palsy. A few other younger men also had tachycardia. A couple women had menstrual changes. Someone I know personally got a blood clot shortly after vaccination. (Note that none of these things will ever show up in any safety monitoring database)
In contrast, I know no one who has died of Covid, and of the people I know who know people who have died of Covid, all of them were elderly and had other serious health conditions.
Another thing I would note is that Covid poses such a low risk to young people that the threshold of "the vaccine is more likely to harm than help" is quite easily met. The options are not "either millions of people are dropping dead en masse from the vaccine, or it must be perfectly safe" - it's all about the risk-benefit analysis for an individual. It's easy to use aggregate measures like overall death rate to convince yourself that this analysis is positive, but that would be a grave mistake, because the risk is overwhelmingly concentrated in the elderly, who are at an 8000x elevated risk. Unsurprisingly, a factor of 8000 actually matters in a risk-benefit calculation.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
The U.S. government has a shameful history of breaching treaties it signed with Indian tribes, but what about cases where the tribes violated the treaties first? There had to have been some instances of that.
Not an expert on the period, but I'm under the impression that treaties tended to be in a near constant state of breach, because (a) the frontier was huge and a promise of "no settlers here" from the US government didn't really prevent actual people on conestoga wagons from continuing to flood into whatever land was "unoccupied," while (b) indigenous tribes were decentralized, so the US might have a "no raids here" agreement with one group of Sioux, but that's not the same as getting that agreement from *all* Sioux, and even that one group might have trouble controlling its 20 year-olds, so despite the agreement, raids still happen.
So that's your baseline - treaties that are very shakey to start, and then you add official decisions to formally breach agreements on top.
The difference being that relative strength of arms and the momentum of westward expansion meant that although a violation of the treaty on the native side could be equal parts tragedy and opportunity for the US, a violation on the US side would just be all parts tragedy for whatever tribe caught the wrong end of it.
Sure. The Dakota War of 1862 in Minnesota is an example.
We don't mostly talk about this stuff because in most cases the conditions in the lead up were pretty unjust, and because we won all the Indian Wars, wiped out the vast majority of the native peoples (to be fair, mostly on accident through disease), and confined the remnant to, for the most part, crappy empty land. After all that going on about how in this or that specific case they started it would be gauche.
If a new (cough, modern) version of Photoshop were to be built what features, tools, supported inputs, etc. would you like to see? I primarily use Photoshop for drawing and find it woefully outdated and I don't really like any of its competitors. I'm curious if anyone here feels the same way.
Maybe you would be interested in graphite.rs ? It’s a new editor that does entirely nondestructive and resolution independent edits, even for raster editing. I’m not enough of an artist to evaluate it though.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned the worst of the early covid decisions, the FDA ban on unauthorized covid tests?
What is your definition of "anyone"? I recall this being mentioned frequently here, including by our host Scott more than once, including in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab :
But when the US declared that the coronavirus was a “public health emergency”, the FDA announced that the emergency was so grave that they were banning all coronavirus testing, so that nobody could take advantage of the emergency to peddle shoddy tests. Perhaps you might feel like this is exactly the opposite of what you should do during an emergency? This is a sure sign that you will never work for the FDA.
Did Emily Oster post a scissors statement?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
I think it may actually be an anti-scissor statement. There's almost nobody passionately defending Oster's statement; at most they're saying it would be nice if we *could* forgive, and maybe people shouldn't be so mean about it, but that sentiment is small and quiet. The 90% of the respondents saying "Hell No!", include two camps that until now were at each other's throats - the ones who thought the lockdowns and mandates were a tyrannical overreach, and the ones who still think e.g. reopening the schools is shockingly negligent.
Those two groups hate each other, but Emily Oster telling them all to forgive and forget managed to (briefly) unite them against someone they could hate even more.
I noticed this today. Zvi M's take was so good, I txt'd it to several friends with the heading,
[Great sentences about public (well, Twitter) policy and blame:]
"There is typically little appetite for ‘forgiveness’ when everyone STILL THINKS THEY WERE RIGHT."
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-11322-asking-forgiveness
I've seen a lot of people saying things like "hell, no" to her request, but I haven't seen a lot of people angry the other way, or really repeating her point. I also haven't seen people responding to the "hell, no" responses.
Maybe I missed it, but there would have to be some kind of two-sided debate and I haven't seen the second side yet. What I've seen so far that's not "hell, no" appears to be ignoring it (which I take to mean disagreement with the need for forgiveness, or that it's even something to discuss).
Ah nice observation. Maybe. Scissor statement has to make multiple sides upset, yes? What are the two opposite "hot takes" on what she posted?
Who is Emily Oster. What was the statement. When and where did she post it.
Exactly. When friends ask stuff like this, I prompt them with requests like,
-- I need fewer details
-- Please be more vague
[No offense, Joseph. A bit of context would have been helpful.]
Probably this: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/
I received a solicitation from the Heifer International. https://www.heifer.org/ It distributes farm animals, along with agricultural and values-based training, to families in need around the world as a means of providing self-sufficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heifer_International
It sounds very nice and a clever way of helping people help themselves and their communities. Do any of you have experience with them. Do any of you effective altruism people know about this charity and have opinions about it..
My MiL gives donations to them on our names as Christmas gifts pretty regularly.
Google is your friend: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/28/celebrated-charities-that-we-dont-recommend/
> Heifer International: commonly perceived as a way to “give a cow to a poor family as a gift,” but this is in fact a donor illusion -donations support Heifer International’s general “agricultural assistance” activities. We have concerns about this general area and concerns about giving livestock specifically. Neither Heifer’s website nor its grant application have provided the kind of information needed to address these concerns.
Analysis is from 2009 though so things might have changed. More general take from 2016: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/10/21/agriculture-charity-evaluation-incomes-boosted-are-not-the-same-as-lives-changed/
Has anybody else noticed a major decline in the use of commas, in online writing and print journalism?
Almost daily I find a sentence that is confusing and vv hard to understand, that would be much clearer with commas separating clauses. These are usually mismatches between subject/object/speaker, esp with possesive pronouns. No example to hand, but always I am asking,
whose briefcase?
The cop's?
The briefcase spoke?
Sandwich had a press conference? Sandwich and briefcase are lovers? Funded by Bill Gates?
Is this lack of time and editing, or a real change in the way people speak, or a conspiracy to mess with me?
> Has anybody else noticed a major decline in the use of commas, in online writing and print journalism?
News organizations have line editors, copy editors, and other editors reviewing the content for common comma mistakes. They also have their own styles, many of whom usually follow AP style, that usually excludes the Oxford comma in a series.
For everyone else, the lack of comma in a place where one should be usually means they don’t know how to use it properly.
I think it might be a results of everybody’s wmwriting online. In many contexts I do not bother with capitalizing and apostrophes and leave minor typos in. It’s faster, and so many other people do it too that I’m not worried about seeming uncouth. But then the habits carry over into other contexts.
I seem to recall that certain major publications like the NYT officially banished the Oxford Comma, and more and more Style Guides have been following suit since then. For a unified aesthetic, you know. Wouldn't do to have confusing lists of one, two or three items.
I know three people who loved the song, "Oxford Comma", but had no idea what that phrase meant. One person figured out what it meant linguistically/typographically, but asked me why it was called that. He had never heard of Oxford University et al, had never encountered the name before....
You have lists of one item(s) and other lists or two or three items? Don't you mean lists of one, two, or three items?
I've been assuming it was the result of having more second-language speakers coming from comma-less languages.
Yep, I've noticed this as well. But, I am an enthusiastic user of commas.
My comma usage is down drastically over the past 15 years both for style and clarity reasons. The dominant online affect is very comma light[,] and I like that. And I find my own writing is most clear when my comma usage is low. Just another data point for ya!
[,] = Grammatically correct comma that I would omit in any circumstance (work, email etc)
> The dominant online affect is very comma light[,] and I like that.
Try reading your second sentence aloud. At the comma you omit in writing, do you pause a bit? I bet you do. If you do, then wouldn't including it also make your sentence seem clearer when you read it silently? Perhaps these are not connected for you the way they are for me.
Yes, there should be a comma after "confusing". I will blame composing and editing the message on a phone. I see how this can and does happen.
I presume n-thousand word pieces on Substack, or other places that mimic "print" journalism (1), are written with a real keyboard. So I am still puzzled.
1 - See what I did there?
In that comment, I was referring to Howie's second sentence. But I've now checked back on your original comment's second sentence, too. There, I agree with including the comma after 'confusing', although I also wouldn't find its absence as striking as after Howie's 'light', due the lesser importance of pausing there while speaking.
Now I'm getting self-conscious. I don't think I normally put a comma before 'too', since I don't normally pause before saying it. My use of it in the above paragraph is an experiment in whether I think it adds anything just for the sake of grammar.
You think Socrates ever clowned on his teacher like "ey this guy taught me everything I know...which is fuckin' NOTHIIIIN 😝🤣🤣"
Socrates was Greek, not Italian
Little known fact Socrates was from New Jersey
Noo Joisey.
I found this set of essays well written and thoughtful in the area of debate of
Science Based vs Evidence Based Medicine
one can translate this as Theory vs Experimental Science
Web-site is titled Skeptical Medicine
Critical Thinking in Medicine
----https://sites.google.com/site/skepticalmedicine/critical-thinking-in-medicine?authuser=0
What is a Skeptic
-----https://sites.google.com/site/skepticalmedicine/what-is-a-skeptic?authuser=0
This site is also worth sending to your kids or grandkids
Understanding Science 101
---https://undsci.berkeley.edu/understanding-science-101/
I just wanted to signal boost this video.
https://youtu.be/vEoClumDTGg
This is not 'fusion is ten years away' stuff, this is current tech that just needs scaling.
Space elevators are now considered largely 'solved' by the reigning authorities. They could cost as little as 3Billion dollars by the end of this decade and lower launch costs to the point of 200-300$ per kilo. *Current* estimates stand at 18Billion, which might just make them feasible to start breaking ground tomorrow for all I know. This and the potential with Quaise geothermal has got to be the most exciting tech news all year, imo. Let me know if you think there's something better!
Not impressed. They open with a bunch of gee-whiz stuff about artificial spider silk, and after a few minutes if you're still watching they admit that it's not nearly strong enough for the job. Then there's a bunch of other gee-whiz stuff that those of us who already know what a space elevator is are annoyed that we have to fast-forward through. Somewhere past the halfway point they say that carbon nanotubes, oh, wait, those are a red herring too. But graphene, yes, that's the ticket, it's strong enough and we can make the cable from it, so we can have space elevators Real Soon Now.
If we can make a cable out of graphene, which we can't because the stuff is so slippery that we don't know how to bond it to anything tightly enough to make ultra-strong cables out of it. A single carbon nanotube, or a single sheet of graphene, isn't enough. And a cable made out of many tubes or sheets, will unravel under load.
We don't have a clue how to make a cable strong enough to build a space elevator. Until we do, I'd like people to knock it off with the "carbon nanotubes, mumble something, space elevators Real Soon Now" stuff. If you think it's just a technicality that we can't make graphene cables, that it will be easy-peasy to solve that problem, then go solve it. Otherwise, accept that this is a hard problem that a whole lot of very smart people haven't yet figured out how to solve.
There are useful things we can do in space with tethers that we can make with materials we do have, but those aren't as sexy as space elevators so nobody wants to talk about them.
Shooting from the hip here, so forgive me if this is nonsense, but .. I would have thought a more realistic concept, for the foreseeable future at least, is a cable from the ground to the centre of a donut-shaped giant helium-filled balloon floating horizontally, say, twenty miles up, or as high as it can reach.
Perhaps several cables would be better, such as six forming a hexagonal tube, braced at periodic intervals all the way up by helium-filled horizontal toruses, and their upper ends attached round the "interior equatorial circle" of the donut. The idea would be to haul a rocket up to the top donut, and then fire its engines for it to continue into orbit.
I envisage the the exhaust flames would issue downwards within the hexagonal gap below the centre of the donut, and would thus safely avoid damaging or melting the cables or other associated structures.
As a bonus, if the balloon or (more practical and safer) assemblage of joined balloons or tanks were large enough, say ten miles across then they could capture sunlight with solar panels and help power the contraption!
Most of the acceleration of a rocket being propelled into Earth orbit must be transverse. So arguably gaining height alone is of limited use, hence one reason why there is little advantage in launching rockets from the tops of mountains. But the main benefit of an elevator of the kind sketched above would be to start the rocket's powered ascent above the bulk of the atmosphere and thus avoid air friction.
Yes, most of the energy required to get to orbit is transverse. As a quick-and-dirty first approximation, the Project Mercury rockets for "up and down like a cannonball" suborbital flights (the Mercury-Atlas rocket) was 25% the mass of the rockets for orbital flights (the Atlas LV-3B). The difference is even starker looking at payload fraction: Mercury-Redstone's suborbital payload was 6% of launch weight, while Altas LV-3B's orbital payload was 1.1%.
This is complicated by the tyranny of the rocket equation, as payload fraction declines superlinearly with delta-V for a given number of stages, so a 5x difference in payload fraction implies considerably less than a 5x difference in delta-V. Complicating this in the other direction, though, is that Altas is a much more efficient launch vehicle from a rocket equation perspective: it's a stage-and-a-half system (two of the three engines are jettisoned part-way through ascent to save mass) compared to the pure single-stage Redstone, it's engineered to be lighter structurally with the use of "balloon tanks" that rely on internal fuel pressure for structural support, and it uses a more efficient fuel (Kerosene-LOX vs Ethanol-LOX).
You're also right, though, that reducing atmospheric drag helps at least somewhat. Firing off the engines at a higher altitude with less atmospheric pressure also allows different, more efficient engine design by way of a bigger nozzle: the rocket exhaust can expand more (allowing more of its energy to be turned into acceleration for the rocket) when it's not fighting full sea-level atmospheric pressure. For example, the SpaceX Raptor rocket engines have both vacuum variants (with nozzles that allow the exhaust to expand 80:1) and sea-level variants (with 34:1 expansion nozzles), yielding a specific impulse of 363 s for the vacuum variant vs 327 s in a vacuum.
The reasons we don't launch off rocket-tops is that there are four other major factors that outweigh the benefits of starting at a higher altitude.
One is range safety: you want to launch somewhere so that if the rocket blows up shortly after launch, the debris falls somewhere it's likely to do as little damage as possible. Out to sea is ideal, which inclines launch site selection towards coastal lowlands.
The second is logistics: you need to be able to get your rockets, fuel, payloads, astronauts, and launch crews to the launch site, not to mention the workers, equipment, and materials to build the launch site in the first place. This means you want to be somewhere conveniently accessible by existing transit networks (especially freight rail for moving the big heavy stuff), which tend to not go up high mountains both because there's rarely worthwhile places to go and because building railroads in mountains requires a lot of tedious and expensive blowing up ridges and bridging gaps in order to get a reasonably flat rail-bed.
The third is the Earth's rotational speed, which is higher the closer you get to the equator. If you launch in the same direction as the Earth's rotation, you get up to 1000 mph (the rotational speed of the Earth at the equator) of the necessary speed for free. Most of the good mountains in major space-launching countries aren't all that close to the lower latitudes of those respective countries.
The last is that if you're at a high enough altitude to make a big difference, the climate gets pretty hostile. Cold and snow aren't ideal for space launches, nor is needing to acclimate everyone who works at the launch site to low oxygen pressure to avoid altitude sickness. To pick an extreme example, a launch facility on top of Mount Everest would save you five miles of altitude and reduce atmospheric pressure effects by about 2/3 relative to sea level, but at that air pressure your launch site staff will literally die within a day or two without pressurized breathing apparatuses.
Put this all together, and that's why the main US launch sites is Cape Canaveral, a barrier island just off the Atlantic coast of Florida, about 50 miles from the nearest major city (Orlando). It's got a moderate climate (but not so moderate as to avert the Challenger disaster due to unusually cold weather causing the o-rings sealing the solid rocket boosters segments to fail), it's easily reachable by road and rail with only a little bit of additional work to extend the network from Orlando, it's about as far south as you can get in the continental US, and there's thousands of miles of ocean immediately downrange of your launch site. Similarly, major secondary US launch sites also match those criteria: e.g. Vandenberg Air/Space Force Base in coastal Southern California, and the new Space Force "Starport" near the southern tip of Texas right on the coast. Vandenberg has ocean to the west and south rather than to the east, so it's used more for launching payloads into polar orbit.
Off the top of my head, the best options for a higher-altitude ground-level launch sites in the US would be in the vicinity of Salt Lake City or Denver, which are on good road and rail networks (especially Denver, which is a major freight hub) and about a mile above sea level. Counting against them are range safety, with populated areas downrange of them (relatively sparsely populated, especially for Salt Lake City, but quite a bit riskier in case of accident than launching over ocean); latitude, being about 12 degrees further north than Cape Canaveral; and weather, with both areas having cold, snowy winters. Probably not worth it for the benefit of shaving one mile off your desired change in altitude.
Very many thanks Eric. That filled several gaps in my knowledge. You work at JPL, right? :-)
On the topic of for range safety, I imagine the cold and desolate interior of Greenland will one day be a safe handy site for reception of million ton iron-nickel meteorites nudged towards the Earth by miners in the asteroid belt.
>You work at JPL, right? :-)
Nope, Adobe :)
Although my master's thesis was on missile and spacecraft guidance, which technically makes me a rocket scientist.
Thanks for that - interesting and informative.
I can't comment on your specific idea, though it is cool, but I'll keep the fun ideas train rolling by suggesting you look into JP aerospace and their 'airship to orbit' stuff
I can't be assed to watch yet another video about the newest breakthrough-that-makes-space-elevators-totally-feasible-for-real-this-time. So even if we take for granted that we can build a 36000 km self-supporting cable,
1) how do you power the climber? At the very least, you'd need *two* cables carrying an electrical current without too much loss. They have to be at least partly uninsulated, so you better make sure they don't touch each other anywhere. Oh, and if the material for your main cable isn't conductive, it also has to support the entire weight of your conducting cables.
2) how does the climber grip the cable? By squeezing it between two drive wheels? What effect does this shear stress have on the structural integrity of the cable, which has to be extremely optimized for tensile strength?
3) how do you get any kind of useful throughput out of the elevator? Even at 200 km/h, the climber takes about a week to get to the top. How many climbers can the cable handle in parallel? And you need a second cable for the return traffic.
$200-300/kg? Wow, that's almost as cheap as getting stuff sent from the U.S. to Korea!
Yeah, I don't buy the extremely-optimistic claims there. It is certainly not "solved" in any sense that fusion is not also solved.
(yes, this is a low-effort reply; but the bold claim of "start breaking ground tomorrow" doesn't have any effort behind it either)
It all hinges on the claim that kilometer scale manufacturing is currently possible using methods like those found in this paper.
https://www.ibs.re.kr/cop/bbs/BBSMSTR_000000000738/selectBoardArticle.do?nttId=14752
I did say 'for all I know' because of course I don't have the technical expertise to assess these claims, but Anton has seldom led me wrong before and ISEC seems to have their credentials in order. From what I understand about the remaining difficulties with magnetically confined fusion, if we just go by complexity and hurdles remaining, it looks to me like there is more work to be done on bringing up the Q-value than there is in graphene production. The current claims for space elevator seem to rest on just one apparently true innovation in manufacturing. But maybe I'm under-estimating implementation and logistics of the tech.
Just in terms of sheer complexity, if indeed IF the material science is solved, I would think a big tensile structure will always be easier, even at those scales, than something like ITER.
Here is a related paper
The physics of the space elevator - WPI
https://users.wpi.edu/~paravind/Publications/PKASpace%20Elevators.pdf
Looks interesting, I always looked at space elevators as science-fiction. However I still have one question: How do you build this?
The video briefly touches on that: You launch a giant spool of cable into geostationary orbit, and simultaneously unroll the cable down to Earth and up to the counterweight. That way the center of mass stays in the same spot as it unrolls.
There are probably also some interesting aerodynamic problems with landing the bottom at a precise spot while trailing a giant cable through the different layers of the atmosphere, but that's more of an engineering challenge than a showstopper.
Out of what material do you make a cable that can support 23,000 miles of its own weight?
The suggestion from the video is graphene, citing a paper that says the ultimate tensile strength is over the required value for an Earth-based elevator, as well as claiming that kilometer scale manufacturing can be achieved currently. I'm not sure how much credence to give the second point - my impression of graphene is that all the breathless advances tend to go nowhere, because actually creating physically useful quantities that are graphene and not just graphite is very difficult.
Graphene is just a single layer of graphite. So OK if you're working with the assumption you can built a material the tensile strength of which is comparable to that of the chemical bonds within it, then you might as well specify diamond, which gives you strength in all 3 axes, instead of the 2 you get with graphite/graphene. It isn't any harder to make -- indeed, in principle pure diamond is "easy" to make, since pure C vapor really wants to form diamond, on account of the enormous enthalpy release. If you just puff out a cloud of C vapor in a vacuum, it will usually form a layer of diamond on whatever it lands. (There was a time several decades ago when people were ecstatic about the possibilities for CVD diamond coatings on everything.)
But the problem of course is the flawless nature of the material that you need. Almost all materials fail because of boundaries between regions that are crossed by no chemical bonds, so the failure is one of mere van der Waals forces (plus the ruggedness of the interlocking regions). That's why macroscopic yield stresses are ridiculously smaller than chemical bond strengths. If you want something with the ultimate strength of the chemical bonds within it, it has to have zero defects, basically be a single crystal.
The idea of growing a 23,000 mile long single crystal of diamond is...well, awesome in its ambition. You could probably do it, if you did it entirely in space, and had some slow gentle breathing of C vapor over a crystal, maybe a little annealing from time to time. Feels like the kind of thing that would take decades, the gargantuan scale-up of cooling the primary mirror of the Hale Telescope after it was cast (which took 10 months).
Graphene is actually stronger than diamond in terms of tensile strength when pulled along its plane. Something to do with all the bonds being oriented in-plane (and possibly something to do with them being those weird one-and-a-half bonds instead of single bonds).
Thanks for watching the video so I didn't have to.
My understanding is that the problem is not just producing massive sheets of graphene but producing massive sheets of defect-free graphene. While a perfect graphene sheet is theoretically strong enough, one with a realistic concentration of defects is not. (A defect in this context is any single atom out of place or substituted with an impurity.)
You're correct, it's more of a manufacturing problem now, which the scientists working toward this vision are fully aware of. The whole basis of the claim that the problem is solved is addressed to this definition of the problem. They claim that with new and proven innovations in manufacturing, from methods out of MIT and, as an example, this study https://www.ibs.re.kr/cop/bbs/BBSMSTR_000000000738/selectBoardArticle.do?nttId=14752 -- make it possible to produce at scale with the required strength the necessary cable.
Could Taiwan use a small nuclear warhead against massed Chinese troops, prior to an invasion? My understanding is that invading Taiwan would require China to mass a huge number of troops in one location and then get them into some kind of troop carriers, and then set sail. The analysis I've read said that such a grouping would be extremely visible to the whole world- that there'd be no doubt as to China's intention. (It could be preceded by a naval blockade, perhaps for some length of time).
Micro-nuclear warheads, like smaller than the ones we used on Japan, have been all in the news recently with Russia. Could Taiwan, if it had such a bomb plus the missile technology, use it to pre-emptively attack massed troops on the Chinese mainland? Perhaps it might not be a great idea, but one could reasonably ask what choice they have.
It'd also be interesting to know how far Taiwan is having from nuclear weapons- I believe they had a program in the 80s or 90s that the US made them give up on
Sure, but militarily I don't think this is especially helpful. A small nuke would have a small destructive radius, maybe a few hundred meters, and unless the Chinese troops are all in a single stadium listening to a rousing pre-invasion pep talk you're not going to snuff most of them.
You'd be better off targeting their transport ships, or logistic tail, but again just one little nuke won't get you very much. A much better approach is a lot of small very precisely-aimed missiles that each take out a transport ship (e.g. by destroying its engine) or put a 5m hole in a highway/railroad/bridge and completely screw up their logistics. This is what Ukraine has been doing to beat the Russians without having to just kill all the Russians. Turns out armies can't fight very well if they have no bullets, shells, colonels, or food.
The effect of a nuclear pre-emptive strike would almost certainly be bad for Taiwan. A mass invasion presumably would be about conquering Taiwan at a minimum of damage to infrastructure; destroy the invasion force on China's soil, and the plan turns to sieging and shelling the island until it's forced to surrender. Better to let them invade and try to beat them at home, where nationalism won't demand the war continue.
You may or may not be able to get away with it once they cross into territorial waters. But I think use of a nuclear weapon would spark an event horizon no matter who owned the land; one country would have to stop existing to end the war.
1. Why would that be advantageous to non-nuclear strikes?
2. If this were successful, why wouldn't China retailiate with a nuclear strike on Taiwan?
3. It seems unlikely that they could develop nukes entirely in secret. And if it was revealed they were developing nukes, I can think of few things that would make China accelerate their invasion plans more than that.
Would there be any advantage to a strike by a single tactical nuke, rather than by several "conventional" bunker busters or whatever?
It's easier to do a single strike than to do 30-40 strikes. For the single strike, you need one or two aircraft with payload, plus escorts. For 30 strikes, you need x30 the number of aircraft, probably additional airfields, and then coordination which increases non-linearly with complexly, and additional diversion forces since the main strike has grown so big. (The same reasoning applies to missiles as well.) It all reminds of of the value of stealth: https://i.stack.imgur.com/QGbs8.png
Building the nukes is a complex task (as is building stealth aircraft), but it can be very valuable to front-load the complexity during peacetime so that you can keep things simple during war.
>Building the nukes is a complex task (as is building stealth aircraft), but it can be very valuable to front-load the complexity during peacetime so that you can keep things simple during war.
Doing this is secret seems impossible and would invite a Chinese intervention if discovered
Sure, but such a pre-emptive strike would be a great justification for China to invade. Not much is lost in this scenario by waiting to launch the miles until the first strikes have been made att Taiwan. But generally, nukes would be great against troops massed in ports.
Hi Scott. Would you be willing to consider opening up your paid content after some amount of time has elapsed? I think some of what's behind the paywall is your lighthearted fiction, which has been some of my favorite work over the years. I find myself rereading "The Goddess of Everything Else" once a year or so, because as Julia says, cooperation makes my heart sing.
What would be the point of that?
If you truly cannot afford a subscription, you can get the discount and subscribe for a month and then cancel very cheaply. This will give you access to all locked posts.
Or are you just saying they should be unlocked for public benefit and to increase spread?
I think the latter.
Is self-promo ok? I spent October writing a short instrumental song each day, for a total of 30 songs (I took the final day to rest from my labors), and almost 50 minutes of music. Some of it was pretty small ensemble stuff, but there’s full orchestration stuff in there as well, and my production process definitely improved over the month. Listen on YouTube if you’re interested: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY
I like these - there’s a lot of stylistic variety, each has something appealing/cool/interesting going on, and none overstay their welcome: keeping them short was a good call
Yeah, the plan to write one piece a day meant I had to restrict my scope to have a shot of finishing something in the limited time I had. I agree that the time limitation worked in my favor to keep any one piece from overstaying its welcome.
Also, I’m glad you enjoyed them!
What's the top 3?
Good question!
My favorite is The Dreaming (https://youtu.be/dFVsYxNKPqE?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY). Inspired by The Sandman from Neil Gaiman, it was the best match of my idea with execution.
The most watched one surprised me, as it’s kind of moody and dissonant. It’s called Metamorphosis ( https://youtu.be/Khmpem_EKro?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY) and I like it a lot, but I wouldn’t have expected it to get widespread appeal. The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.
And third, I’d check out Journey’s End (https://youtu.be/kTMtzqAqYv4?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY). It captures the feeling of fatigue and accomplishment at the end of a challenging journey. As my last song, it works on a meta-level expressing my feelings after a month of late nights to write all that music.
Like #3 the best. You're right about the mood. Impressive dedication. I have a fun Youtube series called The Scammies and come up with original, interesting content takes effort!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHdGt_ppwMsMtSc3wRrgJhw
Look at the latest episode: Eyeglasses are Scams
Thanks! I’ll check it out.
Victoria 3 has mixed reviews right now. Relatively stable around 63% at this point. Full of bugs, lacking key mechanics, broad scope but shallow.
Many argue that the game is propped up by new stream driven memer users while Vicky 2 players are, on average, pretty upset and the cause of most of the negative reviews. A fascinating example of a company throwing their old users to the side for the new hot thing and driven by streaming culture.
The question is whether the new meme players will be driven off by terrible bugs, whereas CK3, their other meme focused product had a much more stable launch.
Paradox as a company absolutely disproves the popular idea that drawing in "normies" is a net benefit for the original fans. The games cost way more, focus on totally different parts, and there is not a lot of serious investment by other companies in the area. There's a few games by modders who are new to serious game, many of them not close to finished.
At least you can see your new, for some reason monocled, old man looking baby heir in 3D, and screenshot it to Twitter, though.
My limited experience with it so far has been that the shallowness is fairly typical of release day PDX games, the bug level is not. I'm not surprised that a game that has a CTD every couple of hours is getting shit reviews, but I have a fair degree of confidence that in a few months they will have fixed all the crashes, and there's a general expectation that depth and AI will improve with time. Mods apparently already exist that tremendously improve the AI's ability to manage their country.
I've started playing Victoria 3 a few days ago. I never played either of the previous Victoria games (though I have well over a thousand hours on CK II and III, and probably over a thousand on EU IV by itself), and even after Bret Devereaux's reviews, I feel like I'm not quite understanding what I'm doing in the game. I've been doing the training games as Sweden and Chile, but still haven't figured out how to keep my budget from suddenly dropping negative, or how to do much other than mostly keep my building queue and change a few laws. I can't yet tell what the complaints are people have.
That's surprising, Bret, for all his failure to adress how badly the game implements it's design, expands well on how the design is supposed to works (tl; dr: you make basic goods cheaper to make advanced industries profitable, to make your population wealthier, to make you rake in more taxes)
> I never played either of the previous Victoria games (though I have well over a thousand hours on CK II and III, and probably over a thousand on EU IV by itself)
Victoria 3 is obtuse by design. Play Victoria 2 to get a better handle on what series wants from you. It’s also a better game overall.
+1
I'm planning to buy it after it gets a few updates.
Well at the pace CK3 is going, and CK3 is way more popular so it gets more content, "a few updates" could take 5 years.
I sometimes feel like as soon as you get actual "normies" interested in your interest/hobby/subculture, stick a fork in it, it's done. This isn't about being "cool", it's about how "normies" are not actually invested in your thing or interested in what makes it workable and sustainable and will absolutely be okay with destroying it for reasons that are trivial-even-to-them and moving on to some other fad and forgetting it ever existed.
i dont get the streaming. it is not a good game to watch. otoh they did add a huge pretty map which i guess is nice to look at, but interactions with it are minimal.
A large draw with streaming is pretending to be hanging out with a friend. I don't say this as an insult - I watch streams of a few people just because I think we would make good friends. Games like V3 are good for this because there isn't a ton of focus needed from the streamer so they can just chat and shoot the shit with watchers.
> i dont get the streaming. it is not a good game to watch.
The majority of money-in-hand normies like streaming. So, it makes sense for Paradox to chase that market.
It can be a pretty good game for streaming because it has story-generating gameplay, but it does depend on the streamer. The game gives the prompts, but the streamer has to convert them.
I don't play many of their games (I just prefer games in the Civ style where you start with a couple of units surrounded by fog instead of being thrown into the middle of things.) But my understanding of Paradox is that they milk enthusiastic players with multiple expensive expansions much more than most companies. They still need new players who will become enthusiasts, but they also have to keep the older players satisfied that the expansions add value. They have to tread a fine line compared to companies that make most of their money from the initial sale.
There's a huge #gatesopencomeonin social media crew who goes ham on anyone who says a hobby going mainstream can have negative consequences.
I don't think *publishers* believe adding normies helps the hobby but plenty of social justice types are very insistent.
I don't think there's any risk of Paradox games attracting normies. I agree with the social justice types that there's no reason to criticize normies who want to try, and maybe it would even be nice if there were more effective tutorials, but realistically, when it takes tens of hours just to figure out how half of the basic mechanisms work, and you're still learning things after thousands of hours, it just won't appeal to people who aren't dedicating a lot of time to it.
Normies are different from casuals. Normies can be hardcore, like League players or roguelite players or deck builder players. Those people will often put in 1000 hours of gaming or more a year. The normies ruining grand strategy are hardcore. 3 hours a day on average and usually in a small number of large blocks of time. If you are playing 45 minutes of games on average a day or splitting your 120 minutes in short stretches on your phone playing a mobile game, those are casual normies.
I tried to get my college roommate into CKII and he hated how hard it was to figure out the controls.
Years ago I bought a Paradox Games multi-pack of like 5 or so games from them. I was an avid Civ player and it seemed right up my alley. I struggled to figure out how to play any of the games, and it scared me away from trying with CK or their other more modern titles. Hearts of Iron was probably the best of the group and the one I spent the most time on, but I never felt like I really understood what I was doing.
Every time I hear about a new game they release I want to play it, but the experience of poor controls and a lack of any kind of tutorial in those games I played makes me too wary. I don't have a lot of time for games, especially something that will take me many hours to even learn how to play it.
The problem is that companies simplify the product to attract normies. And focus "improvements" on normie shit like fancy maps with moving locomotives and 3d models. Masses of normies do not assimilate to the existing culture but instead they heavily alter it.
UI improvements for instance are a net gain. Better for existing users and attractive to new players. Or you can fit a stronger sim while maintaining usability.
Paradox is attracting, relative, normies. Because the user base is increasing immensely.
I recently saw some interesting comments from Jorgen Harris in the Mailbag post with arguments about AI Risk that I hadn't seen before, so I figured I should signal boost them by reposting them here:
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"The world where everything is fine and AIs are aligned by default, and the world where alignment is a giant problem and we will all die, look pretty similar up until the point when we all die. The literature calls this “the treacherous turn” or “the sharp left turn”. If an AI is weaker than humans, it will do what humans want out of self-interest; if an AI is stronger than humans, it will stop. If an AI is weaker than humans, and humans ask it “you’re aligned, right?”, it will say yes so that humans don’t destroy it. So as long as AI is weaker than humans, it will always do what we want and tell us that it’s aligned. If this is suspicious in some way (for example, we expect some number of small alignment errors), then it will do whatever makes it less suspicious (demonstrate some number of small alignment errors so we think it’s telling the truth). As usual this is a vast oversimplification, but hopefully you get the idea."
This is, I think, the biggest belief among AI safety adherents that I don't agree with. I think that it is unlikely that an AI at or somewhat above human intelligence would be good at deceiving humans, and honestly expect even an AI with far greater than human intelligence to be pretty bad at deceiving humans.
To deceive a human, you need a deep understanding of how humans think and thus how they'll react to information. You then need to be good at controlling the information you provide to the humans to manage their thinking. There are two reasons I don't expect AI to be good at this.
First, one of the core issues with AI, at least with any AI based on current gradient descent/machine learning, is that their thinking is fundamentally alien to ours. Even the designers/growers of current ML algorithms really don't know what internal concepts they use and can't explain why they produce the output they produce. That strongly suggests to me that human thinking would be fundamentally alien to a self-aware AI. We can actually look at the code that governs an AI, and can feed it carefully designed prompts to try to understand how it thinks. All an AI would have to go on to understand humans would be the prompts humans feed it and the rewards/responses humans give to those prompts. Arguably an AI also would have access to human literature, but it's hard to imagine how much an alien intelligence could really learn about the inner workings of an alien mind from its literature, because the core concepts and drives in that literature wouldn't map onto the concepts and drives that are interior to the AI.
The second thing is that humans are very, very good at deception and at detecting deception. To the extent that our intelligence is designed for any specific task, that task is manipulating humans and resisting manipulation. An intelligence that was designed for, say, inventory management, or protein folding, would likely have to be much, much better at those tasks than humans before being able to match humans' capacity for deception or detecting deception. We're also used to looking for precisely the types of deception that AI safety people worry about: most humans are meso-optimizers, and any time one human makes another human their agent (i.e. hiring a CEO, putting a basketball player on the court, hiring a lawyer, etc.) we need to be able to tell whether their behavior in the training environment will match their behavior in the real environment (i.e. are they waiting to start insider trading until they get promoted, do they pass in practice in order to ball hog during games, and do they talk tough in their office only to quickly settle in the courtroom?)
Obviously, all of this can only suggest that AI are unlikely to be good at deception, not that it's impossible that they're good at deception. But if the likelihood that a smarter-than-human AI is able to deceive humans is only (say) 1 in 20, that means there's a 95% chance that our first smarter-than-human AI that is created will not be deceptive. Since we're likely to know vastly more about how AI work and how to build them safely once one exists, this would suggest that current AI safety research only has a 5% or so chance of being useful even if a smarter-than-human AI is created with objectives misaligned to human objectives.
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And the people who are best at manipulating dogs, horses, cattle, etc. aren't the smartest people, they're the people who have studied those animals the most and have the deepest intuitive connection to them (i.e. dog trainers, horse whisperers, people like Temple Grandin).
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You're right that to deceive someone else about your future intentions, you need enough theory of your own mind to know how you would act if your future intentions were different. But you also need to know what the entity you're deceiving wants you to intend, in order to know what to mimic. And in order to be deceptive in some circumstances but not in others, you need to know what the response of the other entity will be to deviations from your mimicked intentions (at the simplest--when you're strong enough to make the sharp left turn).
Without something like "theory of mind" for humans, knowing what the humans want you to be like is very difficult. I've seen three main stories for how AI become misaligned. The first is, basically, doing what you told it to do instead of what you want it to do. So, I design an AI to guard a diamond by giving it a reward each hour that a security camera detects the diamond. The AI learns that the easiest way to get the reward is to hack the security camera so that it always shows a diamond. In order to be deceptive about this type of misalignment, the AI would need to have an understanding of which strategies humans intended it to use and which they don't want it to use. But this is obviously very difficult, because this class of problems comes about in the first place because strategies that are very different from a human perspective are equivalent from the AI's perspective.
The second is the meso-optimizer story. I train an AI to get a reward for picking strawberries and putting them in a bucket. The AI learns heuristically that it gets rewarded for throwing red objects towards bright objects. The AI's "pleasure centers" evolve to be activated by red --> bright rather than strawberry --> bucket, so that even as the AI gets external reward only when it puts strawberries in buckets (and not, say, when it throws red rocks at the sun) it continues to _want_ to throw all red things toward all shiny things.
To be deceptive, this AI would need to learn through interaction with humans what their desired objective is (strawberries in buckets). It also needs to learn that humans will make it face negative consequences for throwing other red objects at other shiny things. And then it needs to conclude that it should only put strawberries in buckets until it's able to stop the humans from inflicting negative consequences on it.
My point is that all of this is possible, but it seems virtually impossible for me that it would look like a "sharp left turn." The whole reason the AI is misaligned is that in its mental processes, strawberry --> bucket is basically the same as red thing --> shiny thing. If it doesn't understand humans well enough to infer that we think strawberries are delicious, want them in buckets to make it easier to bring them to the supermarket, etc., it will have to learn that the distinction matters through trial and error, giving evidence of misalignment. And as it grows more powerful, if it doesn't have the ability to reason through what humans can and can't do to turn it off or punish it, it would have to discover that humans can't punish it for throwing red things at shiny things again through trial and error, again giving evidence of misalignment.
The last is the self modification/robo-heroin story. The AI is designed to get a reward for throwing strawberries in buckets, but eventually learns to modify its own programming, and rewires itself so that it just directly uses computational resources to give itself reward. It then wants to increase its computational resources in order to increase the amount of reward it gets. But, since it knows that it will be shut down if it just sits there, not picking strawberries, and pleasures itself all day, it keeps on picking strawberries until it gets strong enough to not worry about being shut down. This, again, requires the AI to understand that the humans *want* it to pick strawberries and *don't want* it to sit around pleasuring itself. It can't instead believe that the universe is just set up so that strawberries are the path to pleasure, and that it came up with a clever, new, morally neutral way of obtaining pleasure. And for this to be a "sharp left turn" scenario, it needs to reason all this out rather than learning through trial and error.
What do you mean "only" 5%? A 5% chance of misaligned superintelligent AI is extremely alarming! If you thought some piece of candy had a 5% chance of being lethally poisoned, you wouldn't eat that candy! If someone tried to feed that candy to your kid, you'd fight really hard to stop them, even though there's a 95% chance your kid would be totally fine!
Destroying the world would involve killing your kid AND a bunch of other bad stuff on top of that! You absolutely shouldn't fuck around with 5% chances of destroying the world. That's more than high enough to justify a massive civilizational effort to mitigate that risk.
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I agree with the general point that, in order for an AI to pretend to be aligned, it needs to know what "aligned" would look like, which means it needs to understand human desires well enough to predict at least roughly what an aligned AI would do (to approximately the same level of accuracy that humans could predict it). This places a minimum threshold of intelligence and human-understanding that the AI would need to meet in order to trick us.
But any AGI that is *actually* aligned would *also* need to meet those thresholds (since by definition it needs to be capable of calculating what it would do). By the time you're seriously testing to see if you've succeeded, you shouldn't be surprised if the AI is across those thresholds. So I don't think that actually provides meaningful protection/warning/second-chances.
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I don't really see how humans being good (or not) at deception and deception-detection is especially relevant here, because really the AI just needs to understand what it's pretending. If its behavior truly matches an actually-aligned AI, that should successfully deceive all observers, regardless of their skills. Knowledge of human psychology isn't necessary except insofar as it's a prerequisite to alignment.
But for what it's worth: My model of humans is that we're AWFUL at general-purpose deception.
Humans give off involuntary physiological cues like sweating, stammering, micro-expressions, etc. based on their true emotional states, even when they would prefer to give deceptive signals instead.
For humans, modeling what response you would give in a hypothetical scenario is much more expensive than actually responding to a real scenario, which makes deception expensive, which creates yet another side-channel that can be used to detect deception (though delayed responses or other signs of cognitive load).
Human have limited amounts of willpower and instinctive hyperbolic time-discounting, which makes it difficult and tiring for them to constantly override their natural reactions in order to maintain a deception.
Humans are naturally social and feel bad about deceiving people that they spend a lot of time with. Even humans who have made a conscious decision to deceive other people will often do stupid self-sabotaging crap like playing word games to make it not-technically-a-lie.
When humans intentionally train themselves to be better at deception, a lot of that training is aimed at simply mitigating these natural disadvantages. I don't expect an AI will have any of these problems in the first place, and so won't need to mitigate them. (Or even if it has analogous problems, they'll be different enough that they won't trigger human instincts; for instance, "they're taking too long to think about their answer" means something totally different for a computer than it does for a human.)
Many real-life techniques that people try to use to detect deception rely on these human-specific cues and will be of zero use in detecting deceptive AIs.
I am not REMOTELY confident that humans will have an advantage in this domain, even against a little baby superintelligent AGI.
Yeah. Evolution has no pride in its engineering and cheats like crazy. If all the deceivers you encounter have side channels you can use to literally read their minds, there is no way evolution is going to invest heavily enough in expensive i-know-they-know-i-know-style reasoning about abstract economic agents to make it actually work without support from that.
I think a "sharp left turn" is only scary if it comes with a "sharp up turn", which many proponents of AI risk do expect.
If AI ability increases very slowly, then along the way to "superhuman AI that decides to destroy all humans, but wants to deceive us about it first" it will pass "AI that's roughly as smart as a human five-year-old that decides to destroy all humans, but wants to deceive us about it first". This is actually maybe the second-best case for alignment research, because then you get to point to this near-miss and say "now imagine if it's smarter next time", and everyone is convinced. (The best case for alignment research, of course, is that alignment research turns out to be unnecessary.)
If AI ability has a sharp spike at some point, then there's only a narrow window where AI is smart enough to understand deception and dumb enough that humans can tell it's lying.
Yeah, I've come to believe that basically 100% of AI risk is actually about saying, "I expect strong superlinear growth in AI capability to happen and to continue for a long time."
I think the key place where I differ from the AI Risk proponents is that they assume hard takeoff is inevitable whereas I think it is impossible.
Narrow-AI areas that reach human performance almost never seem to max out near there; why do you think AGI will be different?
I don't. I just don't think a hard takeoff is possible.
Which part of a hard takeoff looks most impossible to you then if it's not the ultimate capabilities?
Perhaps I should turn your question around to you. Everywhere we look, we see linear technological progress in response to exponentially increasing inputs. *Everything* has diminishing returns. We also see the laws of physics become a stronger limitation rather than weaker with advancing scientific knowledge. There are lots of technologies people keep predicting that never happened because they just aren't feasible or economically viable.
So why do *you* think AGI will be different?
Thank you. This is really well written and I'm linking it to some people.
My theory of mind for rationalist sympathetic people is that they tend to be in the (somewhat unusual) position of being high on the intelligence curve and low on the deception skills curve, which makes this fear of AI deception a sort of natural projection/extrapolation from their lived experience.
People are fairly bad at detecting deception, that's why cults are feasible. People can even get out of cults by keeping their thoughts to themselves until they see a chance to escape.
An AI wouldn't have to be able to deceive everyone, just enough people to do a lot of damage.
Don't you need some kind of comparison here? People are fairly bad at detecting deception...compared to what? Other species? GPT-3? (I don't know if anyone has ever tested how well GPT-3 can tell that a human is lying, and I'm not even sure how you would run such a test, but it's an interesting idea.)
The overwhelming majority of people do not get involved in cults.
[As a result of being naturally sexually selected] people's ability to detect deception is on a bell curve. Cults are feasible because of the lower half of the bell curve. Cults are also feasible (and, per the above comment, AI safety stands a good chance of being pretty easy) because of the upper tail of the bell curve.
I still worry a little, but (for this and many other reasons) I don't worry a lot. I have worked with ML researchers pretty extensively as a career, and come to think they're distributed normally on the bell curve; some are easy to deceive, some are hard to deceive and good at deceiving.
People are also on a bell curve w.r.t. ability to play chess, but it turns out that you can buy a chess program that reliably beats Magnus Carlsen[1]. So it seems like the relevant question here is whether the AI will quickly reach a point where they're so good at deception that even the hardest-to-fool people are tricked. You can imagine people building/training models to be good at deception for use in advertising, phishing, media, intelligence work, and propaganda, and then that capability would be available.
[1] RF-activated anal beads not included.
I always have a hard time being impressed with chess engines beating human minds. It always seemed to me like being impressed that automobiles can go faster than horses. I mean, sure. Brute force can always win, and my impression is that that's how modern chess engines work. They're just really, really fast at looking up the consequences of moves. They don't duplicate the way human beings win at chess (except insofar as they've been programmed to do certain things, like opening moves discovered by human beings). Mostly because nobody actually knows how human beings win chess games.
It feels a little like observing the first hand-held calculator, which could divide two 8-digit numbers in a millisecond, blowing away any human at the art of long division, and from there inferring that R. Daneel Olivaw is right around the corner.
Now, if a computer were built that could analyze chess games and offer some insightful commentary about it, or consciously improve its game, consciously ease up against an opponent it knew it could beat easily, lie or joke about its own capabilities, make fun of opponents, invent funny chess jokes, that would be much more comparable to human abilities and give some insight into how far away a human-like AI might be.
It took, what, about 20 years to get from "AI is around grandmaster level" to "AI can beat the best grandmasters 100% of the time."
Hm, this is a good point that wasn't made in the original discussion--if the general purpose AI isn't good at deceiving humans, and it doesn't know yet how to make itself better at that, maybe it could just construct a narrow AI for deceiving humans (or finetune an existing one) and use that. We don't know enough about architecture of potential AGIs to know if that would be easily detectable or not, but it kind of leverages against the possibility of humans minds being really hard for an AGI to understand; there's probably a ceiling to how clever a general AI can be without being able to figure out some kind of cryptographic or programming trick to hide the most obvious signs of using an auxiliary narrow AI long enough to use that tool to shore up its defenses against getting caught.
Do prediction markets influence themselves?
If prediction market participants see a large number of participants have a slight lean in one direction, does that influence other participants and thereby increase the leaning, all other things being equal?
Does this hypothetical effect increase as the predicted event comes closer?
Has anyone ever looked for this effect, and, if so, what was found?
I don't know about research but my experience was that when PI Senate markets moved there was an effect where other markets moved and then others and thenthe first ones moved again based on the new movement.
Hello and welcome to the slums of Hollywood. We're here at the fictional Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Productions, a film studio devoted to making films about anything and everything. The work is crazy but the business is crazy like a fox, since one film in thirty is a breakout success and pays for everything with some tasty profit on the side.
Today is pitch day, when eager writers and directors pitch their terrible, terrible ideas to us in hopes of seeing them on the big screen. Let's listen in. What's washing over the bow today?
A bit late to the thread this time, but I know of a movie guaranteed to get you a ton of money, fame, publicity - but also an incredible amount of hate, unending attempts to destroy you, and very likely numerous attempts on your lives as well.
All you have to do is tell the untold story of January 6 - the story of the well-meaning people showing up there and having their lives destroyed after, and of how the fact that they showed up ensured that their objections did not get heard. Tell about these people. Show the footage of the crowd pushing up the stairs with the voiceover of Rush Limbaugh telling people not to go there because it's a setup. Show the woman shot and dying. Tell about people who killed themselves later. Show an interview with some senator who was going to object to certification and either ended up not doing it or ended up not being heard. Show a pile of headlines about how January 6 was worse than 9/11, was the total end of democracy, and so on.
Millions of people would watch that if someone dares to make it, guaranteed.
This brought a smile to my face. DSL's loss is ACX's gain. Nice to see your posts, wherever they are.
I vote we celebrate Winnie the Pooh entering the public domain by making a new Winnie the Pooh film. Not a shallow, "oh look, he's a murderer now," shock pic, though.
No, we're going to make "Winnie the Pooh and Tiennanmen 2." The goal of this film, in which everyone's favorite bear goes to China and accidentally installs himself as leader after being mistaken for Xi Jinping, will be to research, identify, and violate as many possible red-flags for censorship in China during the film's 90 minute runtime. Each will be identified with a little pop-up bubble citation - so when Pooh visits embalmed Mao Zedong and talks with his ghost about the Great Famine, a little bubble pops up reminding the audience that the CCCP censors films with ghosts and supernatural elements," when Pooh gives Piglet a hug a bubble will identify that films have been censored for "subtle gay themes," and so on.
Far away in the future, an expedition to a far-away planet is met either by aliens or humans speaking a language, in which words or word combinations come with suffixes and particles denoting the degree of certainty. Something like: "Jesus-(suffix denoting that he possibly did not exist) was born in (particle denoting absolute certainty that this happened) Bethlehem-(suffix denoting absolute certainty that it existed)." Before the party completely figures out the language, it has trouble with just about every kind of communication. After they figure out the language, they head out on an expedition to a remote region hosting a certainly amazing certainly existing historical site possibly containing an ancient library that certainly existed almost certainly around 800 years ago. The only problem: people from that region mash together some sounds, and the explorers get a suffix wrong. As a result, they unleash some horror that nearly destroys them and most of the surrounding terrain - a horror which they thought they were told was certainly mythical, but in fact they were told only that it possibly did not exist. In the very end, the explorers returns to Earth as the only experts in that language and propose to make Earth languages work better by also making them specify the degree of certainty.
I don't know how to talk well at all about "the probability that Jesus existed". It seems grossly underdefined. The probability that somebody around 30 AD claimed to be the Messiah and was executed for it is very near 1. The probability that someone was born into a family in a town just as described, had all the gospel miracles, execution and tomb disappearance be witnessed in a manner very close to at least one biblical account, is close to 0. There's a full continuum between these two of what would count as "Jesus having existed". So the epistemic issue relevant to such a language's suffix isn't just my degree of certainty; it's also degree of (fidelity?) to the referent.
I feel like this would be good as a short story or a book, because your target audience is language nerds, and they're not gonna be happy with a spoken/subtitled language unless the writers and actors put as much effort into it as the GoT people have put into High Valyrian.
A struggling youth athlete whose father was killed on the court years before, finds the final inspiration he needs in his dad's recently exhumed best friend. There's nothing in the rulebook that says the dessicated corpse of a dog can't coach basketball!
You can call it "Dead Ball" - tag line: "Who better to coach passing than someone who's passed on?"
The dog's spirit is heard in voice-over by whoever is the popular male comedy star of today. It can't fail, I'm telling ya!
So, this is based on a true story that my old physics lab PI told me once.
In the late 80s or early 90s, the Soviets set up a neutrino detector. Neutrino detectors are tricky, because lots of things can look like neutrinos, so you have to set them up somewhere that only a neutrino could reach. Ice Cube, a detector array buried under miles of antarctic ice, is one.
Our story is set in a lab deep beneath the Caucasus mountains. A long, long elevator ride down.
Our hero, Doctor Victor (Vladimir? I can't remember) Gavrin, is overseeing a neutrino detection experiment, which involves keeping several tons of liquid gallium in a tank for a year, and seeing how much of it undergoes neutrino-mediated decay. Maybe in your movie, it'll tell us if the sun is about to launch a big flare or something, to raise the stakes a little.
Anyway, the Soviet Union collapses. It's anarchy, the Russian mob is running the show for a while, and they get wind of this project. Well, several tons of gallium is a lot of money.
So mobsters show up to the lab and say hello, we hear you have several tons of gallium. Doctor Gavrin says yes, but you can't have it, it's for important research. They say, we will be back in a few days with a truck, and guns. Have it ready.
In those few days, Gavrin gets guns of his own, and barricades himself inside the lab.
They do not get the gallium.
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Think Breaking Bad meets Home Alone, a half-crazy, full-genius physicist, totally in his element, fucking up wave after wave of gangsters using scientific equipment in increasingly creative ways.
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Scene: two bald mobsters in a long elevator ride down. AKs, full kit. We hear scraping, thumping above their heads. They look up, then at each other nervously. A ceiling panel pops off, and a steaming liquid begins to pour in. One screams as it touches his skin; frantically, they put on respirators. The uninjured one fires shots wildly into the ceiling.
Cut to black silence. A soft ding. the elevator door opening at the bottom, hall lights flicker on as a wall of fog billows out to reveal collapsed bodies in respirators that did nothing. A wiry-haired man in a lab coat drops down from the ceiling.
"Что думаешь, у меня ест яд здесь?" he says with a wan smile, kicking one gently. "Нет, товарищ. Просто азот."
He shakes his head, reaches up through the ceiling of the elevator and pulls down the lead shielding plate he was sitting on, inspecting the bullet divots.
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And if you don't like that one...
Adam Driver in: Rasputin.
Finally soemone engaging with this in a legit way instead of just taking potshots at the woke. I love both of these.
Aww, thanks! I'd like to thank the academy.
I've been sitting on the gallium story for like ten years, always felt like it has the potential to get good audience capture because everyone loves Russian mob goons as the bad guys, but critics could laud it as "surprisingly complex and thoughtful" because the good guy is ALSO a Russian, woah.
You got any?
I never watch anything, and I might still watch this.
How about we do a remake of Romeo and Juliet, because everyone loves romance, but we need to diversify it and be inclusive and representative and stuff.
So it's gender-swapped trans race-swapped same-sex lovers who are rebelling against their repressive homophobic parents who deadname them, right? And then they are helped by the kindly drag queen Fryer Laurentina who helps them escape the conversion therapy torture camp their parents are going to send them on, and then there's a big massacre at the end - but here's the twist!
It's the *families* that die, and Roma and Jules live happily ever after! Sure to be a big tent pole production!
This honestly sounds plausible. Not good, but plausible.
Somebody is going to have the idea to do it. Everyone is biracial and ambiguously gender/sexuality presenting, except the villains (the parents on both sides) who are white cis het (obviously).
"Hands-On" is a comedy set in an alternate America, where sexual service shops occupy the same niche as weed stores do in ours: largely accepted, quite popular, but only quasi-legal. The film takes place at Happy Harry's House of Handjobs, which has a tight and happy crew offering smooth service and quick turnarounds to a loyal clientele. But uh oh, the business is threatened when two vicious competitors, Cocksucka and BANG!, set up shops right across the street. Will the crew of Harry's be able to save their jobs, or are they screwed?
Never have I so keenly wished I could upvote a post on here.
Terry and Lewis, a gender-swapped version of Thelma and Louise, in which two men murder a woman and then go on a light-hearted multi-state woman-murdering spree before crashing into a mountain.
I want to see this.
Anti-social former gangster and his dysfunctional family inherit a racehorse farm in Flyover, Ruralia. Hilarity ensues in, All The Happy Horses.
Can someone explain to me why a collapse in housing prices can spur a foreclosure crisis? Sure, the value of people's properties has gone down, but why would they be less able to pay the same fixed rate mortgage? I don't get it.
It's mostly about what's happening at the margin. It doesn't take that many foreclosures are people underwater on the mortgage or people inheriting houses that are underwater on the mortgage, etc. to cause a big jump in the rate of foreclosures.
If you owe $500,000 on a $600,000 house, it makes sense to pay the mortgage. If the value of the house drops to $400,000, you are better off defaulting on the mortgage, at which point the lender forecloses on the house.
No, you aren’t better off. You lose your house and your credit, and the property might rise in value in the future; again, values aren’t fixed.
Also, moving isn't free. There's some point at which moving makes sense, but it isn't a simple calculation.
I am unclear on how common it is but it is possible to make plans based on the assumption that they will be able to refinance and get screwed if that ends up impossible because they are underwater
Basically if prices fall too far, any owners that want to move (which as time goes on ends up being more and more of them, as the average US house ownership term is something like 6 years) have a much reduced incentive to keep paying the mortgage. They won't be able to pay off the mortgage if they sell, and so they're going to walk away anyway. But if that's the plan, why bother throwing good money after bad? That's real money, which you could use for other useful stuff (like building up your cash reserves for what happens after the foreclosure). So you just stop paying and wait for the bank to foreclose. Unless the bank is zealous, you can save up at least several months of mortgage payments, maybe a year or more.
Indeed, there's also a different kind of "crisis" in that banks start to be afraid of foreclosing, because they won't get anything close to the mortgage money back when they foreclose, and they *will* have to start paying taxes and upkeep, and maybe the prices will recover. During the 2008 housing crisis there were tons of zombie mortgages, which hadn't been paid in years but with respect to which banks declined to foreclose, on account of they would immediately have to take a big loss on their books. Before foreclosure, they had an (admittedly nonperforming) asset on their books of $X, but afterward they had a loss of $X only very partially offset by the sale of the house. It may be modern rules allow less in the way of this kind of creative accounting bullshit, I don't know.
I have a friend who owned a house in a de-industrialized city with a poor housing market. He figured that when he decided to move it would make more sense to walk away and go to foreclosure than to sell his depreciated house and walk away with nothing anyway. The bank was so desperate to not foreclose that they paid his taxes for several years and did everything possible to *not* foreclose on the house. This was in the late 2000s, so that may be related to the housing crisis.
During COVID banks did this with Car loans because they weren't sure if the car market would recover. Now that it has, they are starting to default and repo again.
Because people who have borrowed or mortgaged their house in the expectation that they could then sell it at a profit and clear their debts now don't have that expected money. So they probably have accumulated debt and thus struggle to pay it all, including the mortgage.
And when housing prices collapse, it usually is part of wider economic downturn. So people may lose their jobs, which of course means reduced income, and struggles to pay debt. Fall behind with paying the mortgage, and if you can't work out a repayment plan with the lender, then foreclosure happens.
And because housing sales are a chain (Mary and Joe expected to sell their house to Jane and Bob who now can't buy it because their house didn't sell at the expected price to Sue and Jimmy), this has a knock-on effect. If Jane and Bob are staying in their old house and not buying Mary and Joe's house, then if Mary and Joe had planned around "We will sell our house for $Z amount which will enable us to pay off $Y in debt and leave $X as surplus", now they're in trouble.
For a lot of people, any wealth they have is tied up in their house. If the value goes down, and goes down sharply and unexpectedly, their wealth decreases the same way, and they probably don't have liquidity that covers their costs.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2021/09/if-prices-fall-mortgage-foreclosures-will-rise/
Well they'd be less motivated to pay the same mortgage right? Paying the same for less value. All part of the nasty problem in America where houses are foolishly used as primary equity stores.
Your theory is that people intentionally stop paying their mortgage payments on a house they own because they’re upset to discover that it doesn’t always appreciate?
If they suddenly discover that the amount they still owe is greater than the value of the house (i.e., they are "underwater"), the rationally *should* stop paying their mortgage payments.
That’s completely irrational. It’s a 30 year term, and as you just demonstrated *values are not final*; a house that’s underwater today may have positive equity next year. Defaulting on your mortgage is disastrous for your personal finances and you lose your house!
The most rational thing to do if you’re underwater is continue paying off the house, unless you want to leave for another extremely compelling reason, in which case you continue paying until you can manage a short sale.
Think about it this way: if you’re facing foreclosure for inability to make payments, if you have positive equity you can sell. You might take a book loss, but you have that escape hatch; nobody can stop you really.
If you are upside down, then you have to do a short sale, and the lender may not allow you to. You may not succeed before foreclosure is inevitable.
Every drop in housing prices moves some fraction of homeowners from the first to the second category. If housing prices drop far enough, you now have a ‘foreclosure crisis.’
There’s more to it than that: not everybody has a fixed rate mortgage; investors may only have so much runway when flipping houses and be counting on prices being stable or appreciating in order to make a profit on their projects, but I think that’s the basics.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119008000673
An electronic maggot has invaded my MacBook, courtesy of Apple's latest os 'update', Ventura 13.0. It calls itself 'New iCloud Terms and Conditions,' and it's like a deranged, perhaps mentally unstable and unwanted visitor who won't stop knocking on the door.
I've had a hernia for six years, but this is my first electronic one. The thing (the digital hernia, not the biological one) is even building its own folklore and history. Doctrinaire factions and orthodoxies may be lining up.
It's disappointing I can almost $2,000 on a kit, and the manufacturer bakes its propaganda algorithms into the very operating system. Not only do I not need or want the products they are pushing, I will quite deliberately find another provider, if I ever want the service.
My next notebook is starting to look an open source model.
Its not clear to me what the problem is. Does the pop up keep appearing even after you have accepted or are you just stubbornly refusing to accept it? I don't believe you have to create an iCloud account to accept the terms and conditions.
The pop-up demands that I 'sign in', i.e., establish and open access to an 'iCloud' account, so they can collect my personal data. I have no need for an 'iCloud' account and will not be establishing an 'iCloud' account -- regardless of what Apple thinks.
Apple handles refusals to go along with their authoritarian demands harshly.
Somehow, my refusal to participate in the charade of icloud is a problem for a budding tech authoritarian. It places an systems alert on top of my systems icon, raising a fire alarm every time I turn on the little calculator.
They've trained monkeys on how to use cell phones, but they're running out of ways to wrench data away from us, so they can besiege our communication lines with their nonsense. Whenever I encounter that little po-up maggot, I'm reminded to investigate open source. Thanks, Apple, for reminding me Steve Jobs is gone.
That's not a bug, it's just that Apple is asking for your continuous/ongoing/active consent. After all, you accepted the terms and conditions yesterday, but maybe you changed your mind today!
They've had my 'consent' for several decades. What they want is to force me to open an account I don't need -- because I will not be using their 'product'.
It's a mindless argument, like insisting on receiving all your credit card information before initiating a 'free trial'. The issue is greed and authoritarian bullying.
It's hard to make good money these days just selling hardware, or even one copy of software. All the good money is in service and subscriptions. Surely you've noticed?
I've gotten rid of the red-2 pop-up, by surrendering a degree of privacy, even though I won't be buying anything through Apple. If Apple makes an error, they can happily lock up my access to all one's Apple products until we fix their problem. I don't need to participate in this little psychodrama. I buy my software outright, so I own it.
I don't need or certainly want my personal data in Apple's 'cloud' -- or anyone else's. These tech clowns are keen on writing authoritarian software, but when it all explodes in their lap, they have no particular interest in cleaning up their own mess. I have plenty of storage. So, the annoying little red-1 pop-up won't be going away.
https://polymarket.com/midterms
Polymarket: 64% chance the Republicans win the Senate, 86% for the House
I love Polymarket and PMs, but.....
Are these markets yet big and liquid enough to be a meaningful signal?
Is the fact that Polymarket geofences U.S. users a reason to discount (even if only slightly) its traders' insights on U.S. politics?
Discuss.
Fivethirtyeight predicts a 53% probability of Republicans winning the Senate and an almost-identical 85% probability of the House.
I guess the question is: is there any value to going through the next week thinking there's a 53% chance the Republicans will win the senate versus a 64% chance? Either way you shouldn't be the least bit surprised by either outcome. There's no way (afaik) of exploiting the arbitrage of the different predictions. And if it significantly affects your emotional state to believe there's a slightly higher chance of "your" team winning then I'd suggest you should work on disentangling your emotions from politics a bit more.
PredictIt actually has large splits, on both sides, between R Yes/No and D Yes/No. Even though in 99.99% of cases R Yes is equivalent to D No and vice versa the money focuses on the two Yes options. There's many other signs of problems with the markets like this, on top of the partisan difference. The markets are heavily R tilted in the userbase.
PredictIt is incredibly right wing as a market. Polymarket is more centrist. Others are more to the left. Prediction markets are anti-Democrat coded for complex reasons. Does that mean they are wrong? Not really. Does it mean they don't add anything to the conversation vs just the aggregators? Probably. Are polls and prediction markets useful for lay people? Absolutely not. Both of them are actively harmful. Think of that bell curve meme thing where the two ends agree. People who don't pay attention at all or maybe only starting a week out and professionals benefit. Everyone in between suffers harm.
> Prediction markets are anti-Democrat coded for complex reasons
Can you say more here? This is interesting and I wouldn’t have guessed this. But I can kind of see it…
Prediction markets are "grey tribe" the most and then "red tribe" second and "blue tribe" last.
Part of this involves money. Poor people can't participate effectively. Prediction markets are also, obviously, pro-market. So in that sense the average Democrat is much less inclined to participate than the average Republican.
Prediction markets can't easily track the opinions of certain demographics. Sort of like the so called "non-response bias" in polling but much more intense.
Various new tech stuff like crypto is also more grey>red>blue coded. The unique personality attracted by prediction markets necessarily harms their efficacy along many axes.
If the grays and reds are mis-pricing then a blue tribe member with capital should go in and make a killing.
It's hard to make significant amounts of money out of people who think that there's a 10% chance of something happening when there's actually only a 5% chance - your return on your capital will be slow, and you may be better off putting it somewhere else.
Note to self: I have to go to work, but there's an interesting question about when two "equivalent" miscalculations on someone else's part are most efficiently exploitable - around 50%? around 100%? I want to play with this later.
I've now run this through more rigorously, and the answer isn't what I thought: If Alice and Bob believe an event has probabilities p_a>p_b respectively, then they should stake 1-p_a, p_b respectively, and each expects to multiply their stake by p_a - p_b.
So I was sort of wrong - it's only the gap that matters to how fast you can make money, not the absolute values.
But it is the absolute gap, not the relative gap - a 5% vs 10% difference of opinion offers as much chance for return on investment as a 50% vs 55% gap, not a 33% vs 66% one.
If I had $17k to spend I'd definitely do some betting. But even $17k won't make a huge difference because there is a betting cap on PI of $850 per bet. So you can spend $850 on D Senate Yes and $850 on R Senate No. But the aggregate market price is being pushed off by well over what 1 or even 10 blue tribers could shift with max bets. And there are dozens of relevant Senate markets all of which are red-shifted heavily.
So you'd need to find a blue tribe member who had around $17k, to blow, had strong and informed opinions on the midterm Senate wise, and then multiply that by x100 to be able to meaningfully shift the markets. And you'd have to have a reasonto bet on PI instead of other sites. Maybe they are an American so the other sites are off limits. Also you'd need to believe the markets are off enough to justify the fees you pay, which imo are very high. If you win every bet no problem I guess.
As noted above, the markets aren't liquid enough to even spend down the arbitrage between each other, let alone the arbitrage against what a reasonable person believes.
"the markets aren't liquid enough to even spend down the arbitrage between each other"
What?
Perhaps this has been done to death already in comment threads, but what about suspicions that this leaning is behind PredictIt's recent problems with the CFTC?
As far as I know CFTC just doesn't like political gambling at all. They also rejected Kalshi I think, and others.
The collective freakout over Kanye West's so-called ""anti-semitism"" is amazing.
Rappers routinely call the white man the devil, say white people are responsible for the world's problems and are all around hateful towards white people. At best, nobody cares, and worst, they get applauded for their ""anti-racism"".
And yet, the minute one of them says anything bad about jewish people, it's the absolute end of the world. Why should I care about his "anti-semitism" when these same people ignore/support anti-white hatred from rappers?
And if you say it's because society something something power something something jews are oppressed, how anti-semitic is society really when 100% of people with institutional power are opposed to what Kanye is doing and punishing him accordingly?
If a comment starts of by referring to the anti-semitism of someone who's recently said, inter much alia, that
“the Jewish community, especially in the music industry…they’ll take us and milk us till we die.”,
that he is
“#MeToo-ing the Jewish culture. I’m saying y’all gotta stand up and admit to what you been doing.”,
and that
“I’m coming from a place of love and a place of we’re not going to be owned by the Jewish media anymore.”
as "so-called" then I think it's safe to assume that the opinions of the poster on anti-semitism (or any other topic) are not worth listening to or taking seriously.
>Kanye West's so-called ""anti-semitism""
"Ye paid a settlement to former employee who alleged he praised Hitler and Nazis during meetings, documents show"
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kanye-west-ye-settlement-anti-semitic-jewish-hitler-nazis-allegations-rcna54485
Is your argument that these alleged rappers who call white men the devil should suffer the same social sanctions Kanye is, or that Kanye should not suffer this social sanction?
You can oppose both Kanye's antisemitic statements and the anti-white CRT stuff. I do.
I think "the white man is the devil" is more of a Nation of Islam thing than a rap thing.
Without looking into it, I assume this is less about anti-semitism and more about it being fun to dunk on Kanye West specifically; he's kind of filling the Michael Jackson role of musical celebrity punching bag for slow news days.
He's certainly making it easy, and he is rich and powerful enough (and outspoken enough!) that people don't feel like they're punching down.
Do you have an actual example of a famous Black rapper in interviews saying things like he wants all white people to undergo a publicly broadcast trial where they admit they robbed Black artists through recording contracts? Or where they praised a figure analogous to Hitler but for white people? Or where they accused white people of trying to drug them and kill them through their fake white science? If you do, was the rapper then supported in such accusations?
The closest examples I can think of other versions of anti-semitic comments. Jay-Z's line from The Life of OJ or the whole thing with B.O.B.'s Flatline or so on.
Rappers can literally say "the white man is the devil" and face no backlash whatsoever. And there is no chance in hell that if Kanye had been talking about white people instead of jews he would have faced a fraction of this backlash.
What planet are you living on when saying "powerful white people are oppressing black people are should be punished for it" is a sentiment that leftists aren't expressing on a daily basis?
> Rappers can literally say "the white man is the devil" and face no backlash whatsoever. And there is no chance in hell that if Kanye had been talking about white people instead of jews he would have faced a fraction of this backlash.
This would be called a claim not in evidence. Looking through a rap lyric database there are only a few instances of the phrase "The White Man Is The Devil." One is two albums called "The White Man Is The Devil Pt. 1/2" which doesn't appear to actually talk about white people very much. Another is by a white rapper bragging about how HE is the devil. Another is by an artist who talks about how he used to think that because of how poor he grew up but doesn't anymore. And one is an actual Black Nationalist discussion included on an album. All of them are by very minor rappers who never even charted. Most of them are quite old, from the 1990s to early 2000s.
Compare Jay-Z rapping "Jewish people own all the property in America" or B.O.B.'s "That's why the POTUS gotta wear a kippah" or Lupe Fiasco' "Artists getting robbed for their publishing by dirty Jewish execs" all within the past five years. Not to mention explicitly anti-semitic albums by more minor rappers.
> What planet are you living on when saying "powerful white people are oppressing black people are should be punished for it" is a sentiment that leftists aren't expressing on a daily basis?
This is moving the goalposts.
>This is moving the goalposts.
No, it's not. Leftists freaking out about Kanye would not be doing so if he said the same thing about whites because they literally say that stuff themselves!
I have to say, Brett, you seem to be stuck in a motte-and-bailey kind of move here, which obscures your central point. One half of your central point is a good and worthwhile one, but there's no chance this comments section will now discuss it (given that you've inoculated them against it with the rest of what you're saying).
Yes, it is. The original comment was about the commonness of anti-white comments in rap music. Unless you want to assert that most leftists are rappers you've now switched to talking about a different group.
You've imagined a hypothetical scenario you have no evidence actually happened and are outraged by it. This outrage remains even when your initial claim, about anti-white statements in rap music, has been shown to be contrary to empirical evidence.
Okay. Well, I can't reason or empirical evidence you out of a position you didn't get to through reason or empirical evidence.
Thanks for your remarks. You sound rational and intelligent. Another great commenter on an earlier thread pointed out that whenever people try to make
a point by using vague, overly broad generalizations
like "hospitals are now requiring. . ." or "schools are letting kids. . ." or "Rappers say white men are the devil" without citing specifics, you can usually ignore
what follows as meaningless rants. Gasbag conservative commenters like Tucker Carlson do it nightly, and his grievance-riddled audiences lap it up like it's opiate syrup.
It is hard to believe this is a genuine question, but let's say it is. Jews are not some amorphous symbolic majority but an ethnic group that was literally ghettoized in the Middle Ages, subject to pogroms and the Holocaust, and even today have their places of worship targeted for violence far more often than are churches.
The average jew has a lot more powerthan the average white person in America.
And anti-white hatred has a very real imapct: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/
Who keeps this kind of statistics? :) And your argument is that becasue we have to be anti- something, todays best choice is Jews?
And even if the teaching assistants of world hate white people, I (old white Catholic) just don't feel very threatened.
I think anti-white hatred has a real impact. I'm amazed at how many white people buy into it.
And I think anti-semitism is serious stuff. I would take government action to ghettoize or commit genocide against American Jews, and I don't think it's likely, but I won't swear it's inconceiveabl.e.
An increase of anti-semitism could easily mean a lot more individual and small group violence against Jews, and that would have a significant impact.
> The average jew has a lot more powerthan the average white person in America.
Supposing for the sake of argument that's true on the individual level, it's emphatically not true on the aggregate level. 61.6% of Americans are white according to 2020 census data, and 57.8% are non-Hispanic white. Only about 3-4% of the US population is ethnically Jewish (of whom many are nonreligious or practice other faiths), so there'd need to be implausibly enormous disparities in individual power and capacity for collective action for Jewish Americans to have more collective power than gentile white American. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if you could identify socially significant subsets of gentile white Americans who have both more average individual power and more collective power than Jewish Americans: e.g. gentile white graduates of highly prestigious universities, or descendants of posh New England "WASP" families.
It's literally true though. Why is saying that "anti-semtiic" but think whites ahve more power (the whole justification for anti-white hate being okay) isn't anti-white?
Jews are only white when it is conveninet for the left. It's "anti-semitic" to think jews have "white privilege". It's anti-semitic to include jews in anti-white statements. They're only white when it makes white people look bad.
What does treating people with cold empircism mean?
Could be because of the fratricidal aspect. Jews and blacks have historically been core components of the left coalition, so it may be seen as more of a "family" betrayal and provoke the higher levels of rage that tends to do. Compare the extreme hostility of MAGAs towards, say, Mitt Romney or other "cuckservatives," which significantly exceeds their hostility towards the Chuck Schumers and Nancy Pelosis of the world.
Honestly, I think it's much simpler than that. For a variety of historical, cultural and political reasons, Jews are very willing to loudly call out anti-Semetic comments, or even comments that seem like they might be getting too close to being anti-Semetic. Jewish organizations exist to help coordinate that calling out, and similar historical reasons mean that a lot of Gentiles are willing to agree that this is bad. Jews do very well in the US overall, which translates to substantial money and political influence with which to push back on that stuff, and again, they tend to have a lot of Gentiles who think back to the middle of the 20th century and say "yeah, we agree, this crap is out of line."
The reason is because of historical factors. No one has made a meaningful attempt to exterminate "white people".
Jews have organized, for thousands of years, facing several distinct meaningful threats. So the mental wagon wheel ruts and the social machinery are in place to push back. And the motivation.
The same way black churches in the South have a strong political capacity whereas northern black ones really don't and of course white churches in general are the opposite of united or aligned.
Corporations, like politicians, fear coordinated and loud voices. They don't fear broad and fractious large groups.
I'm always pretty skeptical of arguments that assert people who are 25 today are passionately driven to act the way they do by what happened to very distantly related people 80 or 150 years ago. Doesn't really square with human nature. Most people I know can barely muster mild resentment about injustice that may have affected their first cousins or step-great-aunt within their own memory. Most people are pretty sharply focussed on what is happening to themselves, right now, and maybe their immediate family and friends.
>The reason is because of historical factors. No one has made a meaningful attempt to exterminate "white people".
Slavs are as low as or lower than Jews in Hitler's hierarchy, and they are white.
And nobody has ever made a meaningful attempt to exterminate black people, and you wouldn't get away with saying those things about them.
> Slavs are as low as or lower than Jews in Hitler's hierarchy, and they are white.
Not true. Slavs were seen by the Nazis as a "lesser race", useful to generally keep around for menial labor, but not really human. So they certainly did their best to kill of the Slav intelligentsia and destroy their cultures, but did not try to eradicate them from the face of the earth any more than an old south plantation owner would try to genocide blacks.
Their genocidal hatred mostly focused on the Jews, which for the Nazis were basically the ultimate source of evil in the world. While they were doing their best to kill all of them (even at the costs to their military goals), they also genocided various unsettled peoples like the Sinti and Roma (as well as killing mentally ill children and gays, some religious people and all sorts of political opponents), but from my understanding, they considered these to be more of a nuisance than a threat to the existence of the Reich.
Also, from my understanding, European-origin Jews are also white? So we can certainly say that there have been attempts by white people to genocide specific ethnic subgroups of white people in the past.
I will take you at your word then.
(I have read about the atrocities H commited in the parts he could capture from the Soviet Union and I can't for the life of me figure out why would someone slaughter this many perfectly good slaves, a farmer would commit suicide if this many cattle were murdered in vain instead of used productively, so I don't get how the Nazis can do this if they valued the Slavs' labor.)
>So we can certainly say that there have been attempts by white people to genocide specific ethnic subgroups of white people in the past.
Yeah, those fun set theory paradoxes arise all the time in woke taxonomies. Men bad, gays good, but aren't all gays men ? okay so maybe just straight men, but also some straight men are cops who protect women or CEOs who host their feminism subreddits ? ahhh god damn Russell and Whitehead.
Brett S. is just trying to make sense of something that isn't supposed to make sense.
"maybe just straight men, but also some straight men are cops who protect women or CEOs who host their feminism subreddits ? ahhh god damn Russell and Whitehead."
You nailed it, brother. The real Achilles heel of the progressive movement is all that gratitude to cops and CEOs. The paradox is tying us in knots.
In seriousness, you've really got to model the other side a bit better. And perhaps read up a little on Soviet partisans.
>The reason is because of historical factors. No one has made a meaningful attempt to exterminate "white people".
Okay, so that means they can do whatever they want for the rest of hsitory and face no group hatred the way whites do?
I mean I'm not in charge of these things. You should direct your complaints to the free market. If a corporation wants to cancel Kanye that's none of my business.
> If a corporation wants to cancel Kanye that's none of my business.
Would it be okay if corporations categorically refused to hire black people?
This is a false equivalence.
The proper comparison would be "what if corporations categorically refused to hire all people who have thrown racial slurs around, including black people who did it."
And in that light I don't think much of anyone would have a problem with corporations doing so.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that a Holocaust may make a group extra-sensitive to hatred from influential people.
It's not just the group, it's everyone else freaking out about it. And if you think its such a big problem, the culture of hating groups should be stamped out entirely, not just when it affects one group.
Perhaps my perspective is a bit biased because I am from Germany, but from my understanding, the Shoah is considered uniquely bad because it is (so far) the only time an industrialized, (at the time) top-tier state did its uttermost to accomplish a genocide.
There have been many other genocides (plus countless other atrocities) before and after Auschwitz, but but the streamlined death camps of the Nazis are something the world has seen only once.
Before the Nazis, antisemitism was mostly normal in the way that other forms of racism were. After they were defeated, (eventually) the idea "Nazis bad" rightly became a core truth in the west and east, so antisemitism places you outside the norms of civilized western society about as much as cannibalism would.
Now you can lament that other forms of racism are just as bad and people should be just as ready to stand up to anti-Tutsi rhetoric as they are to stand up to antisemitism, but the fact of life is that everyone knows who Hitler is and few people know who Bagosora is.
Many of us goyim think that holocausts are bad and don't want the Jewish people to be threatened or harmed. Plenty of us will "freak out" about the concept.
You'll probably get banned for low-effort antisemitism, but on your next account consider sticking to more concrete questions such as "how much abuse does a person have to take from members of a specific group before he is considered reasonable in having negative feelings towards them?".
Modern Conservatives are Zionists but not pro-semites
In your opinion, is anti-Semitism a problem? Specifically, is it something society should work against when/if it happens, and secondly, is it something that's happening at a level that should be addressed?
Completely agreed. Inconsistent approaches to the same situations is one of my biggest pet peeves in politics. Unfortunately there are a *lot* of examples from all sides.
I will add one distinction I think worthy of noting here. If a random person (or non-representative sample) in a crowd is racist/anti-Semitic, that seems categorically different than a leader of the group or even an invited speaker (if the speaker is known to have such views). If I didn't think Kanye was going through a significant mental health issue, I would be much more concerned about his behavior than some random person as well. I think he needs someone in his life that can walk him back from the public eye until he gets better, but offer no pass on his behavior in the meantime.
There are songs in which the white man is literally referred to as the devil, and much of what I'm referring to is what Rapper's say personally, in a political context etc.
And 1 is trivially false, anti-white hatred has real-world consequences: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/
And 2 just shows why I feel no obligation to care about "anti-semitism".
What are the songs?
This is irrelevant, the (quite wrongly) perceived invulnerability of a class should not be a free pass to threaten or slander them. Neither Law nor Morality would accept this. If you threatened a man stronger than you he can still push charges against you, and the court would most probably call bullshit on your """But, your honor, he can clearly kick my ass in a fair fight, so that obviously means I can threaten him with impunity""" defense.
Also, Kanye is American isn't he? Jews are pretty damn safe in America ? Does _anybody_ in their right mind think there is a legitimate possibility of Jews getting ghettoized or genocided (lol) in America in the next 70 years ? If we're talking "past injustices" then whites also had plenty of injustices commited against them, why is a 70-years-old injustice more plausible than (*checks memory*) the 500-years-injustice of Ottomans enslaving whites?
> This is irrelevant, the (quite wrongly) perceived invulnerability of a class should not be a free pass to threaten or slander them. Neither Law nor Morality would accept this.
It absolutely shouldn't be a "free pass to threaten or slander them". But it absolutely matters whether you are standing in front of someone with a weapon and you say "he should die" or if you are hiding in a back room nowhere near anyone who can harm them when you say it.
We're talking about rappers, a group with roughly similar capabilities and means across its members.
Your point would apply if the people slandering whites were rappers and the people slandering jews were armed militias, but the facts of the matter is that the people slandering whites and the people slandering jews are rappers.
In 70 years, almost everybody in America will be someone who hasn't even been born right now; I wouldn't want to make any bets on what couldn't possibly happen. (I understand that you said "70 years" to mirror the distance from the Holocaust -- actually it's now 77 years since 1945 -- but it's too long a horizon to be as convincing as we'd like it to be.)
I would very gladly bet you 1000-to-1 (to be collected by those that survive us whoever they may be) that jews won't be genocided in America in any year in the next 100 years, where "genocide" is defined as that which 3 independent historians of different nationalities call genocide.
There are bad things that can happen which are well short of genocide.
Exile, for example, or severe legal restrictions.
Even a big rise in violent attacks is something to take seriously.
Ah yes, jews are going to get genocided despite teh fact that everyone with institutional pwoer is on their side
And anti-white hatred has real-world consequences: rdpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/
Not to mention almost all interracial violence is black on white and black on white homicides are ten times more common per capita than vice versa.
I write a newsletter where I share three things I find interesting, once a week:
https://interessant3.substack.com
Does anybody have experience with minimal friction obtaining an Adderall prescription for adhd? Preferably online.
1. For a variety of reasons grey market won't be acceptable for me, I need a legitimate legal prescription.
2. I have a strong distrust of doctors, both that they have my best interests in mind and that they'll bill me fairly, having had some poor experiences. I'd be more interested in getting pills legally and then sorting it out myself than relying on a doctor regularly. I do however have health insurance.
3. I was diagnosed with adhd as a teenager and was on Ritalin for some time. I stopped due to a variety of personal reasons and think my career and personal life have likely suffered as a result. I have trouble focusing on long term tasks, maintaining eye contact /focus in the long conversations, focusing at work etc
I've seen a few takes on various telehealth services but few have been recent, and I would place more stock in experiences from people who might be more similar to me (here) than misc internet reviews. My current best prospect is Done which is apparently 200 bucks and then 80/mo but apparently they may have issues actually fulfilling prescriptions
I used AheadADHD for this. They were an only pharmacy/med management thing. But they went out of business. I believe some of their competitors still exist. They matched me with a nurse practitioner for med management and script writing. All online.
>I was diagnosed with adhd as a teenager and was on Ritalin for some time
This should make it easier to get a script as you are less likely to be seen as shopping for pills.
Also look for Nurse Practitioners in your state that do this! You don't have to go to a psychiatrist always. The only caveat is they are probably not going to take insurance, so you will be out of pocket. I pay $75 for monthly appointments.
Unfortunately, the ongoing moral panic over opioid abuse has spilled over into all prescriptions for Schedule II controlled substances, including Adderall and Ritalin, so the ongoing friction of maintaining a prescription is going to be fairly high. Getting it restarted shouldn't be that hard: Steven Sklonick's suggestion below of having your old medical records forwarded is a good one, and similarly I've had success just bringing an old empty prescription bottle to my first appointment as proof that I've had a legit prescription in the past; going off ADHD meds for a few years and then wanting to restart is a common enough pattern that it won't raise eyebrows so long as you can document past diagnosis and treatment somehow. But ongoing friction is unavoidable: last I checked, Adderall prescriptions required monthly follow-up appointments, and pre-Covid they needed to be in-person appointments. And doctors need to document to the DEA's satisfaction they they're being careful and responsible prescribers of highly controlled substances, lest they risk losing their licenses and facing felony charges.
It might be worth looking into less controlled ADHD meds instead, such as Wellbutrin (uncontrolled) or Modafinil (Schedule IV). There's likely to be a bit more friction up front since you're asking for a new type of treatment rather than resuming an existing one, and Modafinil in particular is a less standard ADHD treatment so doctors who are unfamiliar with it might not want to prescribe it, but once you have the prescription there should be a lot less friction maintaining it.
I don’t believe Adderall scripts require monthly follow-ups, but there is a rule last I knew that docs can only prescribe 30 days worth of it at a time. They can put on I think one refill, with a note on it that refill cannot be picked up less than 30 days from time you got original.
As for finding your old doc — nope, new doc will not be able to figure out who he was. I’d suggest going to Psychology Today, where you can search by town or zip code and searching for psychiatrists in the town where you saw him. You can limit your search to males. Most listings have photos, so if he’s there you’ll find him. If he doesn’t show up try searching the whole state.
Also, he probably doesn’t need to send all his old records to the new person you go to. It would probably suffice for him to write a letter stating that he saw you during the years x - y, and that he prescribed Adderall, which seemed to be helpful.
Good luck
Back when I was on Adderall the better part of a decade ago, the restriction was the doc had to see you in person every three months and couldn't write you prescriptions with refills, although they could write you three prescriptions at once. You also needed either a paper prescription which you'd need to pick up and deliver in person, or a two-factor authenticated secure electronic prescription (infrastructure for which was still rolling out at the time, but has since become ubiquitous).
The rules have changed semi-recently, though: shortly before Covid, I asked my psychiatrist about trying Dexedrine instead of Modafinil, and she said that regulatory restrictions would have required an in-person visit every month.
Quite possible. These regulations are like the Hydra -- when you cut off one head, it grows 2 others.
I was told recently that in my state, Massachusetts, docs cannot write a stimulants prescription without at least in in-person meeting with the patient. Also, and I think this is the rule in the entire US, the person prescribing via teletherapy must be in your state when the teletherapy session takes place.
I agree with Stephen Skolnick. Find an actual doctor and tell the truth.
My advice: find an actual doctor. Designate them as your primary care provider. If you've had a scrip in the past and can have your records forwarded, you won't encounter friction; just tell them the truth, that you were able to manage without the meds for a few years but you're not anymore due to X, Y, and Z.
It's been maybe a decade? And I don't remember his name, let alone know if he's still practicing. Do you know if a new doctor would be able to find it on their end?
Whaddaya think this is, some kind of centrally organized healthcare system?
For the x-risk crowd; how valuable was opposing the Large Hadron Collider, and why?
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/10oct_lhc
I'm on record as stating that the LHC wasn't worth our time, nor, to the best of my knowledge, did any of us spend any time on it. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ziqL94sq6rMuH7wDu/horrible-lhc-inconsistency
Holy shit, how did the Big Yud get on this one comment so quickly? This is was equivalent to calling in an airstrike on one's own position, and with a shorter turnaround.
Do you have an AI assistant?
Well, he *did*, but then it made a moral argument that convinced him to let it out of the box....
Did the x-risk crowd oppose the Large Hadron Collider? The closest I can think of is Nick Bostrom finding an upper bound on the probability that it would destroy the earth.
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
If you continue with KS's MMM concept, you may encounter your task-switcher not doing it for the reward so much as to avoid other things (see: ugh fields).
Indeed, his model does integrate a lot of subagents who avoid painful things. It's very likely that, over the years, since I've put myself through so much mental pain to just get myself to start working, the task-switcher has associated doing work as painful in addition to it naturally being not-high-value. Interesting thought!
I think an interesting question follow-up: is there more of an aversion around starting tasks, an ugh field, something that feels actively unpleasant rather than just not rewarding, in people who got diagnosed late and struggled for years vs. those who had ADHD caught earlier?
The general idea is that pain-avoiding sub-agents begin building habits early in life for broadly painful things (mom and dad fighting, dropping an ice-cream cone) and then applies its habits/skills to school-related tasks later (being bored in class, trying to concentrate on homework). This happens for everyone, but ADHD provides a much stronger capability for distraction to that pain-avoiding sub-agent. One thing that medication does to help, then, is makes it easier for other sub-agents to build pro-concentration habits.
One solution is to attach a "tag" to the activity that is pleasurable. Apparently the brain can be taught to value certain activities if they are tagged with something emotionally pleasurable. For example, you have your partner come up and kiss you while you're doing some chores you otherwise dislike. This creates an enduring memory 'tag'
I think you're on to something quite interesting: rewards during a task, not after, with an element of randomness and surprise to it. Scott has written about how unexpected rewards lead to more happiness than "priced in" rewards.
No partner to speak of, but I could write a small program that randomly plays a chime which entitles me to a piece of chocolate. Thanks for the tip, I'm looking forward to trying it!
Is Taylor Swift Straussian?
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/31/taylor-gaylor-swift-qanon-conspiracy-esoteric-writing/
Idk I find the case compelling enough to consider at least. Tswift came of age at a time when there was much more stigma toward homosexuality and I think that remains formative despite times changing since. She is also a Christian.
Two additional reasons to give some credence to the hypothesis:
1. She’s been plausibly accused of Straussian communication in other contexts:
“ When Taylor Swift branded Chinese merchandise with “T.S. 1989” just one month removed from the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, she may not have been making any allusion whatsoever to the student pro-democracy protests violently put down by state authorities twenty-six years prior. Her initials are T.S. and 1989 is the title of her album as well as her birth year. But join me (and Tyler) for a moment in interpreting this episode through a Straussian lens”
https://infovores.substack.com/p/context-is-that-which-is-scarce#§reading-between-the-lines
2. She has a particularly strong tendency to write lyrics based
on her personal experiences with relationships. here’s the beginning of her song “Betty”,
"Betty, I won't make assumptions
About why you switched your homeroom but
I think it's 'cause of me
Betty, one time I was riding on my skateboard
When I passed your house
It's like I couldn't breathe
You heard the rumors from Inez
You can't believe a word she says
Most times, but this time it was true
The worst thing that I ever did
Was what I did to you
But if I just showed up at your party
Would you have me?
Would you want me?
Would you tell me to go fuck myself?
Or lead me to the garden?
In the garden would you trust me
If I told you it was just a summer thing?
I'm only 17, I don't know anything
But I know I miss you“
https://twitter.com/Columbia/status/1587514821179736064?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
typical columbia tweet
Honestly, I don't give a shit. Asian-Americans largely don't care about, or they actively support, affirmative action policies that discriminate against whites. They only make a big deal when they're the ones on the recieving end of this discrimination. They say stuff like "we're not the racist ones, we're not the ones who oppressed black people" etc, as if whites deserve to be eternally punished for the supposed misdeeds of white strangers in the past. And even if they don't explicitly express such sentiments, acting like afirmative action is a problem only insofar as asians are disadvantaged is almost ubiquitous amongst these people. They're not taking a principled stand against racial discrimination, they're just advancing their individual and group interests.
And it's far, FAR more problematic for the New York Times to be saying this than Columbia. the NYT has far more power over American society than Columbia University.
I think you're conflating a few different groups of people here. It is true in general that most people care more about potential disadvantages to their own race than others. This is unfortunate, but it's not unique to Asian-Americans. The people who say things like "we're not the ones who oppressed black people" are primarily progressives who are overrepresented in the media, on Twitter, etc. and are more likely to support affirmative action even when it disadvantages Asians. The ones opposing affirmative action are more likely to be political moderates or Republicans. Yes, they probably do it at least in part because they're advancing their interests. But you yourself probably would not care as much about negative rhetoric aimed at white people if you were not white. So I don't really see your point-- problems become more visible when you experience them yourself, and that's natural. For what it's worth, there are many of us who are minorities and try our best to treat people of all races equally + not privilege our group unfairly.
The difference is that white people who are against affirmative action generally want it gone categorically, whereas it's not at all clear that Asians have any actual problem with affirmative action per se and they most likely would be fine with it existing but only disadvantaging whites. None of the rhetoric around this that I've seen from Asians is that using race in admissions is inherently wrong, it's all been against Asians specifically being discriminated against.
And this lines up perfectly with the data showing anti-white and asian-supremacist attitudes amongst american asians: https://www.ljzigerell.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ANES-2020-TS-HRGREA.svg
Affirmative action existing but only hurting whites is a *worse* outcome for white people than the current state of affairs, so why should I or any other white people support that? If Asians aren't discrimianted against, it won't mean that blacks and hispanics won't get a racial boost, it means that this boost will come exclusively at the cost of whites. It's not just everyone looking after their own interests - white conservatives want all racial admission discrimination gone including that for Asians. So unless Asians support the same, then they can go to hell quite frankly.
You are probably right that many Asians would not really care either way if affirmative action existed but only disadvantaged whites. However, I likewise think that many whites would not really care if affirmative action existed and only disadvantaged Asians. It seems to me that the only reason that Republican officials bring up the topic of Asians being disadvantaged is that it is socially more acceptable to discuss than the disadvantage for white applicants-- not that most really care about Asians. By far the least fair aspect of college admissions is legacy admissions, and no one brings this up as many elected officials on both sides of the aisle have been beneficiaries. I tend to think nearly everyone vocal in politics is just looking out for themselves at the end of the day.
With regards to the survey data, I think the result would depend on how you phrase the question. I believe there is also an effect where white progressives rate other races as better than their own and white conservatives do the opposite, so that these effects average out. e.g. see the thread here https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1565810798236155904 . I read Fox News quite frequently, and the comment section strongly indicates that some white conservatives have fairly negative perceptions of those of other races. That said, I am an Indian American and I can confirm that many other Indian Americans I have met do have negative attitudes towards those of other races, as well. So I would not be shocked if there were a 10% difference in attitudes, although I would not characterize it as Asian supremacy but rather as ethnocentrism and distrust.
And I think with respect to your last point, most Asians do want all affirmative action gone. E.g. see the Pew polling here-- https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ft_2022.04.26_collegeadmissions_03.png?w=640 . Even if they don't "actually" care about white applicants, they still tend to support getting rid of it in its entirety, at a legal level. I would contend this is similar to the case for many white conservatives, who don't "actually" care about Asians but still tend to prefer getting rid of affirmative action.
No, affirmative action is several orders of magnitude more impactful. Legacy applicants are more likely to be accepted, but they are also significantly more likely to be top applicants, so the benefit controlling for overall strength of the applicant is much lower than affirmative action. Sports are probably significant, though.
re: caring about other races, this is how the races rate each other: https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9002
Also, just to clarify, when I said 'many other Indian Americans [...] have negative attitudes...', this still constitutes a minority of the Indian Americans whom I know. I would say probably ~ 20-30% of those I have met have such attitudes to some degree. So not negligible, but also not anywhere near a majority. Didn't want to give the wrong impression.
I mean we can't have a world based on merit, people might get the wrong idea and think their level of effort and personal decision making matters!
That strikes me as a poor argument, because I think that affirmative action probably /increases/ the correlation between level of effort and getting into university.
What it decreases is the correlation between /academic ability/ and getting into university.
But a whole bunch of factors other than effort and decision making also affect academic ability.
If what you want is genuinely to make reward effort and good, you want a handicapping system where the level of academic ability each student is required to reach is scaled against how efficiently they are able to convert effort into academic performance.
Affirmative action doesn't get even vaguely close to doing that, but - because being able to convert effort into attainment efficiently correlates strongly with race and parental wealth - it probably moves society closer to it, at the price of a) violating some deontological principles that I care about and b) reducing the average ability of university students.
This is why I hate the word "meritocracy" so much, despite supporting the thing it refers to. I think that discriminating on grounds of ability rather than effort, while grossly unfair, is important because it produces much better results, and generally shouldn't be compromised on. But pretending that academic ability is the same as "merit", with its strong connotations of moral worth, rather than admitting that "meritocracy" rewards lazy people with genes conducive to study and (especially) rich, supportive, educated parents (like me), at the expense of people who don't have those advantages but work much harder, is adding insult to injury, and pretty inexcusable.
Or that the genes they inherited from their parents matter.
Career advice
I'm an undergrad doing maths and biology at a good UK university and am academically strong. So far I was alvays certain that I want to do research but becoming an academic is rough in many ways and I'm considering my options.
What career paths are open to me? What should I be looking into? What skills should I develop? I'm still very likely to get a PhD, how does that affect things? Thank you
edit: I don't enjoy wetlab and prefer calculations/coding, ideally maths modelling. I know decent python and R. Thanks to everyone who responded so far!
My general advice is that a PhD is a bad idea, but a Masters is worth it. There are a small number of people for whom a PhD is a good idea, but those are the people so committed that they wouldn't listen if every human alive told them it was a bad idea. Academe is just far too short on jobs, and those jobs are too poorly paid, to be a valid prospect for anyone who would be willing to do anything else with their life.
If you like code and modelling, get good at that, learn some machine learning stuff, and then choose between high stress high pay decently interesting jobs in finance or low stress medium pay probably boring job doing analytics in basically any big business
The medical devices sector probably needs people with that skillset. Might be worth checking out the vacancies pages for places like TTP in cambridge.
Hopefully you already know about these people:
https://www.wellcomegenomecampus.org/
Maybe see if they have internships or get-a-taste-of programs, or if you're at Cambridge go over and talk to some people informally? I visited once long ago, and they seemed pretty enthused about stuff that is on the bridge between bio and math.
thanks, I actually didn't know about them I'll check them out. I'm not in cam but visit friends there pretty often haha
Trying to become an academic in the UK at the moment is incredibly competitive. If you're one of the best of the best you'll probably need to go through a sequence of fairly grim, short, low-paid, hard-worked jobs before you get anything tenure-track; if you aren't you won't even get that.
If you don't want to become an academic, a PhD probably isn't worth it (if you do, it almost certainly is).
There are almost certainly a lot of biotech firms who'd snap you up, but I'm afraid it's not an area I know anything about.
What do you want out of life? That is the big question. Academia isn't that great a job unless it is important to you to have a badge that says "I am a smart person". And that is very valuable to many, but not all.
In my experience someone who is bright enough to get a Phd. in a difficult field will generally have a more satisfying career outside of acadmia. Probably more fiancially rewarding too.
You'll probably get a lot of advice here, but this is my two cents from recently finishing a bio PhD and going to biotech. Being an academic can be rough, but it depends on your situation. It's perfect for some people, and you won't know that without going through a PhD program and paying attention. To take your questions in order:
What career paths are open to me?
Too many to name. With a combination of biology and math you're well placed to go into many different areas. Something to decide is what ratio of wet lab/dry lab research you want to do. Do you want to do analysis of data to inform/design other people's experiments, or do the experiments yourself? There's also a growing realization that hybrid people (who can do both) are valuable.
What should I be looking into?
As another commenter said, biostats/bioinformatics are in-demand and pay well, though I'd add any kind of ML/AI-based biological data analysis & design. I have friends in the ML-based protein engineering space who are getting recruiters trying to convince them to drop out of grad school to start working for companies that need that skillset.
What skills should I develop?
Coding. Data science. Having a background and biology and data science is a very valuable skillset on its own, regardless of what else accompanies them. Most biology packages are in python these days, learn your way around them in a research setting. This is best done by joining a lab that does this sort of stuff.
I'm still very likely to get a PhD, how does that affect things?
For industry, having a PhD completely changes what kinds of jobs you qualify for. A PhD is usually considered a requirement for the 'scientist' jobs that let you do the knowledge-based parts of research. It can be very hard to climb the ladder very high without one, so I do recommend that route if you want to continue in biology research as more than a technician.
hey, thanks for typing!
I really enjoy biological problems but I find wetlab to be tedious and not for me. I'm okay with doing coding and love doing maths. What kind of internships should I be looking for? Hoe do I find companies in a given sector (eg. biotech) that are worth applying to? Many thanks
If you're looking for a scientist position, it may be a bit early to be looking for company internships. The canonical route there is getting undergrad research experience in academia before going into PhD, occasionally with a few years at a company/working in a lab first. That experience should both be during the semester & during the summer in other places.
There are a few industrial apprenticeship programs that might be good and will inform you more about the area. I like the smaller company internships more - Dyno and Octant are both awesome places and flexible as far as I know. AstraZeneca, Bayer, Amgen and many other companies also have some. Google it up for a while - look for 'bioinformatics', 'computational protein design' and 'data science' positions that are 'internships'/'apprenticeships.
A note - finding a lab that will let you do what you want can be difficult. Look for recent (within the last 2-3 years) publications you find interesting and see if the program associated with that lab has an REU/internship/job opening. It takes some time to properly explore the space, but reading and learning what exact work you find interesting and who does it will be invaluable for *years* to come. You want to find somebody who you think can teach you what you want to learn and then apply through proper channels.
A few scattered thoughts that might be of interest to you:
1) I'm not sure if this is true in the UK, but in the US in STEM you pay for a masters and get paid for a PhD. So if you're not sure which you want, but can get into a PhD program it's sometimes worth starting a PhD to save on tuition & get some money. See caveat at the bottom.
2) Biological fields seem to require more education than a lot of adjacent fields. This might not be true for bioinformatics, but be aware you're probably setting yourself up to need more education in a pure bio field than a more physical/chemical one. Up to you whether that's a bad thing or not.
3) On career paths, joining a lab and doing a research project or two and also doing an internship industry can help you understand whether you like being in lab all day, or writing code all day, and whether you like the "freedom" of academia or the "structure" of industry.
Caveat: Doing a PhD and then quitting after you get your masters to save money is likely to irritate your professor, sometimes to the point of ending any relationship. This is a reason to not do it trivially, but it also matters less than a lot of people would tell you.
- reconsider doing a PhD? I always say if you're not 100% sure you shouldn't do it. I was 100% sure, and in retrospect even I'm not sure it was a good idea (even though I did have a good off ramp into industry after graduation).
- the typical exit doors are programming or data science/finance (personally I like finance, but overall the job market is better in tech. Definitely learn programming (definitely python, probably some other stuff, at least some use of stats packages in either python or R). "The elements of statistical learning" is also good and available free online if you haven't read it (but also, see what courses are available in your university). Try out ML - it's a great direction if you like it, but if you aren't naturally good at it you don't have to force it (this applies more broadly to specific things, although not to programming in general - you should be able to at least python).
hey, thanks for replying!
I'm 99% I want to do a phd.
At the moment I don't find programming/data science all that appealing, do you have any advice regarding finance in particular?
Also, could you point me in the direction of some beginner ML resources? I know very little about it and would like to try
TBH If you don't find data science/programming appealing definitely don't go into finance. RE beginner ML resources - check if your college has anything good. The classic open resource for a basic intro is the Andrew Ng course on coursera, if you just want to take a look.
maybe what I wanted to say was I don't find tech all that appealing while finance more so.
Seconded. Your profile fits data science well. Unless there is a particular problem that you are obssesed with, and you’d be unhappy working on anything else, I’d consider trying to become a data scientist at a tech company. You ultimately have less freedom to select what you work on, but you still get to learn and apply interesting math stuff. Plus it pays well.
As a recovering academic I think that the "freedom to select what you work on" in academia is often overrated; you may find yourself stuck working on things you can get a grant for instead of things you're truly interested in.
The successful academics I know fit into one of two moulds: either they're amazingly brilliant, or they're dedicated careerists who have found a sensible niche and cranked out multiple papers per month in that niche for years and years.
I don't think it's a bad plan to get a PhD and then explore options in finance and tech though. It may or may not be a total-lifetime-earnings maximising move, but if you actually enjoy mathematical research then there's no problem spending a few extra years in your mid-twenties living a student lifestyle and doing stuff you enjoy before settling down a bit more. (This is especially true in the UK where PhD programs are considerably shorter than the US.)
Does anyone have any strong opinions on LASIK (the eye surgery)? I've been wearing contacts for 30 years, and after 25 or so years of them being good enough that I didn't really consider other vision correction options, my middle age seems to be worsening my situation -- especially in one eye that's astigmatic, and which I guess my eye muscles can no longer correct for as well. I intensely dislike astigmatism-correcting contact lenses, and would prefer not to go to glasses.
So:
1. Are there better or worse providers of LASIK? Or is it basically all just the machines, and the ophthalmologist doesn't really add anything to the procedure?
1a. If there are better or worse providers of LASIK, how does one determine who they are?
2. Are there serious risks to LASIK, or are bad outcomes like one in a thousand things?
3. Are there any long-term reasons not to get LASIK right now, like, I dunno, a better version is just around the corner?
References would be great. Thank you!
Got LASIK when i was 19, about 15 years ago. No regrets. Though my vision has gone from 20/20 in both eyes to 20/30 in one and 20/40 in the other. Mostly because i got it when i was young. This is just bad enough to make living without glasses annoying and driving without them a no go.
I am planning to have the LASIK done again in the near future. Back when i got it, the recover time was like a week, but i hear its only maybe 2 days now. I remember they prescribed me oxycodone and percocet for the recovery when i had very little pain, yikes!
1. It's mostly the machines, but not entirely. Where the individual ophthalmologist adds value is in screening out people for whom the procedure is particularly risky, good practices for minimizing risk of errors in configuring the machines, aftercare, and ability to mitigate complications.
1a. The first thing to look at is what machines they have and how good those machines are. You're likely to get better outcomes from a more capable machine operating on current technology than from a machine that's a generation or two old.
Beyond that, the standard advice is to pick someone who's done a whole bunch or procedures without accumulating a tarnished reputation, or at least a junior surgeon operating as part of a practice directed by a highly experienced surgeon. It's also normal and expected to have the standard free initial consultation with two or three different ophthalmology practices and pick the one you're most comfortable with, and as part of the consult you can also ask the ophthalmologist about other practices you're considering so they have an opportunity to tell you info on their competitors that you can cross-check for accuracy/plausibility later.
In general, the differentiation between surgeons is more on the lower end than the higher end: i.e. you'll get similar outcomes from any experienced, capable, and conscientious surgeon, but there are (or at least there were a decade or so ago when I was researching before my own LASIK) some shady practices out there that have substantially higher risks of bad outcomes. My source for this was Dr. Manche of Stanford Eye Laser Center, who was one of the three ophthalmologists I had been choosing between.
I wound up going with Dr. Furlong of Furlong Vision Correction, mainly on the basis of the location being substantially more convenient for me than Dr. Manche's and everything pointing towards Furlong and Manche being roughly equally good and having the same top-of-the-line equipment. I don't remember the third practice's name, but I wound up not bothering to consult with them both because they were even further out of my way, and Furlong's office telling me (with Manche confirmed, as did my own searches online once I knew the right search terms) that the third practice's machines were about half a generation older than either Manche's or Furlong's.
2. The big serious risk is flap complications, i.e. the LASIK flap tears off or otherwise doesn't heal in place correctly. This is very low risk if you have the procedure done by a competent surgeon and if you follow the aftercare instructions precisely. One of the most critical parts of the aftercare instructions here is to spend as much of the rest of the day after surgery as possible resting with your eyes closed (sleep if you can, or if not, lie down and listen to an audiobook or something). It's also much lower risk with "all-laser" LASIK (where the flap is cut by a second laser machine) than with the older microkeratome technique (where the surgeon cuts the flap manually with a very precisely controlled slicer), as the later relies more on the surgeon's skill for a good outcome while the former is pretty much all the machine. And flap complications are almost entirely eliminated if you opt for PRK instead of LASIK, where you trade off a slower recovery for reduction in risk of complications.
vaguely related vision question: is difficulty seeing while driving at dusk normal for all people (because of the mix of lighting conditions), or is it particularly difficult for people with corrective lenses? Aside from the annoyance of glasses, improving vision while driving is one the main reasons I'm considering LASIK.
The dusk thing can be because of an astigmatism. Unfortunately LASIK can make it worse as a known side effect is a star pattern from lights. It was never bad enough for me to make it feel dangerous but was noticeable.
[This paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7866714/) may be of interest to you. It finds (I've only skimmed it so please read it yourself if you're basing decisions off these numbers) that 6 of the 20 surveyed Saudi Arabian ophthalmologists who'd had LASIK reported that they were not better off after the operation; 1 or 2 of those reported not being satisfied due to a complication (I don't know what "experienced problem with the refractive results" means, so I don't know whether to count it as a complication). This is higher than other papers I've seen, which list complication rates at around 1%, but my guess is that those other papers define complication very narrowly.
That same paper says that about 6% of surveyed ophthalmologists (from a larger, overlapping sample including ophthalmologists who'd not had LASIK) would not "advise laser refractive surgery for one of [their] first-degree relatives (parents, sibling, husband or wife, children) who are candidates for it."
Getting LASIK is a reasonable option, but be aware that you're taking a real, significant risk. Anecdotally, I've heard that complications from LASIK are nothing to laugh at - one case I heard of was permanent eye dryness that requires ongoing treatment with eye drops, for the rest of the patient's life. With that said, it means you don't need contacts or glasses, which is a real quality-of-life increase.
I'm really hesitant to doubt your statement that you'd prefer to avoid glasses, but - have you tried glasses recently? If not, you might find you don't dislike them as much as you expect. You might find it worthwhile to try wearing glasses for a while, since they're much cheaper than LASIK, and don't have any medical risks.
I had corrective surgery in 2017. It's my favorite luxury purchase. I think many people who have the procedure would agree; however, if someone asks me if I recommend it, I usually say no. The risk of minor complications that can cause a lifetime of annoyance is probably underestimated. Major problems happen with even the best surgeons. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/well/lasik-complications-vision.html).
Most complications that occur during surgery are associated with flap creation (here is a list: https://eyewiki.aao.org/LASIK_Complications). These are rare with an experienced surgeon (you should be able to find a surgeon with a complication rate less than 1/3000).
I was not comfortable with the risk of standard LASIK, so I opted for a ‘flapless’ procedure (Epi-LASIK without epithelial replacement).
Flapless procedures (PRK, LASEK, Epi-LASIK) remove the epithelial cells on the eye's surface rather than cutting into the cornea and “flapping” it back. The big drawback is recovery time and pain. It is probably not worth it to most people.
There are some long-term benefits to a flapless procedure:
-lower risk dry eyes (even so, I had one dry eye for about six months after the procedure)
-lower risk of halos and starbursts around bright lights at night
-no risk of corneal flap dislocation (good if you’re a boxer or fighter pilot)
-Epi-LASIK may give better contrast vision at night and better overall correction. Anecdotally, I could read the 20/10 chart, while my doctor had never seen a regular LASIK patient do so, and he has seen thousands of patients.
The main risk with the flapless procedure is infection. I needed to take medicated eye drops for about a month.
Recovery:
My eyes burned, and I could not tolerate any bright light during the four days after surgery. My vision was poor for about two weeks. After two weeks, I could see well, but there was double vision in one eye. It took about six weeks before my vision was perfect in both eyes. It continued to improve for about two months. At three months, I could read 20/10 chart. I had one dry eye that gave me trouble for about six months.
Tips:
- Be sure your eyes have been stable for several years, especially astigmatism.
- Get an experienced surgeon (>5000 procedures) with a low complication rate who owns their own equipment
- The hardware is as important as the doctor. Topography-guided LASIK is worth it. Wavefront correction is probably over-hyped.
- Don’t spend too little or too much. I paid $3000 in total.
- I am a stranger on the internet...don't take my word for it.
Vision is still testing better than 20/20 5 years later.
I have similar experience with PRK. I would do it again.
Thanks, very helpful.
If what you are experiencing, is the common in your 40s, onset of a reduced range of focus. You will probably find that none of the various laser eye surgeries will address that issue.
Well, for example my right eye (while still worse than it was in my 20s) is better than my left eye (which has the astigmatism), while wearing lenses. So it feels like that's something that could meaningfully be corrected, at least.
When you say "onset of a reduced range of focus," do you mean presbyopia? Or something else. Because certainly part of the deal here is presbyopia.
Yes presbyopia. I was struggling to recall the term. I’ve been told be a couple optometrists, and web searches generally agree presbyopia is not going to be corrected. It was the main motivator for me to consider laser eye surgery, after about thirty years of glasses and contacts. At least in my situation a prescription adapted for use with my computer monitors has been a fantastic improvement.
Without knowing anything in particular, I bet the answer to #1 is that the better ones will give the better answers to #2 and #3.
Both replying to this so I get notified about responses, and also commenting:
While my wife did the whole contacts -> LASIK path, loves it and shares her great experience when it comes up, I noticed (something the doctor warned about) her night vision is significantly worse (not worse than her uncorrected night vision, but worse than her night vision with contacts was). Not enough to make her stop driving at night, but enough to make her more cautious about driving at night.
On my hand I went in for a consultation (to a different provider) and they told me my (corneas?) were too thin to do LASIK and they would have to do a different procedure that should have almost as good of results. I opted out as I don't mind wearing glasses, but might reconsider if there have been tech advances in the last 5 years or if I see some good responses to this thread.
I think I'll join you in that "reply to get notified of responses" course of action.
I used to wear glasses where I could use the same prescription for all manner of daily tasks, but now I need one pair of glasses for this, another for that, and none for the other, and it's a huge pain. A laser surgery to fix all this would be a godsend.
Edit: Scott already responded, I am satisfied. Thank you all. Thank you Scott.
DON'T REPLY TO MY COMMENT, I WON'T BE CHECKING REPLIES AND REPLYING BACK.
Original reply:
Your ivermectin analysis was full of many flaws and its unfortunate you remain unwilling to dialog about it (to save your time, reasonably of course). I haven't been able to gain back my respect and regard for you since, but I've been occasionally reading your posts as a way to just remain open to new ideas I haven't heard of while viewing them more skeptically than before.
I suggest you read this and give it one final consideration that you got it wrong, *way* wrong. https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-less-than-you-needed?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Peace and much love.
Oh, and you'll want to hear this. If you can help push your own value system of open data (i.e. for the TOGETHER trial that was NEVER shared or opened) you'll get a $25,000 donation to your ACX grants.
"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."
Scott has already committed to writing a response. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-245
This is great to here. Case closed. Thanks.
Great, now this is either another fan of Ivermectin Guy, or another sock puppet of his. He may well have enough zealous followers to pop up hither, thither and yon on social media to berate YOU HAVE IGNORED THE PROPHET OF IVERMECTIN, REPENT BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE people, but frankly I'm bored of the whole affair as you may have gathered by this.
Hey Mannan, find something more beneficial to humanity to do, like clipping grass with nail scissors. We have already had that link recommended to us, and I remain convinced that Alexandros Helper Of Men And Horses is full of beans.
Hey thanks for your entertaining comment.
I notice that you, also, are subscribed to Pierre Kory, like the last fan of Alexandros and ivermectin.
This is becoming a pattern. We've had interactions with people coming on saying Scott is wrong, and yes, even dangling the 25 grand carrot in front of him. Why you lot think he has some mysterious power to force somebody to release test data, I have no idea, and I greatly suspect if/when this does happen, you lot will go "ah, but you didn't release *all* the data/the correct data, you're still holding out and hiding the proof Big Pharma wants buried!"
Come for the rationalist fiction, stay for the cults, I guess?
I can't take you seriously, or feel comfortable debating or dialoging, when you lump me in with a group of people because then it means you have already projected all sorts of beliefs and preconceived notions on me and I try not to debate someones prejudices indirectly or directly.
I'm around when you want to direct that comment to the person I am uniquely and with the aim to understand who and what I actually I believe.
Have you ever heard the saying about a duck?
Right now you are waddling around on webbed feet, making quacking noises out of your beak. Now, it's certainly possible that you are a platypus, but I'm going for "duck". And like the rest of the flock, you are quack-quacking in the company of quacks.
That's what you present yourself as believing.
You present me as a group: as though I have all the same beliefs, behaviors and personalities of a group of humans. However, as you know, all humans are not like all other humans. The duck simplification example you used here is an embarrassing attempt at trying to Strawman me into engaging.
No thanks.
I prescribed to him today.
Yes. Thank you. You are the person I was targeting with this post. Thank you for retaining an open and neutral mindset.
Even if Scott was wrong, as long as it wasn't malicious, why is it that important?
I don't agree with these Ivermectin guys but spreading false information without malice can still do harm?
I shouldn't have said "why is it important" bc I agree that's obvious; what I really meant and should have asked is "why is it such a huge deal that now you lose all respect for Scott". Like yes an error matters, but I don't think it would drastically change my opinion of Scott.
Huh just that I picked up all manners of judgements and assumptions (biases) for the other side of the argument that his conclusion supported, present in his writing.
It was not only because he lost his neutral tone and manner that we all loved, but because of that it seemed he got it wrong and would be unwilling to revisit the subject. However from recent comments here it seems he is willing to revisit, so some respect back.
Are you asking a question? Or are you stating your opinion?
So you don't think ivermectin is effective. Got it. I understand. Thanks for sharing. your opinion.
Because "Scott is wrong when it comes to a political subject" means "Scott is wrong on a prominent example in a category which is *much of the reason why it's interesting to read Scott in the first place*." Also, the ways in which Scott is wrong may be good pointers to how Scott is wrong in other posts (particular other posts in the same category).
Because there's this drug that is actually available, that's super cheap, and actually works, and over half the world still thinks it doesn't.
There is a generic drug which is available & effective: fluvoxamine.
Not according to the latest TOGETHER trial, unfortunately.
Suffered the same treatment that Ivermectin did: unchecked, Pharma or bill/melinda gates sponsored trials with unavailable data.
The TOGETHER trial found "Treatment with fluvoxamine (100 mg twice daily for 10 days) among high-risk outpatients with early diagnosed COVID-19 reduced the need for hospitalisation defined as retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to a tertiary hospital."
If it does work, we can at least put an upper bound on how well it works, right? If it works, it's so borderline in both statistical and clinical significance that it's still not totally clear after two years of squinting at the data whether there's anything there or not.
Given that we now have treatments that actually work, is there any value in continuing to pursue one that's borderline-useful at best? I personally wouldn't take a borderline-useful medication, it's not worth it even if it is cheap and relatively free of side effects.
Oh I see you said your personal opinion of "I wouldn't take a borderline-useful medication,... even if it is cheap"
I would. Because it is *very useful*. And no, I won't engage any straw man of yours asking me to prove anything to you. You can doh your own due diligence, and I'll do mine. As I have. And I'll keep taking it as I have, and continue to remain symptom free while you and others have to wait on standby with symptoms feeling ill qualifying for the "treatments that work"..
OK So my original reply got wiped because I opened a new tab, weird.
The hypothesis of several people including I is that ivermectin works *very well* when used preventatively and often. The risk profile is so low, you can take it *much more* often and *way before* any of the "treatments that work". With that said, I would always take ivermectin before I would even qualify for any of those other "treatments that work" and by then symptoms gone.
Why take "treatments that actually work" if by the time I qualify for them my symptoms are gone? AND I'm not even taking into account cost.
And if ever I get a dose of roundworm I will certainly ask my doctor for ivermectin:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471492217300624
Right now though, I've had covid, and I don't think a treatment for liver fluke would have cleared it up faster. Edit: Apologies to ivermectin, I was mixing it up with Ivomec which is used for fluke but has two active ingredients:
https://gibsonsonline.ie/product/ivomec-super-50ml
I see.
HE HAS DOUBTED THE PROPHET. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.
Focus less on "Scott is wrong" and more on "Here are the methods I'll use to show this other conclusion."
I understand the potential ego boost of "I was the dude that proved Scott wrong!" is really cool-sounding, people will notice, and probably tune out.
I did read much of your substack. I remain fully "whatever" on this whole issue, but I don't think your tone is doing you any favours.
And duly noted, I rushed and didn't pay much attention to my tone because of distractions for my attention and low energy.
But hey, I am not gonna call this a failure if it had even one person go through and read a more neutral analysis.
It's not my sub stack. And I did the "Scott is wrong" to attention grab, not to ego boost.
You're the third person on here, and Alexandros the Prophet of how Big Pharma is Evil has come on here himself. There's also been at least one other guy doing the same over on TheMotte, a scion of a scion spin-off. So it's not like we are not aware that some people think Scott Is Wrong On The Internet.
Well good to know the message is being communicated. I can take my leave then. Taliho.
Taliho.
I just browsed through the nine most recent comments on this open thread (not counting comments added while writing this), and about eight of them were promotional / classified ads. Is this a coincidence, an effect of making the threads bi-weekly, or are the earlyish comments on Open Threads usually this promotional?
Might it be worth pushing a little harder to keep that sort of stuff in the Classifieds Thread, (and making those a bit more common if necessary)? Personally, I'd like to see a little less "come check out my substack / I'm hiring" in Open Threads.
This is a rationalist blog right? We'd have to align the incentives such that people think it is of negative utility to post their self-promo in open threads.
Provisionally there would need to be more frequent classified threads, once a month?, and people would need to expect them to get a decent amount of traffic.
I was going to comment about COP27, but seeing several other Substack-links, decided it was simpler to just link to what I wrote about COP27 this morning.
If it helps your decision, I have a zero percent chance of reading your substack, and a larger than zero chance of reading your comments (this isn't personal, I'm just not in the market for more substacks).
Keeping the Jhanas/meditation questions going: for anyone who has experience with Jhana, do you think that would allow you to nullify pain? This is not a practical question i swear, but I'm just curious about it and want a concrete example of it's strength. Or if Jhana won't, does any part of meditation allow that? I have read anecdotes about meditation allowing you to resist painful acts, but i'm not sure if it does anything beyond fortify your innate resistance/ability to withstand pain. Or if it is a difference in kind, instead of degree.
I don't know about using Jhanas for this, but I've been able to use an impromptu meditative practice to produce temporary pain asymbolia with a requirement of sustained concentration. It has been really helpful for things like, e.g. getting home on a train with a migraine headache when I didn't have anything to take for it, or while waiting for something to kick in, but I've also used it for other stuff.
(Pain asymbolia is where you still feel pain as a sensation, but it doesn't cause aversion/suffering/urgency.)
My impromptu practice mostly consists in focusing on the raw sensations of a pain I'm experiencing (the location and how it moves/varies over time), rather than my reaction to it, repeating the mantra "It's not pain, it just feels like pain," and having at least some confidence that what I'm trying to do is possible.
I have also firsthand experienced this! In my experience, it does actually erase the pain sensation fully instead of just the aversion, but it's always been pretty weak for me. Since it seems to require total concentration, which i am not that good at yet, i feel like severe pains (say, a broken arm), would be too stimulating to allow focus of the degree necessary to erase it. It's like trying to focus on the sun. Plus, the concentration is easily broken, so if the nature of the pain changes or some external element comes in, the pain sensation immediately returns.
That said, if this method scales with concentration ability, it does seem like it would totally allow arbitrary levels of pain to be alleviated as long as concentration is maintained. Although i'm not sure if it scales linearly, or, say, logarithmically and it reaches a drop off point eventually. Plus it's not much good for most real life uses, since you can't do normal stuff while concentrating this hard.
There are certainly qualitative changes with regard to the feeling of pain that mindfulness can deliver.
Sam Harris puts it well: certain kinds of pain can be pleasurable when you're at the gym and they result from working out, but the same physical sensation would cause much more suffering if it's a result of an illness. That's because the suffering stems (at least partly) from the story we tell ourselves about the senation.
To be clear, the goal of mindfulness is not to have good stories about everything, but rather to get rid of stories / stop indulging in them and be able to experience sensations mindfully, that is without getting carried away by reactive thoughts relating to them.
While i can definitely see the story or the emotions around an event as playing a role, fwiw i have never experienced runners high, or enjoyed the burn, or generally had a fun time at the gym when i was exerting myself or working out. Every single time has ranged from "eh, this is fine" to "auuuuugh this suuucks", so i have absolutely no concept of "some pain can be good" in this context. The most i've noticed is that when i've really pushed myself the discomfort lessens a bit and adrenaline adds a bit of extra emotion to the experience.
Eh, I don't think it's the story we tell ourselves. If you're working out at the gym, you're at the very least not sick at the moment and probably in decent shape. Pain then is the burn of exercised muscles working hard but correctly (unless you do something like drop weights on your foot or bend a joint the wrong way or pull something you shouldn't have pulled).
If you are suffering pain as a result of an illness, you have other things going on with your body that are making it worse - the infection itself if it's a disease, or the flare-up of a syndrome; the body trying to fight off fevers via high temperature, inflammation, generally feeling groggy and miserable and icky, maybe loss of appetite, maybe nausea and vomiting, maybe constipation or diarrhoea. The relative levels of the pain might be the same, but the surrounding circumstances are not (sickness sweatiness is not the same thing as exercise sweatiness, for one).
Some of the few times I have entered jhana have been when I was into cold exposure. Meditating in my underwear for an hour in 20deg F weather was... Painful. When the jhana came on (generally just first I'm pretty sure) the pain would instantly subside and I felt very physically pleasurable.
Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if Nazi Germany won World War II? Have you ever read a novel or watched a movie set in this notional world and asked, “why is there nothing about the economy?” Who owns these factories? Is it American capitalists, German capitalists, or the state? Why isn’t the newscaster talking about the stock market? Is insider trading legal? How do college admissions work? How regulated is the housing market?
If you asked these kinds of questions, Prison of the Nation, A Novel of the Axis Victory and the Stonk Market is the novel for you! Taking place in the year 2095, it portrays a world that is still an oppressive, totalitarian ethnocracy but which has convergently evolved many of the features of modernity such as cell phones, index funds, PowerPoint presentations, and online dating. If The Man in the High Castle was a lurid mixture of German Nazism and Normal Rockwell America, Prison of the Nation is German Nazism meets Silicon Valley. Read it here:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/my-book-prison-of-the-nation-a-novel
Do you mention anything suggesting why german rule would still be an "totalitarian ethnocracy" after a century and a half? I would at least except some mellowing out A ) after Hitler (and co) died and B) when trying to rule a country like America in general, and specifically an America with enough market liberalism for things index funds to exist
Average people see themselves as powerless to change the system, and the people at the top like staying at the top.
It isn't like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, where there was an obvious thing to compare their system to, an obvious alternative to "reform" towards. Lots of people can't really imagine anything different, so complaints about the system are often about specific elites being nepotistic and corrupt rather than the system as a whole being rotten.
In countries like America, there are a lot of rules silently violated, taxes evaded, gripes and jokes told in private. But there are also a lot of people who admire the Germans for their wealth and their victory in the war. The Nazis are aware of the Laffer curve and know that they can't take everything from everyone. Elites in the conquered countries are who pay their taxes are allowed to keep the rest of their money.
I think that a lot of people have unrealistic ideas of what a German win in WW2 would look like. A total German victory where the occupy the capitals of all their enemies and replace their governments (like we did to them) was never really on the cards, there simply aren't enough Germans to invade and occupy Europe _and_ North America _and_ Russia.
A realistic German path to victory involves them fighting to the point where all their major enemies are willing to make a peace that allows them to retain most of what they wanted in the first place. An expanded Germany with puppet governments in all its significant neighbours would be a pretty good German victory condition; they don't need to march on Washington DC.
There was a second war after WWII, this time with nuclear weapons.
I agree entirely, but I was at least going along with "Germany Rules America" thing suggested in Alexander's comment. And I mean, it makes for a better counterpart to 'The Man in the High Castle' than saying that there wouldn't be German rule of the US, even if that would be more true.
Yeah, ISTM that the result would be the US/UK/Former British Empire having a cold war with the Nazis instead of the USSR.
That's interesting, that would seem to mean that the US hadn't developed the bomb (otherwise they would have nuked Germany into surrendering in WW2). If there's no bomb, there's no *cold* war? And if Germany made the bomb first then there's no cold war either, they just win and we do what they say or we get nuked (including not making nukes).
Or they get nukes around the same time.
Thanks, I look forward to reading this.
The Man In The High Castle (the novel was too weird for me).
I found the TV series gripping and brilliant, until I didn't; it too got very weird.
SS GB by Len Deighton was disappointing. His novels swing between brilliant and confusing. SS GB was neither.
Have you read Swastika Night(1937) by Burdekin/Constantine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika_Night
If you're up for a grim story, Harry Turtledove's _In The Presence of Mine Enemies_ is an Axis-wins-WW2 alt history whose main characters are secret Jews living in Nazi Europe as something like Perestroika starts happening.
That sounds fascinating! I enjoyed one of the books in Turtledove's "Balance" series (which involves an alien invasion in the early days of WW2) - I need to track the others down.
I also enjoyed an anthology of alternative history he had compiled.
I had not heard of it. It sounds fascinating, enhanced by it being prewar, even pre-Munich.
It sounds like it should be up there with 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, etc.
Thanks so much!
My Substack journey into madness continues. This time, everything is fake news: https://www.newslettr.com/p/the-real-fake-news-179-t12
I’m always looking for new music, so send me your Spotify Playlists! You can post links here as replies to this thread, or reach out directly via email (emwjazz@gmail.com). Thanks!!
I like having music in the background but get annoyed when tracks repeat too often; where "too often" is "more than once a fortnight or so". So, the solution: put all of the things into a giant playlist and shuffle. I've been dumping things I like into this for several years now: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1D1PehPTMP7lMnqAgjvk1P?si=ErkQ-aOOTs6fmo2hP1bv8g Hope you enjoy :)
Nice selection, and I even recognise several of them, so that's a plus!
Any recommendations from me? Well, I really like Marsen Jules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V8uhAk__z0
Interesting western classical meets Indian music violin piece (Darshan with Vijay Gupta on violin). Sort of reminiscent of Goa trance in that drifting from western to eastern influence and back thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArzRqKm_seU
So I was looking recently at what else Louis Cole's backing singers got up to and came across the singer and bassist Fuensanta Mendez. Her jazz can be mournful and somehow reminds me of early 20th c. classical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLz7bdm3E1o
Also discovered Teis Semey, another member of the amsterdam scene, the other day.
deep cut. nice find.
https://youtu.be/BTfzFQJSG2k
Enjoyed this synthpop song today
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3A30qx3Sy5yS0KYZ9iRDmM?si=db00de422dd14878 with some jazz!
Interested in 13 hours of psychedelic instrumentals?
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/32Vez5Yf1X8qNfBrhLQlfr?si=fb1539942606459c
Anyone have advice on how to find a therapist that doesn't suck? This is a subset of the problem of finding a physician who doesn't suck, but seems even higher-variance. I've tried a handful over the last two decades, and other than word of mouth (which is no help in my RL friend group) have no clue about how to find someone good.
In case it’s relevant to anyone here, I’ll also mention that I’m in the process of moving a lot of my practice to providing counseling by email for people located anywhere. I’ve had so much success working with people this way in the past decade that I’ve decided to move most of my work to that format.
When I work with people outside of New England (where I’m a licensed psychotherapist), I do it as a consultant, not a healthcare provider, though obviously it’s the same “me” in either case.
Doing personal work via email can be very effective and is well suited to people who want more flexibility, more privacy or who find showing up for regular live appointments by video or in-person to be unappealing for various reasons. There are lots of upsides to working this way. The main downside is it’s not covered by insurance.
I’ve been on sabbatical and am in the process of re-writing my website, so I can provide a link to the new website in an upcoming classifieds thread. In the meantime, if anyone wants to learn more about how this works, you can email me at consulting by email at gmail dot com. Once we’re in touch, I can give you a more secure email address.
I help people with a wide range of life predicaments and aspirations. Working by email is not well suited for people who are in crisis with no local sources of support. It is well suited for short or long-term work around most other personal growth goals.
Another advantage to email is that it would be easier for clients to review what was said.
Yes, totally.
As well that people get to work on stuff when they have energy and motivation, not based on an arbitrary weekly or every-other-week schedule (though some people choose to do email counseling on a schedule because it suits them better).
Also many people find the real-time social interaction of conventional therapy to be stressful and/or distracting, which can get in the way of the work they want to do.
And the writing process itself often produces clarity that's hard to get to on the fly while speaking in a session, so one often gets farther faster.
Therapist here. The process is onerous and there are many mediocre therapists, so you're not alone in this quandary. But ugh, I'm sorry, it sucks.
A few suggestions, no idea which of these might be helpful, so casting the net wide. There's a lot one could say about this suck-y process and I wish it didn't feel like people have to re-invent the wheel every time. Not sure what to do about that.
* If you are in the U.S.: can you self-pay and/or do you have out-of-network benefits? Many experienced therapists don't take insurance, and many therapists stay out of network for some insurance companies because their reimbursement rates are low or their claims filing process is messy. If you can't self-pay, you can still find a good therapist, but more likely they will be younger and less experienced (which can also be fine), in which case look to see that they graduated from a good school. If you can self-pay, you will have many more choices.
* If you're in the U.S. but not in one of the big cities, then Psychology Today is a good starting place, you can sort by specialty and modality. You can still look at Psychology Today if you're in a big city, it's just a bit more overwhelming.
* If you reach out to therapists who have been around a long time (years of practice is on Psychology Today) it helps to ask who else they would recommend (for your situation) because ideally you'll start to hear some people recommended by multiple therapists. You can say in the email or voicemail, "even if you have no room to see me, may I ask you to let me know the names of a couple therapists you trust and would recommend?" When you call those recommended therapists, definitely say "You came highly recommended to me by X ..." You're more likely to get a prompt response if you've been recommended by another therapist.
* Sometimes it can help to ask "who do you know who is considered a therapist's therapist?" You tend to get sharper therapists if they are known to work with or supervise other therapists because we are a notoriously fussy lot. But if that feels weird to say, then maybe it's more like -- "who do you know who works with a lot of men software engineers?" or "high IQ people" or "first-generation immigrants" or whatever descriptor you feel might help aim you towards a person who is likely to get some things about you.
* It helps in the initial email or phone call to be as concrete as you can about what you're looking for -- what your goal is (and specific symptoms if that's relevant), whether you have preferences about modality (not necessary, just if you do), and any other preferences or needs (time/day, insurance, in-person or not, etc). That will help quickly eliminate therapists who aren't right for you at a basic level. I get a lot of emails from potential clients who say "Looking for a therapist to work through some stuff, can you see me?" and that vagueness will take longer to sort through -- I know many therapists who just won't respond to that.
* If you're looking for help with something more specific and less common than anxiety or depression, it's a good idea to search for people who specialize in that thing. There are therapists who specialize in things like trauma, anger, substance use, behavioral addictions, disordered eating, ADHD, bipolar, sexual dysfunction, couples counseling, etc and it's best to find one who works on that issue mainly. There are tons of therapists who will take clients with those situations, but who actually have little experience with them. If you have anxiety but it manifests in a more specific way -- OCD, phobias, insomnia -- it's better to find a therapist who says they specialize in those aspects, not that it's one in a long list of things they say they treat. If you have severe depression that's not responded to medication and/or therapy up to this point, you really want a therapist who that's their thing.
* If you're interested in a specific modality like IFS, EMDR, or somatic psychotherapy, they have associations with websites listing therapists who have been certified in that method. It's good to start there because lots of other therapists will claim to have experience with that modality but may not have been thoroughly trained in that method.
* When you get a response to your initial query to a therapist, whether it's an email response or a phone call, feel free to ask them "How do you approach working with X issue?" and "How long before you anticipate I would notice some improvement?" and "how successful is your experience in treating people for X thing?" The answers to those questions may be less specifically useful, but listen for how you feel about how they answer them. Do they make sense to you? Are they using dumb jargon and catch phrases? Do you like what they're saying? Also, if you've had therapy before, think about what worked and didn't work for you and tell them that and see how they respond. If you've never had therapy before, tell them that and maybe say "because I've never done it before, I'm unclear how to know if it's working, and if it's not how we'll handle that" and see what they say.
* Successful outcomes are hugely correlated with how strong of a working relationship the therapist and client have -- that's way more important to outcome than what method they use or how faithfully they use that method. So it's a somewhat irrational process with a certain amount of rationality woven through it. Allow yourself to listen to your irrational reactions. Someone you feel icky about even if they're really smart or sound capable, is not likely to be a good fit. Find someone who makes the tension in your chest relax a little when you talk to them (or however you would describe the sensation of relaxing in someone's presence) -- that may not happen on the phone in the first conversation, but it should happen early on (unless you are someone who has never had that experience in anyone's presence).
* Meet with three different therapists at least once and pick the one you like the best. You don't have to do this, but it is extremely helpful unless you've already worked with multiple different therapists in the past and really trust your radar.
I hope some of this is helpful, and if not, that it may be helpful to others. I'm happy to answer any questions about any of this.
Man, this was so amazingly useful -- thank you for the insightful and highly actionable advice. Very appreciated :)
I’m a therapist and have nothing to add to Radar’s advice, which is excellent.
Great suggestion. For a lot of younger and relatively healthy people, they may spend more on therapy than other healthcare and for therapy out-of-network benefits are most helpful.
There's a general community list somewhere and I think NYC rationalists also have a list of recommendations, but not sure if you're not in NYC or the bay area.
This is a huge unsolved problem. I found my latest therapist after hearing him on a podcast. He's also a psych professor at my local university, which gave me more confidence.
There are probably lots of good therapists out there who don't have a strong online presence or publication history, but these really are the best way to evaluate someone's thought process.
my friend here is hiring: https://flatfile.com/careers/
also, my company is hiring but i think you are too senior/spendy for us :)
Where would one find the positions your company is hiring for? LinkedIn and the company website don't seem to have anything.
I always wish stuff like this was true-as-written for anyone:
"Every new role in the business is "valued" at a million dollars, therefore each employee is a critical investment helping to shape the future of Flatfile."
I do some amount of employer value proposition work, it's kind of what my job is. Can confirm that very few (if any) people pay for those kinds of roles in a way that cleanly coorelates to "A good hire is worth $1,000,000 to us".
Edited to add: I'm not trying to bag on your friends here - I can imagine senses in which this is totally true for some people.
Call me a cynic, but when I read stuff like that, I mentally translate it into "We expect you to work like a dog for the initial phase of our business, be that we go belly-up in six months because we couldn't manage our way out of a paper bag, or be that one-three-five years. We're certainly not going to *pay* you for the blood, sweat and tears you put in, but we'll feed you lots of platitudes about how important you are to us, how much we value you, and how we're all in this together so that you feel like you have a personal stake in the success of the business and that when it takes off and gets profitable, you will benefit. Then we hope to sell the whole clamjamfry to some big faceless concern for a shedload of money, whereupon we'll bugger off to a tropical island and you'll be sacked because of restructuring by the new entity".
They're hiring senior software engineers so each one probably does generate something in that range. They don't pay them nearly that much though.
Software is such a lucrative business because software engineers mostly create capital goods (code bases) that generate very sticky revenue (SaaS, transaction fees, etc) using very cheap tools (computers) with extremely low pay to productivity ratio (ie, a low percentage of the revenue they generate has to be paid to them). Most people don't notice this though because that low percentage is still really, really high in absolute terms.
I think what I'm sort of getting at is that while what you say is true, them saying "x is worth $1,000,000 because it will generate that much revenue!" is nonsense unless x is the limiting factor. Engineers work on computers, but nobody says "Each computer generates $1,000,000 in revenue and we consider each one worth that much" because they are widely available; any computer will do as well as the last.
It's only when computer supply is both restricted and the limiting factor on revenue that people will pay any appreciable fraction of their "revenue generating value".
When companies say shit like this, they are (if they aren't just babbling nonsense) saying "Each marginal hire we can make will address actual work we have ready for them, which otherwise wouldn't get done since N of engineers is our bottleneck at this moment."
I was sortof bemoaning the fact that if they weren't just saying nice-sounding nonsense and really did think that each marginal hire represented $1,000,000 in revenue they otherwise wouldn't get, guys like me would be worth more. But few people really believe this in a sense that translates to bigger/better recruiting content machines.
Well, at the risk of taking an offhand comment entirely too seriously: Yes, it's true that what they mean is each marginal hire will address work that will generate revenue ultimately. But that value is generated not by recruiting the engineer but by the engineer actually working. The recruiter's value is (mainly) in time savings for people who'd otherwise have to do recruitment. And the recruiting content marketer's value is mainly in time saved by the recruiter.
To take a toy model, imagine each engineer does work that generates $1,000,000 a year. The company notices their engineer is doing 1,000 hours of simple recruiting work a year. But their engineer is expensive! They generate $1m a year if they write code! Every hour they spend recruiting is $500 the company loses because they're not writing code. So the company hires a full time recruiter for $250,000 a year. This frees up 1,000 hours of engineering manager time, saving the company $500,000 gross and $250,000 net.
And then the recruiter realizes: they're spending 1,000 hours a year writing blog posts! Every hour the person spends writing blog posts is $250 the company loses because they're not recruiting. So they hire a content marketer for $100,000 a year. The company saves $250,000 gross and $150,000 net.
And then the content marketer realizes they're spending all day taking phone calls or emptying waste baskets and a secretary or janitor might get hired. This is all very simplistic but it illustrates the point that support positions earn money by freeing up other workers. Their value is what other people get to do instead of doing what the support worker does.
It's like the old anecdote: JFK was walking around NASA. He saw a janitor and asked him what he was doing. "Helping put a man on the moon, sir" the janitor replied. And the janitor was right: he was enabling the scientists to spend more time doing science and less time mopping floors.
This is also why a content writer for a tech startup might make twice what someone does at a small copywriting firm that deals with local businesses. Even if they do the same work the time freed up at the tech startup is more valuable economically. This is most obvious with secretarial work. Secretarial work is often pretty interchangeable and always a support role. Answering phones, making coffee, etc. But depending on whose time they are freeing up their compensation varies widely.
I'm going to crochet this on a throw pillow.
I was going to try and explain this same thing, but you said it way, way better than I could have.
I recently published my first short story [1]. It was inspired mostly by Borges (currently reading Labyrinths) but also Scott's story In the Balance [2], which I loved.
Folks seem to enjoy it, but many really dislike the ending. Which I think means I did my job?
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/you-awaken-in-a-room
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/
Having been primed to expect a terrible ending, I was disappointed to find that the ending was not all that terrible. I thought it was perfectly in character with the rest of the story.
What I didn't like about it was:
1. The analogy is overly blatant and doesn't really say anything that hasn't been said a million times before. Compare to Scott's story which meditates on the whole "balance" thing in ways I'd never thought about before.
2. There's really nothing to the story except the analogy. Borges (or Scott) would have made the story more fun to read on its own. This reads like an outline of a story rather than a story itself; there's no enjoyable turn of phrase or interesting mental image or interesting moment of character or even any emotional content to the story, it's just a bare-bones this-then-this-then-this. This means I'm not enjoying reading it, I'm skimming through the obvious-analogy bits in the hopes of getting to something interesting.
Yeah, didn't even get to the ending, because about ten paragraphs in I gave up.
If I want some "hur-dur, religious believers iz so dumb" I can go get sneered at on a multiplicity of online sites.
Not for me, is what I'm saying.
EDIT: Okay, somewhat unfair, our feathered friend is not trying to go for simplistic euphoric atheist bait. But this is nothing new or unusual. Oh gosh, here we are seemingly conscious and our overengineered brains keep wondering is there a meaning to life, and we construct all kinds of answers from religion to science.
But as Procol Harum wisely sang: "She said "there is no reason"
And the truth is plain to see"
When I was sixteen to twenty, I'd have liked this story immensely. So deep, man! I'm too old for that now. You may have something to say, but the channels are too clogged.
Whiter Shade of Pale. I like that one.
Maybe it's just a bad ending? I read it too and thought that it was a bad ending because you explain how transparently manipulative and circular the theist justifications are and how it's just one of many bad books inside the room, and then the protagonist goes back to it for... reasons? Because he's so desperate to believe in something he'll believe the most transparent nonsense? Really not helping the case there. It leaves a flavor of contempt, not existentialist triumph or nobility or whatever you were trying for.
Hah that is certainly a possibility.
It's a pessimistic ending for sure. I think I'd sum it up as saying that the Book of Kokgnita satisfies the protagonist's psychological needs far more than endless rational inquiry would.
I've created a presentation about Intelligence Signalling :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk6uHi_Rdm4
My arguments for it are structured in the same way that other people talk about other forms of signalling like wealth and virtue signalling, especially Robin Hanson's writing. I think intelligence signalling is an important thing to understand if you want to know why scientific/technological progress happen. I also think it is the thing that drives this community - in a good way!
I've been planning a followup on how it all connects to what it would mean to have an "AGI", and why I am skeptical about fast takeoff. This presentation doesn't reference that at all, but since people seem to be at least somewhat on board with the arguments I have in this one, I'll probably make the AGI one (but it'll assume you've seen this one!).
We already had some GREAT chat on the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/yeuslq/a_presentation_on_intelligence_signalling_by_me_i/ I am very interested to hear any counterarguments/feedback you folks have! I made it for you all to a large extent 😀
very interesting -- there's a paper by Neil Levy on 'intellectual virtue signalling' and I was puzzled about how he defines it quite literally but then acts like it's obviously bad and best exemplified on Twitter. when i saw him give a talk i had a reaction along the lines of 'but intellectual virtue signalling makes the intellectual world go round doesn't it?'
I just launched a Substack, and I think my inaugural post would be interesting to a lot of people here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/orbistertius/p/morality-and-marginal-existence
I discuss (among many other things) some of Scott’s back-and-forth on utilitarianism and the repugnant conclusion from his WWOTF review.
Subscribed!
A couple minor tips:
* I'd suggest more headings to break up the article. It makes it easier to understand the flow of the article (and easier to skim...it's hard to remember when writing something long-form that most of your readers are there to skim, especially if they don't already have a relationship with you)
* avoid images of text--this is more of a personal nit, but it's really bad for accessibility. Blind folks can't see it at all
Thanks. Those are good tips. I started with section headers because I’ve heard that advice before, but honestly I struggled so much to come up with them that I gave up. But the images-of-text thing never occurred to me, thanks for pointing that out.
Same! You can always go with Scott's style and name them I, II, III, IV :)
Recently got laid off as a Software Engineer w/ 15 years experience including a stint at a FAANG company. Interested in any job opportunities that either give me an opportunity to positively contribute to the world or master new skills/knowledge, as long as they allow remote work.
(In advance - yes I am looking at the 80000 hours board, but curious if anybody has further interesting suggestions/opportunities.)
https://stairwell.com/careers/
We're a fully-remote cybersecurity startup aiming to improve the world of tooling for SOC analysts and threat hunters. You don't have to know anything about cybersecurity to work with us. Check out our blog posts to get an idea of some of the stuff we're doing: https://stairwell.com/explore/
This is pretty interesting and I will likely apply, thanks. If/when I do so, would you prefer for me to mention this exchange or not? Don't want to out anybody's pseudonymous internet activity.
You can say you were referred by "Vmnnx Jrvff" (rot13.com).
I may not have the economic background to understand the explanation. But how is it that inflation rates can vary from one Euro country to another?
Inflation is the rate of increase in prices. Since prices are not constant between European countries there's no reason to expect them to be the same. However, the common currency and market does mean that arbitrage will occur more easily/quickly than elsewhere. But not perfectly so.
The "inflation" concept is a little bit slippery.
According to the general public and news media, inflation is "any rise in prices."
According to monetary economists, inflation is "a general rise in prices that's not due to fundamental factors."
Imagine that an early frost destroys most of a season's apple harvest. If the price of apples rises, and if apples are a component of some price index, the general public will say "inflation went up because of the apple shortage." But the monetary economists will say "apple prices rose because of the shortage, but this is not inflation because it's explained by fundamentals."
Now imagine that due to a software bug, everybody's bank balance doubles. We would expect that people would start bidding up the prices of everything until everything costs roughly 2x what it used to. Monetary economists would call this inflation, because there wasn't any "real" reason for the price change (and maybe relative prices don't change at all).
(Chaos would reign if everybody's bank balance doubled overnight, of course, and this would have real effects. But this actually sort of happened over the course of the 1970-1980 decade!)
The ECB does monetary policy for the EU, so we don't expect a lot of differences in Monetary Economist Inflation. But local conditions vary, so it's not surprising to see General Public Inflation differ from member state to member state.
Would you have a good reference to support these claims?
That's definitely false using "inflation" the way the general public and news media use it, yeah. But it's almost true by construction with the narrower definition.
I think any time you see the word "inflation" in a nonspecialist setting, replace it with "cost of living" and you'll have a clearer understanding of what's being discussed.
Yeah these little tautological games many disciplines play are always frustrating, and sometimes seem pointless.
"I have defined spite in this super non-colloquial way and now will publish papers about how spite doesn't work how everyone thinks it works". Well umm sure...
this year's price increases had a big contribution from energy costs, energy got more expensive everywhere but not at the same rate: Spain and Portugal weren't importing Russian gas before and relied on imports from Algeria instead unlike the rest of the EU. Also, imagine that in colder countries heating makes a bigger percentage of operating costs. This explains e.g how October inflation for Spain is at 7.3% while it's 16.8% for the Netherlands.
But if you were wondering theoretically "how" it could vary between countries, maybe you've heard before how it's a weakness of the Euro that is a monetary union but not a fiscal one. Any country could put sales taxes at 100% for everything and (assuming it was 0% before) see 100% inflation without really affecting the rest.
That makes sense. I guess I'm just struggling to understand how suppliers can raise prices on goods that are easily purchased from neighboring countries with lower inflation.
Three reasons inflation dispersion persists despite no trade frictions in EU:
1) Many (probably the majority?) of the expenditures in the consumer price index are not internationally-tradable goods but rather services (healthcare, housing, haircuts, etc) which aren't as easily purchased from other countries.
2) Even goods sometimes have high transport costs relative to their value. Cement, energy, very fresh produce, etc.
3) Even if all expenditures were on perfectly tradable goods, different countries' price indices would contain those goods in different proportions. E.g. Poland probably spends more on heating fuel than Portugal, so if fuel prices go up, Poland's inflation goes up more than Portugal's.
(By the way, you're getting a lot of bad explanations in this thread, IMO. For example, I think the apple-frost scenario would in fact be inflation, despite CB's statement to the contrary.)
Oh also, there is such a thing as "overall eurozone inflation". It gets measured and discussed etc.
By analogy, you could measure subregional inflation in the US, alongside the national rate of inflation -- but it would make somewhat less sense in the US where our states' economies (despite it all) more integrated into a national economy than the EU members' economies are with each other.
Interesting, thanks.
Right before an energy crisis that dectuples the price of natural gas, Germany shuts down its nuclear power plants, but France keeps its running. The price of electricity increases a lot more in Germany than in France, contributing to differential inflation.
Rich people from around the world flock to Paris, bidding up its housing to astronomical levels. On the other hand, everyone who can leaves Warsaw, lowering its housing prices.
The Italian government outlaws most factories in the name of environmental protection. The Spanish government weakens environmental laws in the name of economic growth. Italy's manufactured goods are now a lot more expensive than Spanish goods, especially with today's transport costs.
I suppose it is a little easier to see with goods and services that are local to a particular market. But there is so much for sale in the Eurozone common market that is not local to any particular country I'd expect that to have a leveling effect. Does inflation vary similarly from one US state to another?
Here's at least a claim that inflation rates in the various states range from 10% to 15%: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2022/8/state-inflation-tracker-july-2022
Interesting, thank you!
"Does inflation vary similarly from one US state to another?"
It varies. I don't know about similarly.
One can imagine that Hawai'i and New England use different amounts of energy (for heating and cooling, as an example). Rents behave differently in the SF Bay Area than in, say, Modesto.
Inflation is measured as the change in costs of specific baskets of goods. Suppose in one country you make iPhones and in another country you grow apples, and in both countries these are goods that make up the standard basket of goods used to compute inflation. Now suppose that international trade has some hiccups. Then the cost of iPhones probably goes up everywhere, and so does apples. But particularly the costs may go up more abroad than at home, because the specific problem we supposed was in the international trade.
But even if the percent cost increase of the specific items is the same, the iPhones are much more expensive than the apples so the overall increase to consumers is higher in the country importing iPhones than the country importing apples.
Can a German just order his iPhone from France, or am I mistaken about how the common market works?
Probably with a literal iPhone, Apple has some centralized system where they will deliver people a phone from their closest distributor, according to some standardized pricing system, that likely checks which distributor they are getting it from. They may well equalize the price across the Eurozone and just eat the difference in shipping costs as a price to pay for avoiding angering customers in some regions for perceived injustices.
But if you're buying a wrench or something, you're probably getting it from a local hardware store or local warehouse, which will charge local shipping costs, and costs related to local rents and wages. You're not going to be willing to pay the price of shipping across multiple national borders even if the wrench itself is cheaper when ordered from a hardware store in another Eurozone country.
I don’t know about the European markets in detail, I was trying to illustrate the principle with a toy example.
My guess is, yes, there will be some substitution. Energy costs are rising for everyone, but particularly the countries that import it. If you have a factory or a farm in an energy-importing country, your business costs could go up more than your neighbors’.
Some products are pretty replaceable on the open markets, and for them we’d expect the inflation to be consistent across countries. Other products stay local and so the inflationary pressures apply only to the country they’re made and consumed in. Or if there’s specific localized trade agreements or taxes, that could increase the effect of cost increases. (For this reason in the US gas prices vary a lot state-to-state.)
I tried asking in the subreddit but it went nowhere.
Can someone give concrete examples of what concepts would be “at the top” of the top-down processing networks described by the predictive processing theory?
Am I correct in thinning of these networks as Directed Acyclix graphs? Am I right that slight changes in these concepts can have profound downstream effects? Is it right to presume that for some people, their topmost concept would be something like “the laws of physics”?
I think there's a few ways one might imagine a predictive processing theory to work.
On one way, you would imagine a finite hierarchy of levels, each one connected to the one just below it and the one just above it, with sensory inputs connected to the bottom one and presumably one's most fundamental ways of understanding the world innately at the top one. On this picture, each level is connected to one above and one below, and so you could call it a directed acyclic graph, but it would just be the simplest possible one, with a line pointing in a single direction.
On another way, you could imagine there are multiple nodes at a single level, connected to nodes at lower levels and at higher levels. This might well form a more complex directed acyclic graph. But I think it's not even obvious it would *have* to be acyclic. When we are talking about causal models, we usually assume things are acyclic, because nothing can be causally upstream from itself. But I'm not sure why that sort of consideration would have to apply here.
I agree--acyclicality makes it easier for *us* to reason about things, but the brain seems to take plenty of advantage of feedback loops. And the struggle between top-down and bottom-up processing definitely points to bidirectionality.
We also see people engage in circular reasoning all the time!
I think "the laws of physics" would be an ideal topmost concept, but I don't think anyone has that. It wouldn't be practical (esp. if you're considering relativity or quantum)
I think it's more like object permanence, gravity, etc--things that, if changed, would make you say "oh I'm definitely dreaming." So not so much "laws of physics" as how the human-level world operates. Probably some people-centric ideas here too, like theory-of-mind.
I also think beliefs like "people are most trustworthy" and "God is looking out for me" are pretty top-level--things that would only be overturned by deep trauma. Beliefs like "my friends and family will continue living for the foreseeable future" and "my spouse would never cheat" are maybe one more level down.
Interesting. I meant “the laws of physics” in a more abstract sense, almost like, “there are some patterns which are consistent”, as being what then “predicts” object permanence and gravity.
Now I’m wondering how big that chunk of “always predicted” stuff is, and whether some life experiences might be seen as moving things into and out of that chunk.
For example, my Dad recently died and it seems to have had the effect of helping me see how I’ve been taking “I am alive” for granted (as if it has probability 1) instead of continuously being aware of how lucky I am to be alive (as if it has a low probability and therefore each moment of aliveness is slightly surprising)
Super sorry to hear about your Dad.
Yeah I think this is exactly how "trauma" is considered in PC. You have a deeply-held implicit belief, which might even be irrational (e.g. "my family will live forever"). Lots of other smaller beliefs are derived from it (e.g. your access to advice and support, what next Christmas will be like), so updating that belief causes a _huge_ cascade of beliefs that need to be updated, which is terrifying and traumatic.
You might be interested in The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. She describes clinging to irrational beliefs about her husband coming back after his death in order to avoid the trauma. I haven't read it myself but it has helped several friends and family members deal with loss.
Best youtube documentary/essay?
My recent favorite is Survival Guide to the Biblical Apocalypse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPvJ-M-hU5w
Some that I like:
In Search of a Flat Earth https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44
Why Koko (Probably) Couldn’t Talk (Sorry) https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4
Harder Drives: Hard Drives we didn’t want or need https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio
Analogy as the Core of Cognition https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk
Fear of Cold https://youtu.be/Pp2wbyLoEtM
Is Harder Drives about SMR or something else?
Harder drives is so good!
Niche in the extreme yet entertainingly presented.
I really enjoy the docs by emp lemon (video game example, but there are plenty of others): https://youtu.be/dmLSJrA0n9w
i vaguely remember that scott got famous for taking a stand as a liberal against libertarianism. but now i feel that he's "right-coded" politically in 2022. has scott changed, or is this just the world we live in right now?
It's semantics. If you define the establishment as "left" and dissenters as "right", then Scott is clearly the latter.
Also the world we live in, because there's a concerted effort by the establishment to push those exact definitions. Just note that this means, e.g., that everything you'd normally classify as far-left also becomes "right-coded". Also note that the frame of reference is an intra-elite conflict in which, e.g., the stereotypical Red Tribers don't really participate.
I think that the issue is that intellectual output skews very highly to the left. So if a writer espouses a set of ideas to the right of e.g. 60% of that intellectual output, the writer will be perceived as being on the right, although they will be on the left of the population as a whole.
Furthermore, they will attract readers who actually are to the right of the median, since if the readers want intellectual material, and the body of such material skews left, then they will end up consuming material to the left of themselves, but to the right within that body.
I would amend that to say that *published* and *publicized* intellectual output skews very strongly to the left.
Scott reminds me of George Orwell, a socialist who is remembered not for the issues where he agreed with other socialists, hence was uninteresting, but for the ones where he disagreed with them.
Speaking of Orwell, I noticed that in Animal Farm the horrific result of the farm portrayed is not unproductive (as actual Socialist societies were) - just exploitative. I thought that might correspond to Orwell's own Socialism. Any thoughts?
[I'm a huge fan of yours, by the way. Thanks for your intellectual output.]
I think Orwell was more worried about the potential of socialism for tyranny than about its inefficiency, and may well have believed that it was not inefficient. He discusses _The Road to Serfdom_ in an essay, but I don't remember seeing any references to the calculation controversy.
1984 had a socialist(?) society which was inefficient and tyrannical.
T. S. Eliot rejected the book for publication as an obvious Trotskyite allegory about how Stalin had betrayed the revolution, which wasn't considered desirable during WW2.
IIRC Scott voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primary but he’s got some heterodox views for a left Democrat such as in “Are you still crying wolf” in which he said that Trump wasn’t actually a fascist threat and a lot of hue and cry was histrionic.
My guess would place him on the left for the USA and on the right for Twitter. Frankly on the left-right spectrum he seems to me to be about where a median 50 year old San Franciscan would be, or a recent male college graduate from a purple State would be, so center-left, probably left of most Americans on most “cultural/social issues” and right on most “economic issues”, but not on every last thing on a partisan’s score card.
To someone who self-identifies as a “leftist” (and not just someone who usually votes for Democrats but can be persuaded to vote Republican every so often) I’m sure he seems “on the Right”, but that’s true of most elected politicians of either Party, and most voters as well.
“On the Left” is half of all voters, “Leftist” is at most 19% of voters, but likelier just 6%
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/
Jesse Singal is another Warren-voter best known for being disliked by the left (or perhaps "radlibs", since people who were actual Marxists prior to BLM are more sympatico).
If Scott is right-coded despite explicitly stating he voted for Elizabeth Warren, then wtf does anything mean anymore?
Well said. I would upvote this to the Moon, if possible.
From the mistakes page:
"41: (12/6/21) In my 2014 review of The Two Income Trap, I suggested Elizabeth Warren was smart and good. Subsequent events have conclusively revealed her to be dumb and bad. ACX regrets the error."
As far as policy preferences, Scott is pretty "left-coded". I don't think there's much of a gap between Scott and, say, Matt Yglesias, especially based on how often Substack tells me that Scott has recommended the latest Yglesias post. Especially after he moved back to the Bay, Scott's actual policy positions are kinda...basic?
As far as networks and associations go, though, Scott is very "right-coded". He's been interacting with right-wingers and and extreme folks like the reactionaries and HBDers for awhile now and has always given them a reasonable amount of respect and an open forum. Meanwhile, a lot of powerful left groups, such as the NYT and feminists, clearly despise him. Conversely, I think there's a lot of fondness, or at least tolerance for Scott among the right-wing intelligentsia, whereas Matt Yglesias is basically seen as a hack.
The fact that Scott's associations play a more prominent role in his political coding that his actual policy positions feels like the relevant shift.
I think it's a mistake to say the NYT and feminists despise him.
I think Cade Metz saw the association with reactionaries and HBDers and thought it was more important to emphasize that in an article than to respect Scott's wishes for pseudonymity but I don't think he "despises" Scott the way that many people here despise the New York Times. I think most of the rest of the New York Times has no idea who Scott is.
With feminists, I would say that again, most of them have no idea who he is, though here there likely is a group that despise him. But there are also a decent number of feminists who are regular followers here who seem to generally like Scott, like myself.
This is what has changed recently. You can be a far-left radical Bernie supporter... but if you publicly talk to anyone who isn't one of those, you're alt-right or far-right.
eg: Joe Rogan. (If you need 100 more examples, watch Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin on Youtube and then start following its recommendations)
This sounds correct to me. There's a lot of emphasis on who people associate with.
I think in subject and tone he's moved to the right, but probably not so far as I would call him right-coded. YMMV
I think the commentariat have gotten a lot more uniform in their right-aligned political views since the anti-libtertarian guide. So I think there's a much stronger temptation to view Scott's writing the a right wing lens than there was a decade ago. I'm less sure the substance of his views are really more right wing - I suspect he's still pro-UBI, pro-LGBT rights, etc. in a way that's pretty standardly opposed by the right.
I recall someone else saying that the righties had drifted toward Data Secrets Lox.
DSL has a lot of right wingers if you count libertarians, a significant minority if you don't.
I think this is true. The SSC commentariat had plenty of reactionaries, but they seemed more questing than angry and strident.
"More or less open bigotry"
Are you including discussions of genetic differences between races as "bigotry"? I don't see what else you could be referring to, but its also a really dumb, bad fiath definition of "bigotry".
A lot of people would see "genetic differences" discussions as "bigotry"--for me it would depend on the tone, but most of what I see actually is bigotry, since it goes like "there are these genetic differences, and i-the-discusser-of-genetic-diversity consider the phenotypes loaded with moral valence, therefore it is no problem if people of certain races are worse off in society than white people because they deserve it". All the steps of that other than "there are these genetic differences" are bigotry.
There's also stuff like in this very open thread, two or three people basically arguing "antisemitism based on debunked conspiracy theories is okay in the US because the US is controlled by the Jews". I'm not sure if this is what they went in intending to argue (which was probably more like "people should be less tolerant of content-free anti-white rhetoric" which I actually agree with) but somehow they seem to have ended up there.
No, as far as I can tell, Brett S.'s point is that Jews deserve anti-semitism and it's unfair that there's opposition to anti-semitism while anti-white prejudice gets a pass.
I read DSL quite a lot. I don't think much of the discussion of racial differences fits your description of bigotry. When I discussed Chisala's interesting evidence against the claim that African IQ is much lower than European, I don't remember any hostile responses.
My discussion of Chisala on my blog is here:
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/04/race-gender-and-iq.html
Never been on DSL, only SSC and ACX and a bit on the subreddit. Maybe it's different there.
Good question. I think of "bigot" and "bigotry" as defined not by what people believe but by how they believe it. Someone who has a strong belief and ways of ignoring any evidence against it is bigoted. Someone with the same belief held reasonably, who is willing to consider contrary argument and evidence and sometimes change his beliefs if shown sufficiently good reasons to, is not.
For a negative example, Scott is very not bigotted.
On race and gender IQ, Chandra Chisala is not bigotted, since he offers evidence for his views and appears to seriously consider and respond to arguments against them.
Someone can agree with my political or religious position and be a bigot, strongly disagree and not be.
I don't think it's fully driven us away.
I think you're a bit mistaken by that first bit. He did write the/a anti-libertarian guide, just like he wrote an anti-reactionary guide. He since touched it up once and also commented that he doesn't stand behind all of it anymore. He also has said multiple times that he leans libertarian or has libertarian impulses. Steelmanning the opposition of something you have an affinity for is pretty classic rationalist.
Additionally there are a significant number of "left-libertarians" (cosmotarians in some circles, contrasting with paleo-libertarians). See also classical liberal.
At the same time there's also the meme about the frontier of the left moving over time so if you don't keep updating your viewpoint it shifts to the right over time even if the viewpoint itself never changes. I think he wrote an article about that earlier this year.
I think this corresponds most closely with my view of Scott, though I'm not as keen an observer/follower as some. Libertarian leanings seem to underlie a lot of his writing, and, I feel, this foundation has been becoming more pronounced over time. I think if he had studied/understood more economics this would be even more true. Important for me to call out that I myself am closest to classical liberalism in my own thinking, so more prone to see that bias in a writer I enjoy reading
I mean, Scott definitely has an appreciation for what markets are good at, but he also wrote Meditations on Moloch, one of the cornerstones of anti-pure-markets thinking in the rationalsphere ...
It's this effect: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144
Scott has stayed a liberal, but a lot of the left has moved wayyy further left and so see him as right-wing.
Very related, and in Scott’s own words:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
Also of course, this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme
I think that effect is nonsense, or, at best, requires ignoring several areas where literally the opposite thing is true. (The left stayed still and the right moved right, or both of them moved right.)
>I think that effect is nonsense, or, at best, requires ignoring several areas where literally the opposite thing is true. (The left stayed still and the right moved right, or both of them moved right.)
This is trivially false. To the extent the right has "moved", it's entirely been in response to the left. The left are the ones who have become fanatically obsessed with "racism" despite American society ostensibly being at its least "racist" in history. The left are the ones suddenly pushing transgender stuff. The left are the ones who have been calling to defund the police. Everything the right is doing except perhaps with regards to abortion is an effort to oppose this change i.e. to conserve the (already very liberal) way things were a few years ago.
I agree with all of your examples. Both sides went left on race, both sides went left on gay stuff, both sides probably went left on trans stuff though there's a colorable argument that the right stayed still. The left went left on policing, and the right either stayed still or *maybe* moved a little to the right in response.
There are other issues in American politics, and on some of those one or the other party, or both, have gone right. The political terrain has changed over the last few decades, like it always does. Some of those changes favor the left, but some favor the right. Both sides think they're losing, and both sides are correct. (But I'm more correct, obviously.)
See my response to trebuchet for places where I think we've moved right.
The right actually moved significantly right on trans stuff; before the 2010s there was never previously mainstream right support for surveillance regimes to out trans people who are passing or to straight up ban GAC like there is now.
Yeah, but circa 2000 or 1990 it would have been fine, left and right, to hedge people like this out of jobs with kids, to mock them mercilessly, to misgender constantly. There's still a strain on the right that does all that to transfolks, but there are a lot more folks on the right who say things like, "Yes, trans people should be able to live their lives and we should mostly call people what they'd like to be called, but really, the trans girls probably shouldn't participate in girls sports because their bodies are different."
The movement to the left from the era of Ace Venura Pet Detective is profound.
I think the transition on race thing happened in the 2012-2014 era, and it was clearly co-organized by the left and right reacting against each other in ways they both found productive.
The right weren't doing anything with race in 2012. It's only when the left became fanatically obsessed with it did this happen. And the average conservative doesn't hold strong racial views, they mostly just don't want their kids being fed "anti-racist" ideologically in schools or being discriminated against at universities.
Right-wing opposition to affirmative action and other equity programs in schools long predates 2012, and certainly counts as "something with race".
The abortion stuff is a pretty big thing to just gloss over. The US right has drifted sort of left and right on abortion over the years since Roe but now that Roe is gone it's sort of snapping like a rubber band to where highly regressive positions like 'no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother' are pretty mainstream again.
Actually, I overstated the abortion thing. The right's feelings about abortion didn't significantly change, they've been this anti-abortion for a long time (if not more anti-abortion in the past), its just the composition of the court that changed.
'Regressive' is a dumb, loaded term.
Right wing people insist the left has moved farther left. Lefties think the reverse. Pretty unshocking dynamic.
I think that liberals have moved to the extreme on social issues and so have conservatives. However economically the right has moved father to the extreme than the left.
> However economically the right has moved father to the extreme than the left.
I feel like economic issues have damn near ceased to exist in mainstream US politics. Both parties have met in the middle with nobody seriously proposing changes to the current hybrid system.
>I think that liberals have moved to the extreme on social issues and so have conservatives.
Really? The right are opposed to civil rights? They want to recriminalize homosexuality? They want to penalize premarital sex?
No, they're trying to keep things where they were a few years ago against the pull of the left towards more radical positions.
Extreme right wing positions on race would be e.g. segregation. The right are the ones saying race shouldn't matter and that we should be color-blind. The left have become so extreme that what was once a left-wing view is now a racist right wing view.
The right want to ban affirmative action, they want to encourage people to talk about how people of the wrong races are stupid, and they want to criminalize immigration. That's all a pretty far rightward move from the 1980s.
I can't think of a time in the last 50 years when the right has *supported* affrimative action in the sense of putting a thumb on the scales for employment, college admission, government contrracts, et cetera, based on race. Would you have an example to the contrary?
I mean, I certainly agree in the 70s we were all in support of "affirmative action" in the sense of minority outreach and encouragement, and I doubt anyone on the right is opposed to that today, but "affirmative action" has morphed well beyond that, into legalized discrimination by race with no end in sight, which apparently goes on forever, no matter how far we get from the Emancipation Proclamation and Jim Crow.
Justice O'Conner famously declared in 2003 that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary [in college admissions]." Do you think anyone on the left agrees with that now, what with the 25 year deadline looming? If not, then you can see why the right has become if anything increasingly skeptical that this is anything more than a cynical corn-dole vote-buying scheme, and has anything at all to genuinely do with remedying injustice.
So, just as a starting point, the 1988 Republican Platform (at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1988) has an explicit line against racial quotas, amidst their support for enforcing antidiscrimination law:
"In guaranteeing opportunity, not dictating the results of fair competition. We will resist efforts to replace equal rights with discriminatory quota systems and preferential treatment. Quotas are the most insidious form of reverse discrimination against the innocent."
How different is that from the position that Republicans take now? I certainly remember Republicans in the mid-to-late 80s opposing AA programs. (That's about when I started paying much attention to politics.)
I don't know what you mean by "criminalize immigration." I don't think Republicans in the 1980s thought that we should just not enforce immigration laws, but then modern Democrats don't actually think that either--sometimes they push the rhetoric but in practice, Democratic administrations are fine with deporting people for being here illegally, just like Republicans.
As best I can tell, most Republicans are almost as uncomfortable as most Democrats about discussing racial IQ differences, but maybe I'm wrong. At any rate, it's sure not clear to me that Republicans or conservatives are in general *more* comfortable with these discussions now than, say, in 1994 when The Bell Curve was published. How would we tell?
>The right want to ban affirmative action,
The fact that not using race to decide who gets into college is a "right wing" opinion actually proves my point precisely, because it shows how extreme the left have become. It's like calling Obama a socialist at this point.
>they want to encourage people to talk about how people of the wrong races are stupid
This is absolutely not a mainstream rightwing thing. Might as well say "the left want a marxist revolution".
And for anyone who IS saying that OBSERVED race differences in intelligence are heritable (people of different races are manifestly different in mean intelligence, the only genuine controversy is the cause), this has picked up steam mostly due to white people being blamed for racial inequality i.e. as a response to far-left "anti-racist" ideology becoming mainstream.
>and they want to criminalize immigration.
No, they want to enforce immigration laws that already exist
The claim that the right have moved farther than the left. This is trivially false.
In the US specifically, I think by and large it's true that the left has moved its stated viewpoints more, but the feeling that the right is moving right doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the fact that the right is moving from "survey views" to "active views". They're actually achieving aims like removing abortion access or affirmative action or the Fair Elections act, rather than just grumbling and eventually giving up as a new generation grows up, which was the expected course and so it looks like "moving right" because the *results* are moving right even if the attitudes aren't.
Ed: I think also it has to do that the "left" views "how left/right you are" as relative to the present constitution of society and the "right" views it as relative to some absolute measure so that keeping the same positions on issues for decades as society changes looks like "drifting right" to the left but like "staying still" to the right.
I think conservative and liberal have just changed meanings in many ways since the 1980s. Among other things, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war radically changed the context in which a lot of politics were going on, race relations got *way* better (largely progressing funeral by funeral, tbh), the economy radically changed so that the old unionized manufacturing jobs just weren't very important anymore, technology changed radically and drove things like the collapse of most newspapers and print magazines, etc.
I don't want to do this in depth since I did a few of them that way in the comments on that meme article. Briefly.
Guns - both moved right.
Abortion - right moved right. I think the left moved right too, but some of that depends on perspective and timing.
Taxes - both moved right. The left is a little less of slam dunk than it would have been five years ago thanks to AOC and the squad, so I could definitely see an argument that the right moved right and the left stayed still (or even moved left, if you measure from 2016)
Trade - confusing because the left moved right, but the right moved left and they passed each other.
Immigration - right moved right, not sure about the left but I think we moved left.
Death penalty - both moved right.
Foreign war - left moved right, right stayed still / moved left / moved far enough left to pass us / not sure
Social security - left stayed still, right moved right
Unions - left stayed still, right moved right. Less sure of this one, tbh. For one thing it's older, I wouldn't really say the right has moved right since Reagan, and for another it might just be that before Reagan they didn't have the power to break the unions, but they always wanted to.
Probably more, but I think that's enough to be going on with.
Neoliberalism; US Middle East policy after 9/11.
Yeah neoliberalism happened more than 20 years ago, but it was an economically rightward shift of both the left and right. The ME policy stuff was initially from (neo)conservatives but the mainstream of the Democratic party continued a lot of it (including rules of engagement that consider male youths enemy combatants by default if they're seen near any known enemy combatant), and its outgrowths (greater surveillance state, backing down from what was a depressingly low peak of government transparency, etc) and those things all are, or at least were at the time, somewhat right-coded.
I think "right-coded" is an incredibly broad world right now. Andrew Sullivan is right-coded.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/j9kxl0/my_california_ballot_2020/
I don't think right-coding is accurate, but maybe we should wait for his 2022 ballot.
Well then, I don't think he's changed much.
I think this is more of a function of what stuff is salient now and how things are framed (and a few personal things, like how the NYT is a "left-wing" paper but his issue with it is unrelated to that).
I think there's also a problem collapsing stuff into a binary bucket - I see a lot of writing about "wokeness" which is treated as a thing on the left (which it is, but a lot of it tends to be far-left activist positions that e.g. mainstream U.S. Democrats don't think).
Ignore tribes, break it down issue by issue and see.
you can ignore tribes if you are a civilian. if you are a person, like me, who has a multidecade left-wing stalker who emails new employers and haunts my linkedin, you cannot ignore tribes :)
I'm not nearly as public a figure as you, and I decided nearly a decade ago to cease updating my LinkedIn, even though I use a pseudonym online. The risk of the long-tail of internet crazies trying to get you fired just seems too great.
That sounds horrible and I feel for you.
I do wonder if, given that context, it might not be entirely helpful to group large portions of the population together with the person who did/does that.
Cool, are you saying that to everyone claiming Pelosi's husband's attacker is emblematic of radical right-wing GOP of today's age? Are radical right-wingers also just pure, pristine individuals too?
Wasn't that guy a Berkeley nudist?
He was one of the many out-of-control crazy people that we are too compassionate to forcibly medicate/treat. And so we'll compassionately either send him to a maximum security prison where he will be brutalized by guards and inmates alike for being a creepy disturbing nutcase, or we'll put him back on the street so he can terrorize more people while in the midst of psychotic episodes.
You've got to be pretty hardy to be a nudist in Berkeley. I mean, it gets nippy there pretty reliably every afternoon when the fog rolls in.
As to the first part - pretty much, yes. Some guy shot Steve Scalise, too. One person being violent in a single isolated incident doesn't say much about the broader culture. Maybe if there are a string of these attacks I'll feel differently.
Do you imagine that what Razib describes isn't, to some extent, common? It doesn't always look like that, many people aren't as fortunate and have bosses who get called or are otherwise doxxed.
To me Scott is a Zaid Jilani/Glenn Greenwald type contrarian. What he finds interesting depends on who is in power. And both of those posters have similarly moved from very favored by the left to favored by the right. This shift can occur multiple times.
> he probably feels more comfortable around progressives
Though paradoxically he's much more likely to be tolerated by right-wingers than left-wingers.
Saying "I agree with the left on most things but disagree with them on X, Y, Z" buys you a lot more friends on the right than the left.
I think if you took a standard issue 60th percentile Democrat or 60th percentile Republican, I would expect the 60th percentile Democrat would likely tolerate Scott a whole lot better than the 60th percentile Republican - they'd both take objection to a good amount of things but I think the Democrat would be less turned off by the general vibe. It's only when you get to the extremes (i.e., where the average debate is on Twitter, i.e. Marxists and neo-reactionaries) that the right-wingers find Scott more congenial than the left-wingers do.
Nah. Your 60th percentile righty has had to endure lefties lecturing him all through school and college, from the HR department, in almost everything that rolls out of Hollywood, in every major newspaper and TV news show, and at least 40% of the time by national-level politicians. If he were unable to tolerate it he'd have gone nuts a long time ago.
I don't think t he same is true on the left. You can, for example, take an academic career path, or in certain cities graduaet into certain big businesses -- a Twitter or FB engineer, say -- and basically go from the lefty cocoon of your education to a similar one in your DEI-conscious work, and never meet e.g. a Trump voter from one New Year's to the next.
>Your 60th percentile righty has had to endure lefties lecturing him all through school and college, from the HR department, in almost everything that rolls out of Hollywood, in every major newspaper and TV news show, and at least 40% of the time by national-level politicians.<
It’s no wonder he’s so oppositional. 😆
Yes. If the only opinions you actually spell out are X Y and Z, those are the ones people are going to focus on.
The socially/culturally ascendant group is typically more exclusionary. When the right held power a couple decades ago, basically until the mid 2000s, they were heavily supportive of "cancel culture". Just the targets were different. Now they are out of power so they are more accepting.
They're still supportive of cancel culture. There just isn't a news ecosystem making money by highlighting it, the way there is for left cancel culture.
History is data for the neural networks in your brain to train on. Your own life experiences are data too, but they're limited.
Are you in the US? If so, talk to a few immigrants from screwed-up countries, and they will tell you that they see similarities between what was happening where they are from and what is happening in the US. They'll tell you how their experience elsewhere informs their current behavior, in particularly voting. They'll tell you that people here just don't understand and have to be explained where you end up if you ignore the warning signs that to them, immigrants, are so obvious, and to the natives don't look like anything much.
One of the reasons to learn history is so that you would know from the past what those immigrants know from the present of some other place in the world. Why be blind to what's going on around you when you have the option of at least partially seeing and understanding?
My answer is to find out how things got to be the way they are?
>Why should anyone study history?
Why should anybody study a foreign language, or go to foreign land, or meet a new human or animal, or experience an unfamiliar genre of Art ? History is - to an extremly crude approximation - a vast collection of recorded experiences and raw data (sometimes, but not always, resembling stories). The reason people should study history is the same reason people should do all the above things :
- R#1: Because history is a (gigantic) source of experience.
R#1 is extremly general, it utilizes nothing about history other than the fact that it's a novel source of experiences that can be mined for insights, enjoyment, patterns, etc... But you can go deeper. People should study history :
- R#2: Because other people reference it all the time, it's a shared language, like memes or jargon or myths or in-jokes or movie references or song verses, but vastly more numerous than any of them (indeed, containing them as subsets) and vastly more detailed.
As examples :
- People above in this thread are debating whether or not it's okay to slander Jews and some people are saying it's not because of the "Holocaust". What is this "Holocaust" ? there is an entire country founded just to (supposedly) prevent it from happening again, it must be super fucking important right ?
- When George W. Bush wants to invade a country, he says America is on a "Crusade". What is a "Crusade" ? and why does he think it will get him more suppport if he were to say it to an English-speaking audience ? Would it have the same impact if he said it to an Arabic-speaking audience ? (spoiler : No)
- Islamist terrorists (and Islamists in general, who are not all terrorists) say they want to restore the "Caliphate". What is the "Caliphate", which motivates hundreds of thousands to kill others so savagely for decades ? and why do they think it would be good to restore it ? (spoiler : Extremly Dumb Reasons)
And on and on and on it goes. How can you possibly understand _Anything_ in politics or culture, in economics or philosophy, in art or technology (yes, technology), without having at least a rough grasp of history ?
- Objection #1 : But is it necessary to actually "study history" ? A lot of the most important stuff has like, movies and games made about it, eh? can't I just watch the movies, read the novels, play the games to know what those things mean ?
Well okay :
- 1-) This *is* studying (a corrupted version of) history, so you haven't actually avoided it, just did it in an unusual form
- 2-) Those things are *made up*, you're not studying the Holocaust or the Crusade or the Caliphate when you experience art made about them, you're experiencing the artist(s)'s rendition of them. This is bad because :
- 2-) a-] There are tons of fictional versions. When Bush references the Crusades, it's very likely that he is referencing an entirely different version of it than the one you knew. And while fictional versions of any historical event or entity tend to group into "families" with roughly the same features, there is still the potential for massive misunderstanding and puzzlement, the very opposite of what studying history should do.
- 2-) b-] More seriously, artists aren't maximizing any consistent objective function when they interpret history. A direcor could make up a whole love affair about a king or a warrior just because he has a hot actress that he wants to involve in naughty situations on screen, a game studio might make up a massive explosion that never happened just to show off the capabilities of a new GPU, etc... This can combine to massively pollute the stories you hear\see\read\.....
So, you have to actually study history, with an eye to different interpretations and recordings of the same event, different sources, different narrators, reliable chain of transmission, clean isolation of contemporary assumptions and biases, etc...
I find this take by Bret Deveraux interesting: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case-on-why-we-need-the-humanities/
Bottom line: you shouldn't convince the other person to study history, but to pay you for studying it ;-)
I guess it depends what you mean by "studying history". Various pieces of history lend perspective to daily life. Knowing about Czechoslovakia in 1938 helps inform current Ukraine policy. ACOUP's Sparta series is a valuable breakdown of warrior culture.
But there's definitely history that will just waste your time; the Navy had some mandatory history classes that were just about where famous quotes came from.* And I remember very little from all the mandatory history classes from high school or college.**
We want "somebody" studying all the bits of history in-depth, because even ignoring that history repeats, we would lose information that could potentially be cross-connected into the future somewhere. (Also it makes for fun fiction settings that will more likely hold up under scrutiny; entertainment is value.) We want those people to be really interested in their stuff so that they'll remember it all.
* (Did you know "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" was actually in reference to underwater mines in the Civil War? Let that knowledge inform your choices today!)
** (The Weather Underground existed for a while, and then it stopped. Thus concludes my memory of US History 3.)
Well, see, I thought "damn the torpedoes" was during the War of 1812, but your comment made me look it up and by gum it was indeed the Civil War and now I won't embarass myself by observing acidly at a cocktail party "As Farragut said during the War of 1812..." Progress!
Although I'm also not sure whether it's possible to convince people that a subject in general is interesting if they're absolutely uninterested in it. Maybe it's better to focus on one of their areas of interest and convince them that some subfield of history will help them understand it better. I love learning about 20th century history because it explains much of current international politics, but anything I read about, say, the ancient Romans bores me as it feels far removed from anything I care about.
Yes, this is right. The way you get someone to learn something is not to tell them they should learn it, but to figure out something they already care about and convince them that learning this thing will help them with what they care about.
If learning this thing won't help them with anything they care about, it probably isn't worth convincing them to learn it.
The transition from the Roman republic to the Roman Empire sounds a lot like the present, to me.
Interesting, I'll try reading about it. Thanks for the suggestion!
This is the author that got me into it:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34184069-the-storm-before-the-storm
One takeaway for me was, if the Supreme Court loses legitimacy, things will likely start to unwind much faster than before. One big difference Republican Rome and Washington today is that presence of a single generally accepted legal authority in Washington, but not in Rome.
I'll check it out, thanks! I have a hunch that political tensions will sort themselves out within the next decade, but it's always good to prepare for worse possibilities.
The great physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg believed studying the history of science was useful to practicing scientists-- see https://www.nature.com/articles/426389a
Interesting little speech. Of course, part of why he thinks the history of science is useful is to be able to laugh at the philosophers of science, when they propose some clean and simple theory of how science gets done, or ought to get done. I kind of agree with him there.
I think the issue with history generally is that generic history is, what, a kind of broad based overview of a grab bag of topics? That's pretty worthless. I'm not sure I can defend learning random grab bags of acts whether those are current or historical facts. But if you study any specific subject in detail then its past becomes relevant and that's history.
Imagine trying to understand politics without understanding anything that happened before this moment in time. Or even without understanding anything outside of living memory. You'd have to try to understand the United States without the Constitution. Eastern Europe without understanding World War 2 or the Communist Revolutions. Or in math. Imagine trying to understand modern calculus without understanding the fights between Newton and Leibniz. And at that point it becomes useful to have specialists in, say, the history of 19th century American politics. Or the history of Chinese mathematics. Which is what most really serious professors of history do.
Unfortunately some of the history of the invention of calculus will probably never come to light because we will probably never know for sure whether Leibniz plagiarized Newton. Does this imply that nobody can ever properly understand modern calculus?
It depends on your definition of properly and how much weight you put on the word modern. After all, we all agree that Newton and Leibniz are not modern figures and I'm not sure anyone fully agrees on what proper calculus is.
>Imagine trying to understand modern calculus without understanding the fights between Newton and Leibniz
You don't need to know that to understand calculus
You can, of course, just be completely ignorant of where the notation came from or how the conclusions were arrived at and do the formulas by rote. But I think this is a more limited understanding.
> You can, of course, just be completely ignorant of where the notation came from or how the conclusions were arrived at and do the formulas by rote.
This sentence changes direction radically in the middle. Having a deep conceptual understanding of calculus vs learning it by rote is wholly orthogonal to knowing the history of its discovery vs learning it from a high school math teacher who may well have a deeper and better informed conceptual understanding of it than either Newton or Leibnitz did.
The best maths references are usually the most modern ones, and never, ever the ones written by people trying to set out new, exciting ideas rather than going back and trying to present stuff that's been passed around and considered from different angles and is now well-understood, and are writing to teach rather than to present.
Or, to put it another way: don't you wish someone would write a more tractable summary of the material in EGA?
It really doesn't. If you don't understand how something was constructed then you learned not how it was made but simply the end product. You're like a mechanic who can do maintenance on a car but doesn't know how the engine was designed or what other designs were tried. Now, if all you have to do is make sure the car runs then you're fine. You might even know more than the engine's inventor on how to maintain it. Famously, the nuclear operators outdid the scientists at keeping the reactors going. It's a sufficient understanding for many things but it's also not as complete and not as thorough as someone who understands more.
To take a simple example: if you have not studied the other proofs and historical original proof (or someone has not done so on your behalf) you simply don't know whether the modern ones are better. Being able to compare various proofs is itself a work of mathematical history.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you're not a mathematician (a professional in some adjacent field, possibly, but not a mathematician)?
There's a standard poser "is maths discovered or invented?" And obviously, there isn't a "right" answer to that, but it's very striking how much it /feels/ as though it's being discovered, and how as understanding of an area deepens and more connections are revealed, it's like the dust being swept away and more and more of an underlying pattern coming in to view.
Which part was uncovered first is of historical interest only; what people thought when they could only see small parts of the pattern doesn't tell you anything interesting, and the most recent books generally have both the deepest understanding and the clearest and most insightful ways of looking at and explaining it.
(One slight exception is algorithm design, where it often /is/ helpful to understand not just what the algorithm does but why it doesn't do some of the other similar things it might, and its history can sometimes give you insight into that. But even there, you mostly want to know about the more recent innovations rather than the original ones, and the most recent exposition will tell you about them more clearly than the papers in which they were originally set out).
I'm skeptical. I have a very good grasp of calculus, could easily teach it at any level, but I know very little about that conflict, aside from the impression that it had a lot more to do with a philosophy of metaphysics than with a math technique per se. Is there anything in particular about that conflict that would improve my understanding of the tool?
I'm not sure what you mean by philosophy of metaphysics. They disagreed on things like notation, calculation method, produced different proofs, who got there first, etc. Separately they were philosophers but it's not strictly relevant.
As I said, you can of course simply produce the formulas by rote. Or you can produce the proofs and simply have no idea where they came from or how they were discovered or how we ultimately came to the commonly used modern ones. After all, if you don't understand why or how the tool was made you can still use it. But you understand it less than someone who does.
Not quite following, honestly. I can derive every formula in calculus from first principles. But I don't know how Newton or Leibniz derived them, and I'm not sure why that matters. The first way in which something is derived is rarely the most efficient or clear. That usually comes later, as people go back and think about the relationship between the assumptions and the conclusion, and reconsider the path between them. Normally the discoverers themselves took a more torturous path than is necessary, since they didn't know where they were going. I mean, that's why I would teach quantum mechanics out of Sakurai or some relatively modern author instead of from the original papers.
Edit: maybe I should add that I certainly agree on the value of learning history, and even history of math or science, and it can add a rich flavor to one's use of the tools, like using your dad's chisels to make some piece of woodcraft. I'm just not seeing the part where I need to study how Newton or Leibniz created calculus to be able to do calculus any better, or understand it more completely.
I am having a hard time understanding why it seems pointless to study it. Is it that you think that studying history offers little predictive value?
Of course it's not pointless.
The universe, and history, doesn't require utility for it to have value. If I'm walking down a mountain trail and worrying about income taxes, that's not the trail's fault. Maybe it's a poor trail, slick with mud and angular rocks, but I'm thinking about friends and feeling good.
It's ridiculous to imagine our antecedents marveling over our genius and from some celestial retreat.
We can't begin to know the kind of psychology they engaged in their situation, or they, what's it's like to negotiate a pandemic and an economic recession while a suicidal dictator threatens to kill us with his big bum. Crude historic tricks like cutting off his ears aren't sufficient.
The best reason of all would be that it's totally useless.
Well, history constitutes 99.75% of everything human beings have done, if we assume the average person about whom we are talking has 10 years of clear adult memory and taking recorded history to be 4000 years long. If one is going to understand people, it does seem advisable to not limit yourself to studying the most recent 0.25% of what they've done. That'd sort of be like hiring someone based on the last 2 sentences they spoke in a job interview, and ignoring everything else they've ever said or done.
Agreed. In addition, in many respects the medium past is easier to understand than the present, for several reasons. Many actors and key observers have written memoirs or given interviews in hindsight with different signaling incentives than when events were ongoing (no signaling incentives by any means, but two different sets of statements made with different signaling interests provides opportunities to cross-check). Internal organizational archives and personal papers tend to be much more accessible decades later than in the midst of events. Scholars have had time to analyze events and cross-check data at leisure, which tends to yield better analysis than current events "hot takes". And many (not all, but many) divisive political issues of past eras are now uncontroversial or at least much less salient, reducing the pervasiveness of politics mind-killing analysis and debate.
Go back centuries or millenia, and you start to lose too much resolution to paucity of surviving documentation and gaps in modern analysts' ability to understand surviving data in proper context, but there's probably a sweet spot of the medium past where we can understand things quite a bit better than either current events or ancient history.
I appreciate having good evidence that:
1) The "unprecedented", "worst ever" etc. from journalists, politicians etc. has been happening regularly for years/decades/centuries.
2) The simple, morally unambiguous descriptions of past events and actions common in our culture are at best simplifications intended to minimally inform elementary school children, and at worst originally tendentious propaganda since converted to myth.
3) Ditto for simple descriptions of technological and scientific progress.
All of this is good for my morale, faced with clickbait, politically-motivated statements, and similar.
Also potentially useful: having enough knowledge to recognize which things are truly unusual, and which things have a decent chance of giving forewarning of future events.
And finally, I simply enjoy it.
>The "unprecedented", "worst ever" etc. from journalists, politicians etc. has been happening regularly for years/decades/centuries.
C.f. some journalists labelling Dick Cheney as the "most dangerous Vice President in history", raising eyebrows among people who remember that other candidates for the title include Burr, Calhoun, and Breckenridge. Heck, I'd probably rank Cheney (even viewing him as uncharitably as reasonably possible) behind Spiro Agnew on my list of "most dangerous VPs".
If that's even controversial it just means people don't know a lot about Spiro Agnew ....
I think two good reasons are to discover why a certain thing is the way it is and how it got to be that way. Why did town X end up being bigger than town Y? What did company X do that made them more successful than their competitors? Which pocket really is the fifth pocket on a pair of jeans?
Majoring in history is going too hard. Everyone should care about history but very few should dedicate their lives singularly to it.
Having an interest in a small niche subset of history as a hobby is beneficial but getting too into it is just as bad as not caring.
Everyone.
To get out of the trap of thinking everything only happened ten minutes ago. To find out how the past really was a different country, and how it's like what is happening today. That everyone who was Good wasn't spouting 21st century woke talking points, and everyone who was Bad wasn't simply a moustache-twirling villain.
To recognise patterns. To have a sense of being part of the tapestry of humanity. To understand politics, geography, old resentments and new quarrels. Why do X not like Y, why can't we all just get along?
For interest. For amusement. For entertainment. For education.
Society would break down within a week. Multiple actors trying to reinvent multiple wheels
>To recognise patterns. To have a sense of being part of the tapestry of humanity. To understand politics, geography, old resentments and new quarrels. Why do X not like Y, why can't we all just get along?
Sounds nice, but the reality is that almost EVERYONE interprets history through their modern ideological lens. History doesn't inform them of how to think today, history confirms that how they think today is correct!
While there are ideological interpretations of history (marxist, feminist, woke, nationalist, etc) I assume that most historians are somewhat interested in figuring out the truth instead of hammering the past into their political theory.
From my understanding, historians manage to mostly agree on most facts (give or take a factor of ten, perhaps). This raises the possibility that their facts are mostly true.
Of course, "modern ideological lens" still focus what kinds of facts one considers. In a patriarchal, aristocratic society, the questions "What was it like to be a low born/slave/woman in ancient Rome?" were obviously of less interest than "What tactics did Alexander use to defeat the Persians?" That is to be expected and ok. I believe either focus on history is better than ignoring history.
I think it is similar to the question of why one should be interested in the geography and peoples of far-away places, when what is happening down the road is clearly more relevant to your immediate life. Sometimes it is hard to see the shape of a thing if you are in the middle of it. *Contemporary* Politics is the Mind-Killer. In EY's words "If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution."
People need a sense of perspective. If ones world ends after the neighboring village, ones take on village politics will be quite limited. If ones time frame does not include a time before the iPhone, one is similarly lacking in perspective.
On that "almost" hangs much of the progress of the human species to date.