I'm interested in the total number of votes cast for each party in the US midterms, for both the Senate and the House. Breakdowns by state and district are readily available, but I'm not interested enough to compile the totals myself.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!
Note that this is unlikely, maybe 5-10% chance tops, but because we live in the stupidest timeline there is a case to be made that Dems win the House and Rs win the Senate.
Gentlemen! All this discussion about politics, and yet none of you saw fit to tell me about Thomas Jefferson's mammoth cheese? A cheese that was given a room of its own in the White House, and guests were conducted there to view it? Partisan cheese that had no Federalist cow involved in its manufacture?
"The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was a gift from the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802. The 1,235-pound (560 kg) cheese was created by combining the milk from every cow in the town, and made in a makeshift cheese press to handle the cheese's size. The cheese bore the Jeffersonian motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
...Given the political landscape of the time, there was a fear that the more Republican Jefferson, considered an "infidel of the French Revolutionary school," would harm the religious interests of the citizenry, and that "the altars of New England would be demolished, and all their religious institutions would be swept away by an inrushing and irresistible flood of French infidelity."
One pastor in Cheshire, Elder John Leland, opposed this line of thought. A beleaguered minority in Calvinist New England, the Baptists were perhaps the strongest advocates in the early republic of the separation of church and state. Leland had met Jefferson during his time in Virginia and the two grew to have a friendly relationship. Leland remembered this as he served in Cheshire, and campaigned strongly for Jefferson.
Leland, believing that his efforts helped Jefferson win the Presidency, encouraged his townspeople to make a unique gesture to Jefferson. He urged each member of his congregation "who owned a cow to bring every quart of milk given on a given day, or all the curd it would make, to a great cider mill..." Leland also insisted that "no Federal cow" (a cow owned by a Federalist farmer) be allowed to offer any milk, "lest it should leaven the whole lump with a distasteful savour."
You obviously don't talk to me enough. I have an entire rant somewhere about it. The entire thing was a gesture towards rural industry and an attempt by Jefferson to assert an alternative economic vision to the more urban, financial-industrialist-Hamiltonian view. Further, it was (probably) American cheddar which at the time was one of the few exports the US had that was good enough that it would actually get exported directly to European consumers. So this is a giant block of rural manufactured cheese was basically an attempt to assert that Jeffersonian smallholder democracy could do large industrial production of high enough quality goods as to compete with urban development even in Europe. Cheese became a common symbol at the time and while Jefferson's was the first it wouldn't be the last.
NOTE: I say 'correct or incorrect' for percentage predictions, as most folks made 1-2 predictions, so there's no useful calibration to do. This required reducing them to a binary, e.g. 60% chance of X, if X didn't happen is recorded as incorrect.
Okay, so we’re still early, but let’s take a quick look at the midterm predictions from last thread and earlier:
Starting with my own predictions:
“I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters,”
This looks to have been wrong. We’ll know more later, but this looks basically in line with the polling, so far.
“However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.”
Uncertain, but looks right so far.
Argentus:
“Something like 80% chance the Repubs win the House.”
Uncertain, but appears almost certainly correct.
“I think something like 50% chance Repubs win the Senate, 20% Dems win it, and 30% they tie.”
Uncertain, but looks like we’re falling in the last two boxes.
Yug Gnibrob:
“I predict a surprise victory for Elvis Presley in at least three races.”
Everything hasn’t been called yet, so still possible. Also, amusing.
Carl Pham:
“I'm expecting an epic Democratic wipeout.”
Incorrect.
Note, Deisach responded to this, but I couldn’t pull a concrete prediction out of it, so much as a description of the options.
Education Realist:
Begins with a reference to conventional wisdom which appears likely to be wrong, but I don’t think that was their prediction? Feel free to jump in if I misunderstood.
“I think there's a 40% chance the Senate stays tied ,which was all the GOP could hope for six months ago, but would now be the downside.”
Uncertain, but looks like it may be tied.
“There's an enormous likelihood--not a 60% chance but closer to 90%--that the polls are understating GOP support.”
Uncertain, but looks incorrect? Just like for me, it looks like polls did significantly better this time.
Axioms:
“On the upside for them Fetterman had a stroke but on the downside the Trump endorsed candidate is so widely hated he is still gonna lose.”
Correct. Fetterman won.
“I'd say 53-54 Senate seats for Dems.”
Incorrect.
“The House is 60-40 and I expect the majority for either side to be like 10 tops.”
Unclear wording, but I think this was saying 60-40 in favor of Democrat victory, based on the above predictions. If so, uncertain, but appears likely to be incorrect, current projection is R-224, D-211, but this is obviously in flux.
Paul Botts:
Agreed with my predictions, then added “I'd say the GOP has around a 2 in 3 chance of gaining a House majority but most likely a narrow one.”
Appears correct, though not certain yet and depends a bit on definition of narrow. It’s projected to be broader than the current D one, but not by much.
“Polymarket, Manifold, and PredictIt now have shiny interfaces for predicting the upcoming US midterm elections. In terms of the Republicans taking the Senate, Polymarket is at 65%, Manifold at 58%, PredictIt at 73%, and 538 at 49%.”
Uncertain, but it appears this is not likely to happen.
It looks like in cases where I deviated from Trafalgarian Augury I was wrong. Their last poll accurately predicted WI, GA, OH, PA, NC, probably AZ, and NV when you consider only the Republican vote share as stated in my theory.
I would consider my House projection correct. Things are still in the air and we got Boebert. Also I was right about the majorities, probably. I expect Dems to get closer than -13.
Dems will max at 52 seats and 51 is more likely. I guess I will take the L on that, even though 53 is even or better compared to most predictions.
All in all I'm happy with what I predicted. My original theory was right but I deviated, and projections of a lost Senate or a Dem wipeout were totally discredited.
Florida though lmao. That is a Kentucky level result. So red.
I considered that, and just went with the underlying prediction as there's insufficient predictions to compare usefully and calibrate percentage accuracy. I thought about a disclaimer at the top, but it was already way too long, but I can still add one.
To tell you the absolute truth, this video about why it makes sense to cook a turkey in pieces got a lot more response than why there wasn't violence at the polls.. Possibly of interest to rationalists because it's an example of goal factoring-- is that Norman Rockwell image of bringing a whole turkey to the table and carving it worth it compared to having a turkey cook faster and the ability to cook dark meat and light meat separately?
It's coming up to Thanksgiving for you in America and then Christmas for everyone else as well. Of course we're going to be interested in 'best ways of cooking a turkey' videos over "same old dog and cat partisan politics fighting". I'm starting to look for recipes online myself (turkey generally comes out okay, not too dry and not burned, but I'm wanting to spread my wings now that I've got the basics down and try something a little more adventurous).
EDIT: The video looks good so far, and I'm glad he does the "idiot's guide" version about removing the giblets in the plastic bag inside. One year I totally forgot to do this and only remembered while the bird was three-quarters cooked. I have no idea what guardian angel of the kitchen was looking out for my idiot self, but by some fluke the plastic did *not* melt inside the bird, it was *not* undercooked, and nobody got food poisoning or plastic poisoning. But ever since ALWAYS LOOK INSIDE AND CHECK, DON'T ASSUME.
I think a lot of people avoid talking about politics, in order to avoid conflict or just because they aren't interested. But food is relevant to everyone.
People were worried about violence at the polls. It didn't happen. Any theories?
Was the possibility of violence actually a matter of excessive concern about some people who were talking big? This might have an implication that Republicans are less violent than Democrats expect.
As a rough estimate, there are some 75 million Republicans in the US. If as little as one in a million of them had chosen violence yesterday, it would have been a very bad day.
Was the punishment of January 6 rioters enough to get potentially violent people to think hard about whether they wanted to wreck their lives?
I don't believe there could have been adequate protection against violence at polling places to have prevented a determined attempt.
I've posted this to Facebook, and haven't gotten very interesting replies, though one person mentioned significant police at their polling place, and another claimed that violence at the polls has been predicted for years (possibly decades) but never happens.
I'm hoping for some discussion about what went wrong with the prediction, and by that, I mean something more sophisticated that the left generally gets things wrong.
Among other factors already discussed, literally suicidal martyrs are exceedingly rare, and even go-to-prison-for-twenty-years martyrs are fairly rare. If it's not going to accomplish anything useful, and it is going to get them killed or thrown in prison for twenty years, virtually nobody will do it.
Now, maybe there's a hundred thousand Americans who, if they believed a hundred thousand Americans were going to storm the polling places with AR-15s and deliver the vote to the Trumpublicans, would want to be a part of that. With a hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand guns, they might pull it off. And with a hundred thousand Spartaci, the police won't be able to hunt them all down afterwards even if it does fail.
But here and now, after years of Qanon failing to deliver, after 1/6 fizzled out ineffectually, after Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo persistently didn't happen, each of those hundred thousand is pretty sure that the other 99,999 are going to keep wimping out. So the plan where they and their two buddies grab their AR-15s and hit the local polling place, is just going to be pointless ineffectual suicide.
That's a coordination problem that requires a lot of suicidal martyrs, or a very successful conspiracy, or a very public recruitment effort, to pull off. The Trumpublicans didn't have any of those things this time around, and that's not likely to change.
I think you're underestimating how easy adequate protection is. While the January 6th riot involved several hundred people, a lot of the most concerning issues were being driven by a core of 10-30 Oathkeepers and Proud Boys. These 10-30 individuals did a big chunk of the violence and virtually all the targeted attacks on office holders and officials. I think it's very plausible they were a major contributing factor as how violent a lot of the more "casual" protestors became.
So basically, the theory is that police and the FBI have gotten better at targeting "rablerousers", ie high commitment individuals with a real interest in violent/anti-government action. For people on the right-wing, this would probably be the equivalent of Antifa in a large BLM rally. You don't need to stop a large violent mob, you only need to isolate and remove a few dozen individuals to turn a potentially violent mob into a bunch of protestors. Conversely, removing or intimidating/isolating right-wing groups like the Oathkeepers and Proudboys from general rightwing protests could be all that's needed to prevent violence.
I did a pretty deep dive back on DSL on the Oathkeepers and distinguishing different groups at 1/6 by the severity of what they got charged with, you can go through it here: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5326.0.html
Given the very local nature of most polling places, and how self-segregated people tend to be (red vs. blue counties and such) I think anyone contemplating election violence would necessarily be facing all the problems of attacking while outnumbered and inside hostile territory. Which might give pause to anyone even halfway sane, and likely exceeds the logistical skills of most completely insane people.
My haven't-gathered-any-evidence take is that the January 6 riot was less about the election and more a reaction to the country-wide BLM riots throughout 2020. The feeling was that the left had turned to violent oppression, and that had won them the presidency, so the right had their own violent rally. you won't see that level of election violence again from the right unless you also have that level of pre-election violence from the left. For now, the genie's back in the bottle.
I think "the democrats are stealing the presidential election through mass fraud and all nonviolent means of stopping them have been exhausted" is a much more convincing reason to riot than "left-wing protesters have been rioting and the media have been taking their side". Honestly, if you believe the former proposition then rioting is a rational course of action that isn't in need of further psychological explanation.
Even before the 2020 racial unrest plenty of people (more than stormed the Capitol) believed that covid was an establishment hoax, a belief which was far more absurd than the big lie. No matter how well you treat people, some proportion of them will believe dumb conspiracy theories. The thing that made the 2020 election result in so much more violence than previous ones was that the charismatic president fully backed the idea that the election had been stolen.
I don't think most people who violated mask ordinances, refused to social distance in urban areas were treated well. I also don't think they deserved to be treated well. Much in the same way i dont think people who refuse to shower, dont wipe their ass, or violate other societal norms deserve the pleasantries we reserve for people who do. Also, the qualified experts seemed to think it would be better for everyone involved if we just follwed their safety precautions for a little while.
However, in rural areas where science denial is more common place you were likely to be scoffed at for wearing a mask or worse for getting a vaccine, that is a safe and effective way to prevent the spread of COVID.
> This might have an implication that Republicans are less violent than Democrats expect.
> Was the punishment of January 6 rioters enough to get potentially violent people to think hard about whether they wanted to wreck their lives?
I'd say it's these two. People usually overestimate how awful their political opponents are, and deterrence works. (And also, the January 6th riot completely failed to change the outcome of the election.)
>As a rough estimate, there are some 75 million Republicans in the US. If as little as one in a million of them had chosen violence yesterday, it would have been a very bad day.
Wrong category. There may be some 75 million Republicans, but a fair share of them are in states that are either too blue or too red, where, even if you believe fraud is commited, it would not change the result, and therefore they have no pragmatic reason to act.
The other part of the answer is that R are very civil, and that jan6 wasn't, in fact, an insurrection, and that people expecting widespread violence were, in fact, "getting off on their own supply".
Modeling error. In a very general kind of way, the right don't engage in "partial violence" at a social level; you don't punch somebody unless you intend to kill them, at which point you should shoot them. Violence at the polls would be "partial violence", in the sense that it is an effort to use violence to try to shape the system from within, instead of destroying the system outright.
Some on the right describe this as "Violence as a switch vs violence as a dial".
"You don't punch somebody unless you intend to kill them" This is just not true I have punched people that I did not intend to kill. As have many others. If you have never had the misfortune of being in a violent environment I suggest you not speculate about its nature.
It's a fairly lossy generalization, granted. Even to those whom it applies, it's not like right-wing people do not in fact ever accidentally kill people or get in bar fights; they are not, in fact, perfectly emotionally stable.
Notice that the right's model of what happened with J6 involved outside agents deliberately whipping the crowd into a frenzy - but the crowd failing to maintain that frenzy after the provoking individuals were no longer present, and started milling about and taking selfies. Also notice it's the same model they had for how BLM protests kept turning into riots - antifa agents came in and incited violence.
Which I think shows that they're not necessarily any better at modeling the left's approach to violence; like, I don't think the right can even really understand the idea of a halfhearted assassination attempt.
2) I'll say I'm less concerned about violence at the polls and more concerned about violence post-election once people know what happened. I think the odds of significant (organized with more than 20 people involved, or more than 5 separate individual actions) post election violence this election is ~10%.
So previously I predicted that the polls would lean suddenly rightward leading up the election, and that there would be a general right-wing victory.
So I got the first part right, but I'd say my prediction overall was wrong. And even if I do end up getting the second part right, at this point, it will be by accident rather than good planning, because looking at the little data that is coming in - it looks like young people actually voted.
I, uh, didn't expect that. And I'm pretty sure neither did the pollsters. Because I'm reasonably certain what will come out in short order is exactly my mistake: A misallocation of likely voters as we approached the election.
I think it comes down to that abortion was enough to bridge some of the enthusiasm gap, but we'll see.
That's all, really. Got a thing wrong, here's why I think I got it wrong, in case any of you find that helpful.
Legal question: A friend of mine recently took the LSAT, but on the day scores were released he received, instead of a score, a notice saying that the LSAT companied believed he had cheated, & were investigating the situation, and it might be up to 4 months til he learned the outcome. If they conclude he cheated he will not be allowed to take the LSAT again. Friend has learned from an online forum for LSAT-takers that LSAT never shares info about why they suspect cheating, and how they arrived at ultimate conclusion that person was guilty or not guilty.
So my question: Can this possibly be legal? My friend did not cheat, and if testing company decides he did and locks him out of taking LSAT again his life & life plans will be greatly damaged. The only forms of cheating that are possible could not be proven through viewings of the video of his taking the exam -- at most a viewer might see something that would make them suspect cheating. It seems to me it should at least be possible to insist that my friend be allowed to retake the exam under conditions where whatever form of cheating they suspect could not possibly be carried out -- let's say in some setting where his pockets or whatever are checked beforehand & someone sits in the room watching him the whole time he's taking the test. Those of you who understand the legal issues here: Do you agree it would be possible legally to force the test company to allow a re-take of this kind?
A couple additional details: My friend took several old versions of the LSAT in prep for taking the real thing, and got perfect scores on some and near-perfect on the rest, so it is likely that he achieved the same on the actual test. It seems likely that the testing company would be particularly suspicious of someone who scored a perfect 180, and we suspect that's why he is now under investigation. That's understandable, but this sure is shabby treatment of someone who worked hard to prepare, then managed to do better than 99.9% of the other test-takers.
Schools aren't required to respect the LSAT, and apparently various schools are dropping the LSAT requirement, so a court would probably tell your friend to apply to those schools.
Thank you. It does say in the info about appeal process that he can have a hearing, and bring counsel. Can you make any suggestions about how to identify someone who would do a good job representing him? Neither he nor I know people in that world.
He *could* go to a law school that does not require the LSAT, but this guy worked his ass off to get into the score range where he was by the time he took the LSAT this time. A perfect score, or a score within a point or 2 of that, will guarantee you a full scholarship at a mid-range law school, pretty much guarantees admission to Harvard or other high-prestige school, and is likely to get a person some financial aid even at Harvard. So going to a law school that does not require the LSAT would mean giving up a couple hundred thousand dollars in scholarships OR the many advantages that go with attending a top-tier law school.
I know him well, and am positive he did not cheat. But setting aside my opinion, which is actually irrelevant to everybody involved except me, it just seems crazy that they might just conclude that he is cheating. There are only 3 ways of cheating, and none of them would be obvious to a person observing him taking the test. None of them would make an open and shut case, I mean . At most the video could have captured him doing something that looks suspicious. "His hair looks dyed -- maybe the person taking the test is not him but a hired look-alike." "He has a funny way of stopping and blinking every so often. Could this be a signal to a collaborator that he needs help answering a question?"
I've got no advice for going forward, I'm just pulling stuff off of Google.
From their Determinations section:
"Because intent is not an element of the findings, no inquiry into or determination of intent shall be made. Determinations about the seriousness of an instance of misconduct or irregularity are left to individual law schools and other affected parties."
So, even if they find an irregularity, it might not matter, depending on how common the irregularity is. The school might be willing to wave it off.
Yug, just wanted to let you know that the LSAT apparently thought better of accusing my friend of cheating, and went ahead and sent him his score: 180. He achieved a perfect score. That's probably why they were suspicious. 99.9th percentile starts at 178. He's one in something like 50,000! and can probably get into any law school now.
FYI Scott, your Moloch article links to http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html however the domain has been squatted, so the link took me to a “you have won a Samsung phone” page. I am guessing you know, and that maintaining old links is a burden, but just in case you didn’t! Cheers
Hopefully not, but even so, the Dnipro is a heck of a defensive barrier - kicking the Russians out of their only toehold on the western side of it still does a lot to improve the Ukrainian position, even if it's full of mines and they can't push across it or use it economically.
I'd expect that too. In their shoes I'd probably push up to the Dnipro, then relocate forces to Donetsk and Zaporozia and try to push South to the coast.
A southern thrust to Melitopol or Mariupol could strand huge numbers of Russian troops in Kherson and Crimea with only the Kerch bridge for supply - a bridge that is both currently out of commission and in range of ATACMS from Melitopol (if the US were to agree to supply them).
(a) fighting retreat/orderly withdrawal which allows Russia to evac their equipment to prepared defenses on the Eastern bank of the Dnipro like UI mentioned below; or,
(b) evacuating civilians in preparation to dig in for high-intensity urban fighting to try to hold the Western bank of the Dnipro.
I've seen both theories put out there, and my belief tends towards (a), but it's not a strong lean.
Both of these, and if the Ukrainian General Staff's assessment is correct, the Russians are trying to bait them into a premature urban assault in Kherson - basically what the Ukrainians did to Russia in Severodonetsk over the summer. Taunt them, bleed them, then pull back your own people in good order before it's too late.
The Ukrainians are less likely to fall for it, and having a bunch of demoralized conscripts with a minimally-crossable river behind them is going to make it hard for the Russians to pull off any of their part.
So today is election day. Some people are gonna look smart and some will look very foolish. Hard to say who is who right now. Some very weird stuff going on this election. Win or lose I'm ready to be done, though. Election day is gonna suck for me regardless cause I have some weird jaw pain that is not going away. Well unless I chug Tylenol. Florida is look pretty rough in the EDay vote but old Republicans vote early in Miami so it doesn't say a ton yet.
Sounds like you were predicting something outside general expectations. Either a larger than expected red wave or the opposite. So you were either correct, or extra super wrong!
I don’t understand your comment. Are you calling this a larger than expected red wave? Axiom had a theory that put the blue margin substantially higher than most others had it, FYI.
Popular expectations were for a moderate red wave. In particular, betting markets, which had a Republican Senate at 70+ percent. I remembered an Axioms comment that suggested his predictions were different than the betting markets, but he did not reveal them. So either he was predicting larger or smaller red wave. I think you could classify these results as smaller than expected than red wave, possibly much smaller. So I was curious if Axioms was either extra correct, or extra wrong.
I just realized he has his Twitter linked in his profile and it's pretty clear the answer is he was extra correct. Hope he won some money in those markets!
Still not sure I understand your terminology. Seems like the boring "trust 538" is the strategy looking solid now and I don't see why Axioms would qualify as "extra correct". I actually have a hard time imagining any position that could be called "extra correct" with this kind of middle-of-the-line result and I'm also not even sure what you think Axioms' position was. A Republican senate is still definitely in the running and we could easily not know until Georgia runoffs again, so let's not grade that too early.
I found Axioms final senate predictions in Open Thread 248. Here they are:
Bennet +12
Murray +11
Kelly +9
Hassan +9
Fetterman +7
Warnock +5
CCM +4
Beasley +3
Barnes +2
Ryan +2
Demmings +1
We don't have results for all of these, but Hassan and Bennet look on-the-money, Fetterman, Warnock, Barnes, Beasly are too blue and Ryan, Demmings are way too blue.
So the issue with Demmings was that I didn't have a Trafalgar poll. He never polled. So I really didn't know what was happening there. So that prediction was not really safe.
The final Trafalgar poll in each state shifted heavily from the ones that existed when I made my predictions so I shouldn't have hedged and shoulda just taken those results.
I'm pretty happy with Bennet, Murray, Hassan, Barnes and Fetterman. It looks like Fetterman will win by 5 when the last votes come in. Hassan appears to be dead on. She's currently up by 9. Barnes is going to win or lose by ~1% based on current projections so I count that as a win for me. Hard to say with CCM and Kelly. Kelly is currently up ~6. Counting super slow.
The final Trafalgar poll got Walker, Johnson, Budd, Oz, and Vance correct but I didn't change my predictions to match. That's on me.
What appears to have happened with Warnock is that DeKalb, Clayton, and Fulton had anemic election day voting. I was expecting 4.2 million total but it is more like 4mil.
In any case my mistake was not trusting Trafalgar enough.
Then I’ll reserve all judgement until final tallies are in. I’m relieved that “Axioms is correct” is even on the consideration this morning. Thought this (and the democrats) would be dead on arrival.
Any recommendations for interesting an entertaining stories/books/videos/movies where the protagonist has a strong sense of duty? Deontological ethics are pretty far from the mind of the average teenager, I find...
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series might work. The main protagonist, Miles, can be a handful, but he's grounded by his duty as part of the Vor caste. (And it gets especially good when he starts coming ungrounded, and then has to deal with the results.)
The Aubrey/Maturin nautical adventure novels by Patrick O'Brian, and the movie with Russel Crowe and Paul Bettany, give you a double dose of this in that Aubrey and Maturin have strong but distinct senses of duty. And are solid friends, and entertaining to watch if you're into that sort of thing.
I love these books. In the same vein I would suggest that when it comes to a sense of duty that the Horatio Hornblower novels are perhaps even stronger.
But less interesting because there's only Hornblower's perspective on duty, and zero chance that he's going to shirk it. Aubrey and Maturin are going to have to come to an agreement that isn't entirely aligned with one of them at least.
Well, “interesting” is a moveable feast so I will demure. I have read both series twice now (maybe thrice) and find both of them thoroughly interesting.
I would disagree that there is only hornblowers perspective on his sense of duty but the internal wrestling between duty and his sense of other possibilities is front and center. He’s very hard on himself.
Other people’s reactions to him give a strong sense of an outside perspective on his sense of duty, to me. He actually does CHEAT on his wife in one of the final volumes and ends up as a rather bitter old man who has spent his entire life at war, lost all his comrades, and at a loss to make any sense of that.
Aubrey is a more elemental character, less prone to introspection, and much more colorful. When he gets confused with himself he generally acts it out, rather than having a long chat with himself.
Hornblower is a rationalist as well, which should not go unmentioned here. Loves Whist, finds listening to music painful, and is always quick to chastise himself for not making the perfect move. The short story about how he handles being challenged to a duel by a fellow who is a much better shot than he is very amusing.
Pretty much all of Rachel Neumeier, but her "Tuyo" series is the first one that comes to mind. The protagonist is introduced to us offering himself as a willing (if not exactly ecstatic about it) sacrifice to his tribe's enemy, with full expectation that he will be tortured to death in order to expiate the issue between the two peoples and settle the immediate conflict.
As his role as protagonist suggests, things don't go as he expected. But duty and the need to resolve conflicting ones remains a strong throughline.
Any of John Le Carre's George Smiley novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy being the obvious starting point). Duty here to both country and organization, and what it means in a very gray operating environment.
The Chesscourt book series deals extensively with the burden of duty, as well as with coming to terms with the consequences of one's actions. A bit of a warning - though the series starts out pretty straightforward, it becomes really heavy in later installments (in more than one sense). Also, don't read the unpublished final installment.
Do you mean something specific by duty? Because don't many (most?) popular heroes fall into that category?
Harry Potter. James Holden. Ted Lasso. Superman/Spiderman/etc "With great power...". Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh most kids cartoons. Steven Universe. Avatar the Last Airbender. Anime too. Doctor/lawyer shows too often have characters with strong codes/duty. Scrubs. Most of Star Trek. Captain Picard and Captain Pike come to mind as the strongest examples.
All of Terry Pratchett is basically about sticking hard to your moral code. Dresden Files. Stormlight Archive.
Finch in Person of Interest.
Political shows. President Bartlett in the West Wing is over the top super duty focused.
I wouldn't say "all of Terry Pratchett". Rincewind, for example, does not seem to fit.
I'd say all of Terry Pratchett's Sam Vimes books. Of those, I'd say "Night Watch" is probably the best. (The book is Pratchett's take on "A Tale of Two Cities", if it helps.) My other favorite is "Thud!", but I understand this might be too fantastic if you're not that much into fantasy.
Pratchett's "Night Watch" is a really good read. If you are yet to read it, I envy you.
Cherryh's _The Paladin_ is my favorite and I think qualifies, at least after the male protagonist is dragged back into the world by the female protagonist.
Urban fantasy protagonists tend to have a strong sense of duty-- it's an easy way to get them into trouble.
Seanan McGuire's October Daye has a strong sense of duty. The first book is _Rosemary and Rue_. I don't remember whether she develops a stronger sense of duty as the series goes on.
I have not read it yet, but from what I've heard, Augustus by John Williams is an epistolary historical fiction novel that explores duty as a central theme.
I'm not sure it is exactly what you are looking for, but the protagonist of Naomi Novik's Scholomance series (three books) is a teenager whose behavior is very much constrained by what she thinks it is right to do. Also, they are very good books.
Speaking of Naomi Novik, her Temeraire series fits the "protagonist with a strong sense of duty" very well (classical An Officer And A Gentleman), although he gets challenged quite a lot.
More a sense of what she thinks is the *wrong* thing to do. She spends most of the story unclear about what the right thing to do is, but knowing perfectly well that the one solution clearly available to her (kill them all, let God sort them out, light off a volcano under what's left) is just plain wrong even if she can't see any other solution that ends with her alive.
Consider her seminar in saving freshmen. Judged not by what she says her principles are but by what she does, it is constrained by what she ought to do. So is her killing of the first Mawmouth.
Throwaway account to comment on my ban, it's easy to guess which one of those banned was my main.
The reason I do this is *not* to go full troll and flagrantly disrespect your, Scott's, dominion. I have a lot of respect for you, which is precisely why I write this feedback. The issues of moderation and bannning seems to be "in the air" and on your mind recently with your recent posts and the twitter buyout playing out, so I sought to offer you the (as far as I know) unique perspective of someone you banned. No part of this should ever be construed as me bargaining or asking for an account unban.
1- The most puzzling thing about this for me is why now? 2 months is a really long time for me, is it not for everybody ?
This is relevant because fast enforcement of rules is good.
1-a- From the point of view of the banned, it feels unfair (an entirely different thing from actually being unfair) to come after me after I have cooled off. If you have banned me in the 5-10 days interval after posting that rant, I would still be pissed, but hey, I had it coming. While not exactly a pleasant analogy, imagine this a fist fight. I throw a punch and you come at me 6 hours later with a bunch of your friends and give me a piece of your mind, harsh but fair. But I throw a punch and you come at me 2 months later ? Hmmmmm.
1-b- If you don't give a flying heck about the banned, (some of) the rest of your community is probably latching on bannings as a useful signal. It's a bit like how programmers learn a new programming language : write what they think to be a valid program, throw it at a program responsible for saying what's a valid program, and recieve yelling in return about why this is not - in fact - a valid program. Rinse and repeat till no yelling. Back to the object level : the programmers here are the commenteriats. The programs are the comments. And you're the oracle responsible for saying which programs are valid and which are nonsense. A 2-month-long feedback cycle is degrading this useful signal by a whole amount of a lot. Is this intentional so people spend more time thinking about what to write instead of just hitting 'post' and seeing what happens ?
2- The particular comment you banned contains, right after downthread, a semi-apology to the person who reported me, which he semi-accepted by replying back in kind. I don't want a cookie for this, but it feels like it should count for something. Apologies are hard, they are costly, they contain tacit admissions of a lot of bad things about the one apologizing. To put that in the most transactional and entitled way possible : What did my softened tone later in that thread buy me ? Is the answer nothing ? *Should* the answer be nothing ? Gradients are lovely, they allow you to be mostly wrong but still make progress. 0/1 kindness may be hard for me towards a particular class of people, it would be cool if I can be mean then retract and make amends later.
3- This is simply a matter of perception, but I can't shake the feeling that you're biased in favor of you-know-who. This is probably wrong, but wrong perceptions still can and indeed does affect conversations. There is a very easy solution for this : pick the most anti-you-know-who person that have ever anti-you-know-who-ed in your close circle, and make them responsible for the final green light on a random 50% of the people you intend to ban.
4- There is something awefully school-principal-like and preachy about posting the names of the banned. What purpose does it serve ? The message "A lot of people were banned, tread carefully" can equally be sent by stating the number of bans, not the actual names. If the content of the comments serve as a useful signal (as in 1-b-), then maybe you can just copy paste it into a pastebin or a github repo without the name attached. I'm not "ashamed" of my comment, I just object to the forced-group-consensus aspect of highlighting the badness of my comment as if it was a fact or an uncontroversial example to be heeded.
To temper this very tame criticism, I reacted positively to you banning the comment that directly insulted an actual person, and not the comment that just said a bunch of very naughty words that a bunch of you-know-whos said shouldn't be said. It might be a minuscule thing, it might have been entirely a noise artifact that I'm reading weird things into, but it really proves for me that you take moderation seriously as a tool to make the prisoner's dilemma of internet conversations bend more towards cooperation, rather than merely a synonym for "a button I can use to efficiently shutdown people I don't want to speak". Moderation Is Different From Censorship indeed.
I like your moderation, Scott, and I like you in general, and I learn(t) a lot of things from reading you think about conflict-resolution, free speech, governance and whatnot. 1..4 are just "UX" issues that I think it would benefit you greatly and the community to think more about.
Here's the SQLite blessing :
> May you do good and not evil.
> May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
> May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Have a great (*Checks California time*) afternoon.
I remember your original... quite frankly, rant, and I want to respond to some of the things you said.
1a/b- On point. I know Scott is a busy person, but he should really place more weight on doing this more than bi-monthly, or otherwise set up some system whereby it happens more frequently. The signal value of bans is reduced by the long delay.
Then again, the "Challenge" threads seem to be an attempt to do just that, so maybe he already recognizes this?
2- Valid points. Apologies are costly, you should probably get some credit for them. That's probably the strongest argument for this to be a temp ban.
That said, you had a lot to apologize for in that thread, as Scott pointed your first comment alone was already toeing the line even before you posted the comment your were banned for.
(Also, not to put to fine a point on this, but that two months was enough time to cool down and delete or edit away any comment you *really* regretted, and escape the notice of the banhammer. That's somewhat of a contentious norm, though, so I can see why that wouldn't appeal to you, and obviously substack's UI sucks for finding old comments.)
3- This is what I really wanted to respond to, because I think you're wrong here. At least, maybe. I do not, in fact, "know who" you are referring to, or rather I am not sure, because you've directed ire at multiple groups. Wokesters? All progressives? Trans people? The new-world-order?
(Side note and observation: usually when the kind of people who throw slurs around start talking about a "you-know-who", they're talking about a specific ethnic group that Scott happens to belong to. I assume you are not referring to this group, so your vagueness really hurts you here)
If you meant "progressives", then... no, sorry. Lots of progressives go after Scott for being too biased *towards* anti-progressives and neoreactionaries in his comment sections. Scott is notably anti-woke. But beyond that, the replies you got should have told you that even the anti-progressives weren't on your side. Hell, a quick look suggests the *majority* of the people who replied to your post to offer criticism or caution were anti-progressives. One directly identified themselves as such and still explicitly told you your comment(s) didn't belong here. Even trebuchet disagreed with you, and having gotten into multiple, erm, friendly discussions with him, I can tell you *for certain* he is not biased toward progressives.
If you meant "trans people" (or whatever slur you want to use to describe them), or queer folks in general, then... maybe he's biased in the sense that he expects people to respect their basic dignity, and you arguing that it's actually correct to use slurs against them reveals a fairly substantial values dissonance in lowest bar for commenters that Scott sets. He would probably be right to ban you if you want the litmus test to be the "most anti-trans person he knows". I hope this is therefore not what you mean.
4- Scott's been pretty consistent about wanting to be transparent in his moderation. This is perfectly in line with that. Plus it's useful to see what crossed the line. As I said above, callbacks to point 1 are appropriate here though.
Opinion time: personally, I think that:
a) the amount of naked ire you put into your comments towards specific groups, and specifically
b) the priors that lead you to think you should be able to use any slurs without consequence (which, as far as I can tell, was one of the main things you were expressing the root comment complaining about being banned elsewhere)
c) (and, additionally) the assumption that this comment section is significantly biased *towards* progressives
...lead to you being a bad fit for contributing to this community unless you made some significant adjustments, and Scott was probably correct in his decision.
I didn't really intend to use this account for a back-and-forth thread to honor my claim that this isn't ban-challenging or trolling, but you assume a heck of a lot about me and I really can't resist setting you straight.
> I can see why that wouldn't appeal to you
Good sight, I hate deleting comments or controversial things in general. It will make replies meaningless and confusing, it's a cowardly way to conduct yourself as opposed to taking responsibility and leaving a record of what you once said and did, and it's generally a bad way to apologize (unless it's done at the specific request of the party that I wanted to apologize to).
>because you've directed ire at multiple groups
I did ? They are all really the same to me, people who desperately want to exert power and founded a religion to do just so. You would be surprised at how much this homogenizes a vast array of ideologies and people into one big melting pot that I intensely hate so much.
>Wokesters? All progressives? Trans people? The new-world-order?
That last one probably doesn't exist. From the other 3, select the subset that matches the melting-pot predicate, and that's your answer.
>usually when the kind of people who throw slurs around start talking about a "you-know-who", they're talking about a specific ethnic group that Scott happens to belong to. I assume you are not referring to this group
You don't really have to assume, do you now :) ? you think an anti-jew ("anti-semite" is inaccurate, plenty of people other than jews are semites) would begin and end his comment by declaring his respect for and sharing a beautiful blessing for the jewish blogger he's commenting at ? you hurt my feelings, I can hate much better than this.
In truth, I used "you-know-who" *just* because I think it's irrelevant who AHG hates or was railing against before he was banned. I didn't want the mental RAM of a comment reader to be occupied with AHG's prejudices, AHG's prejudices are irrelevant and uninteresting in this particular context PHG is talking in. I promised to comment neutrally about the ban in general and why it could have been done better, and that's why I tried to do just that.
The 2 paragraphs after that has a lot of claims and assumptions about me that I would absolutely love to challenge and contradict, but as PHG I can't let myself descend into reiterating AHG's worldview yet another time, so maybe I can satisfy you and myself with some bullet points that I think to be true :
a- I don't hate anybody who doesn't hate me or a value I deeply cherish
b- If anything, I'm biased in favor of underdogs and outcasts, which *sometimes* intersects with groups you mentioned
c- Dominant religions love to claim victimhood and persecution because it justifies how they do exactly this to disbelievers
d- Sometimes performatively being outrageous is good to normalize disrespect and open challenge for a totalitarian ideology BUT
e- It's wrong and ill-thought to do this at ACX
e-1- Because Scott doesn't like it
e-2- Because this way of speech and argumentation heavily mirrors those who do it while actually meaning it, and it's difficult to get across that my motives are different
> transparent in his moderation
Copying the contents of the comments without the name would still achieve that, but points 3..4 are somewhat subjective and it's okay for me if people differ.
>the amount of naked ire you put into your comments towards specific groups
Is it bad because it's ire or because it's naked ? and is there such a thing as an upper limit on hate if we grant that the target of hate deserve it ? (those questions are not rhetorical)
> the priors that lead you to think you should be able to use any slurs without consequence (which, as far as I can tell, was one of the main things you were expressing the root comment complaining about being banned elsewhere)
This is wrong on several levels. I wasn't complaining about being banned from HackerNews, I was using it as an anecdote to open a discussion about how a modern religion that loves claiming persecution so much is actually a fairly powerful and invading force. I wasn't banned from HN because I used slurs, I was banned because I lost my temper at a commenter gloating about a really really bad thing (in a way that doesn't involve using slurs). I'm fairly rule-abiding in general and I don't value the ability to use slurs (and I'm not comfortable when I do it unironically), but - like I said above - I believe one ideology has gained so much undeserved power and a say over who says and does what over the internet that it's sometimes acceptable to say whatever vile words necessary *just* to spite them, 0 other reasons, just that.
Was I thoughtless and too anger-drunk to realize that ACX is not a good place for this ? Yes. But am I wrong ? of course I can be, but nobody has ever convinced me that I am.
>the assumption that this comment section is significantly biased *towards* progressives
I don't hold this assumption as true. Heck, AHG got away with unironically saying sheer raw 21st century heresy and he wouldn't be allowed to finish his sentence anywhere else on the vast majority of the internet (including this community's discord channel, which is still heretic). No, this place is as heretic and heretic-welcoming as it can ever be given the various constraints, and I love it, like I love all heretics and those who support them. I just said I have a slight feeling that Scott is *juuuust a tiny bit* biased in favor of a group he once used to call home, an understandable perception, and I said in the same breath that I suspect I'm mostly wrong, but I still can't help the feeling.
> you being a bad fit for contributing to this community unless you made some significant adjustments, and Scott was probably correct in his decision.
I hate 'bad fit' because it reminds me of HR speak so much, but that conclusion is fair. Just say I suck :D. Remember "No part of this should ever be construed as me bargaining or asking for an account unban."? not empty filler or tactical cover, genuinely what I think. Scott was generous and gracious, and I *was* aggressive, for no good reason, anger can break me like that sometimes. Maybe a time out can reset that. And I'm working on that. Like James S.A. Corey put it (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10120236-the-magic-word-is-oops), the magic word is "oops", so oopsie daisey, it looks like I hecked up.
I just want to say, hang in there. I've got anger problems too, and I sympathize. Some people say that anger motivates them or helps them focus, and I wish I knew what they were talking about, whether it's even the same feeling. For me, it just gets in the way, and prevents me from doing anything productive about the causes.
But what about this, AHG?: You sound like someone who really craves for people to get you. You sound deeply angry, hurt and pained when people do not understand what you are trying to get across. Instead, they misunderstand and argue and ban you! I'm the same way. It *really* bothers me when people don't hear what I am trying to say. It's especially painful and infuriating if they think the point I was making is silly and stupid. I want to write and write and write until it's very clear and there's no way for them to misunderstand. Sometimes I do that. I want to do something to make them feel like shit, the way they made me feel -- I hardly ever to that these days.
But here's what you are not taking into account: How clearly you write is only one determinant of whether people understand your points. The other determinant is whether something is interfering with them giving your ideas their full attention. And in the case of your communications here, YOU are doing something that interferes with people's listening: You are implying, or actually saying, that you are smart and independent and they are dumber than you and and not independent and in fact sort of hypnotized into believing various stupid culty ideas. And you are saying that you HATE the ideas and the cult, and that you do not feel bad about hating it, in fact you think that's the proper attitude to have. Once people grasp that you are basically calling them stupid conformist assholes, their ability to take in the rest of what you have to say is going to be severely limited. Maybe it should not be that way, and maybe if they were saints or zen masters it would not be. But with regular people, in real life, you are not going to get a good hearing if you tell the audience you are smart and right and they are assholes and wrong. They are all going to be sitting there feeling angry and misunderstood and thinking of rebuttals to what you are saying.
So you have to choose: Do you want to pour out your angry thoughts, and your certainty you are right and everyone else is wrong? Or do you want to be listened to? You can't have both.
Ok, AHG can sound like a Richard Dawkins (this is a bad thing) sometimes, it's the risk of denouncing any kind of conformity. Totalitarians hijack the agreebleness and rule-following subroutines of humans (normally good and necessary things with thousands of benign everyday uses), so that those against them have to fight the double whammy of both the material consequences they conjure and the psychological hurdle of calling lots of people wrong and imply all kinds of nasty things in the process (and the *material consequences* of that when\if people get pissed). In my case I thankfully don't have to fight any material consequences, but I still have to overcome the psychological hurdle, because - I will swear by whatever gods you happen to believe in or all of them - I don't like upsetting people.
How to solve this ? Needless to say, I myself mostly manage to not fall into the trap of thinking I'm more smart and independent than my religious peers or other people who believe differently from me. I offer this comment where I defend christians (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242/comment/9148010) and this one (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-244/comment/9460877) where I defend muslims as evidence. I *was* a conformist many many times in the past, I was once a muslim. I had a progressive phase, if you can believe that. I make no effort to keep these things a secret too. How to better signal that when I rail against conformity I don't want you to hate the people doing it (as much as humanly possible) but rather hate the ugliness and unfairness of conformity itself ?
Kindness can't always be the answer, right ? All human languages evolved curse words and harsh ways of speech (citation needed, I don't actually know for sure if this is correct but sounds like it must be true). And neither is unkindness free or easy, people who choose it like AHG has to bear the cost of being disliked, being eye-rolled at, being mistaken for various people he doesn't share beliefs with (only words), and bad things like that. Oh, he's not a martyr, those are very minor nuisances he willingly chooses to bear, even the ban is not that much of a problem. I'm not defending AHG and I'm likely to never repeat his ways with the same aggressiveness again, but there is a very legitimate problem that he imagined himself solving.
I think you're sort of talking past what people are saying, PHG, and despite your protests I think you're still defending AHG's impulses, if not his methods.
You're certainly correct, kindness isn't always the correct answer, but AHG's methods weren't just anti-kind, Eremolalos effectively pointed out why they were actively ineffective - anti-winning (and therefore antirationalist). People are correct to associate that sort of thing anti-intellectualism and faux-intellectualism, because that's who they appeal to - they're good for getting retweets from the worst quintile of twitter who already agree with them, and not much else.
This is frustrating, because there *are* valid criticisms adjacent to what you're saying, you're just failing to express them. If you want to change people's minds, be clear on what you actually mean, give more substance to your criticism. Don't say "progressivism is a religion", be specific; here's some examples I think would be more effective while expressing what I think you meant:
- When you mean "woke", say woke. Don't tar all of progressives with the same brush (remember, the people who opposed slavery, segregation, sodomy laws, etc were progressives. They're right about some things). If you can make a distinction, you can get even members of the enemy faction to agree with you. "I disagree with progressives as a whole, but it's wokeism I really think is dangerous, and your should be worried too, for <reasons below>". *Especially* avoid automatically including people (trans, queer) in a group you hate just because of something (they're telling you) they can't change, that's textbook bigotry and renders your opinion worthless more quickly than anything else.
- Instead of calling it a religion, make comparisons, like I did, *between* Christian Morality and the movement, and then you can say, "you don't want to be a religion, you hate fundamentalists, you should be worried". If you think "religion" is an insult, don't use it as a slur, use it as a threat.
- Worried about how conformist it is, how authoritarian it is? ...Well, you're not going to get any friends by calling progressives that directly. In general, the left trends anti-authoritarian compared to the right, you'll never convince them otherwise. And everyone is conformist to their ingroup. But point out where conformism is getting in the way of their stated goals, point out real abuses of authority, and not just ones where it hurts your ingroup. "Actual progress on the things you claim to care about is taking a backseat to language policing" You'll get pushback, but as more power accrues people will start to notice you have a point.
I'm kind of rambling here, but I endorse each of these because *I know they work* because I've seen them work on me and other progressives. Hell, I'm even be comfortable with having the label "woke" applied to me, and I've still picked up a bunch of criticisms from Scott and others adjacent to him, as well as others in my tribe.
> They are all really the same to me, people who desperately want to exert power and founded a religion to do just so. You would be surprised at how much this homogenizes a vast array of ideologies and people into one big melting pot
I think this is a deeply reductive and antisocial view (god help me, I almost typed "problematic" here), and is probably a source of why you've had trouble interacting civilly with people. Calling people who are just asking you to respect their basic humanity and not call them slurs "a religion" is... well, to put it the way you requested, it sucks, and you suck for it :P
I also really dislike when people use the term "religion" when they mean "popular thing I disagree with". (It's the same as the people who say "all religion is a cult", it minimizes the harm done by *actual cults*). Just say "authoritarians", it's quicker, more accurate, and you don't sound like a conspiracy theorist.
(Also, any accusations of wokeism being a religion apply just as strongly for the alt-right/anti-wokeism, and if you don't recognize that you're being myopic and exposing your own bias)
That said, and since I love tangents, there is *some* truth to what you're saying, and it's that there's a troubling trend of wokesters that are directly importing purity tests from Christian Morality, because the US culture they grew up in is Christian By Default, even for atheists. To be clear, it's not because they're a religion, it's because they're
To take one of your own examples:
>Dominant religions love to claim victimhood and persecution because it justifies how they do exactly this to disbelievers
This is mostly a Christian Morality thing. (And to a lesser extent, the other Semitic religions). Sunday school does its best to instill a deep persecution complex into the most dominant religion out there, so this filters out as a realpolitikally useful tactic.
Maybe it is just convergent social evolution, but the coincidences are too strong there.
John McWhorter keeps calling SJ a religion, which seems very wrong to me. Or ineffective, since he seems to assume religions are necessarily wrong.
My problem is that when he talks about it, he seems reasonable, but I can never remember his arguments for calling SJ a religion. Can anyone do a summary of his argument?
I don't know whether McWhorter mentions this, but something I notice is that young people in a setting where it is highly desirable to be "woke" suffer a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. They are aware that many of their private thoughts and feelings do not pass the woke test, struggle mightily to have only politically correct inner reactions, and worry that they are bad people because they can't succeed at this. They remind me of people exposed to old-style Catholicism who are horrified by having secret sexual desires that if gratified would be sins, and fear going to hell because they cannot make themselves refrain from masturbating.
From what I can tell, he's mostly focused on aspects of SJ that resemble the worst aspects of early-to-medieval Catholicism and modern American evangelical Christianity. He focuses on belief vs. facts, on embracing contradictory thoughts instead of rational dialogue, and on the focus on ideological purity (heresy, apostasy, schisms, creeds, etc.). I haven't read it all, and my memory these days is unreliable, so that's not a complete list. I expect that he also gets into the SJ versions of original sin, and the extent to which SJ adds a moral valence to virtually every aspect of life.
I personally tend to agree with the overall point, using the extremely-vague theory that human behavior and human minds seem to have a "niche" that the thing we call "religion" slots into very nicely. (Memetic adaption, probably.) It's a thing that provides community, morality, a sense of the structure of the universe and one's place in it, helpful bits of wisdom, and various rituals that, besides whatever practical use they might have, serve to set the community apart and keep it together. Or maybe just some of those things (does the Rocky Horror Picture Show count?). And evangelism is a trait of many of the most successful religions. (This "definition" makes no claim to how useful or true any given "religion" is, or whether those are correlated with each other or with the overall success of the religion.) And I think that people who reject "traditional" religions without understanding this niche, end up vulnerable to "non-traditional" religions, which fill the niche without any mention of "sky fathers" or "nature spirits" or what have you. (Please forgive my overuse of quotation marks.)
For what it's worth, I'd classify some strains of communism as falling into this category, too. Some people's relationship to sexual kinks fits, too. And, frankly, I've seen it in the rationalist community, which is part of why I've held myself apart from it for years. Looking at some of Eliezer's writing, I think he was intentionally exploiting this niche. (And again, this is not meant to imply anything about how true or useful any of this stuff is.)
Wait what? Sunday school instills a persecution complex? That is...strange. I wonder what kind of Sunday school you went to? That which I went to in my youth had two goals 180 degrees from creating a persecution complex: (1) to teach you that you were lucky, blessed, a person who was about to receive the gift of understanding and the beeline to eternal salvation, The Good News, so to speak, and (2) to teach you that because of this fabulous good luck you should feel a sense of obligation to those less fortunate -- it was incumbent on you to spread the love you were receiving, to do good works, help those who were still stuck in some dark night of the soul.
I mean, most churches that run Sunday schools also run substantial charity operations, and if you participate in the church as much as going to Sunday school, you'll certainly feel the social pressure to contribute to the charity missions. How this is consistent with fostering a persecution complex I cannot see.
I'm overselling it a little; I was raised episcopalian, which is definitely on the liberal side of traditionalist protestantism.
That being said, there's a *lot* of bible stories about Jews and Christians being persecuted for their faith, and Jesus's persecution is kind of a huge overarching theme of the gospels that definitely gets a lot of focus - "they hated him because he spoke the truth" and all. Even if they don't *specifically* call attention to it, biblical teachings tend to subconsciously form a solid basis for a persecution complex through vibes alone, to say nothing of sermons that often reinforce that.
The church I grew up in (evangelical) heavily focused on the "in the world but not of it" and "take up your cross and follow me" aspects of the thing--the idea that if you are doing Christianity *right* you will inevitably be persecuted by the "world". This is an insidious thing to expose children to because it can make the feeling of being persecuted a pillar of self-worth and lead to either pointlessly oppositional behavior or delusions of persecution (or both) as a way to shore up this pillar.
Well, but that's just the A->B, B does not imply A fallacy, right? Do what's right where it's needed, and persecution follows, but persecution by itself doesn't say anything about the merits of what you were doing.
Speaking in defense of #4 I think "I banned X and here is the post so that the community can see my decision-making and evaluate my conduct" is a better approach than "I banned X and will not be sharing the basis for that decision because this is my website and it can be a star chamber if I want."
Neither approach is perfect, but between 2 imperfect options I think the former is better, and I imagine Scott thought it over and reached a similar conclusion.
Agreed. I think it provides the rest of us an indication of where Scott draws his lines, which in turn gives us a sense of when we're safe and when we're pushing the limits. Emergent boundary setting. If we never combine meat and dairy, we're safe, but if we do happen to feel the need, it's on our own heads to make sure that we're not accidentally boiling a calf in its mother's milk.
I believe the 2 month delay was Scott being busy, not on purpose. It would be really weird to decide to ban someone, wait for 2 months, and then actually do it. I agree that it is not optimal, but what can be done about it? Scott is going to be busy in random moments in future, that cannot be prevented.
Perhaps the capacity to give bans should be extended to other people? (Not sure if Substack allows that.) Perhaps the other moderators would ban for an unspecified period of time, and when Scott is available again, he decides whether the bad is permanent or temporary.
Posting the names is useful from my perspective. The comment threads are very long here; I do not want to scroll twenty pages again just to see who exactly was banned. There is a chance that I remember the name, so when Scott writes "XY is banned", I know. (And if I do not remember, that's what the links are for.)
Unfortunately, moderation does not scale well. If you do not delegate, it can become another full-time job. If you delegate, other people do not make the same subjective judgments you would, making the whole process more arbitrary.
I actually think a lot of moderation does scale pretty well if you do it carefully. I think a lot of the moderation could be done by an assistant -- maybe some grad student who'd prefer the job to being a TA (in my town they call themselves TF's, Totally Fuckeds). There are many situations in my field, psychology, where 2 peoples have to attain a high level of agreement about categorizing something. Agreement is measured by the correlation of their scores across a bunch of subjects. For instance in choosing subjects for a study, you might want people who are very depressed, but are not drug or alcohol abusers or psychotic. The proper way to do this assessment is to write out detailed criteria for judging degree of depression, and presence/absence of substance abuse and psychosis, and then have 2 or more raters interview people, rate them following the guidelines, then compare answers, & discuss disagreements with each other and with the person who wrote the guide until they are able to categorize subjects with scores that correlate .85 or better. I have been trained to do that in a couple settings. It is hard work, but definitely do-able.
And Scott's criteria are pretty clearly spelled out. I doubt it would take him long to train a grad student to follow them pretty well. Or what if some of us, as a group, compiled for Scott the beginnings of a manual for judging posts? The ideal manual would have clear-cut, stellar examples of each category of acceptable or unacceptable posts, as well as some commentary about edge cases of each. We could use posts banned so far as examples of various kinds of unacceptable posts.
It’s hard for me to imagine Scott turning the moderation decisions entirely over to an assistant, but, Scott, if you’re listening, what about having an assistant make a first pass — identify the low hanging fruit, i.e. comments that pretty clearly pass, and those that pretty clearly don’t. They could also mark comments they think are on the border of some category and hard to call balls or strike on.
"Or what if some of us, as a group, compiled for Scott the beginnings of a manual for judging posts?"
Nope. Not unless you to start a real hair-pulling, knock-down, drag-out fight. For every person going "X is definitely a bannable offence", there will be another person going "X is harmless". And no three people will agree on the exact definition of X itself. Then we'll have the accusations of "You only want to ban X to get rid of your outgroup/political enemies/that guy you had a row with about what wine goes with which cheese" and *some* of those accusations will even be true.
I much prefer the solitary decision-making power of the Reign of Terror to rule by committee.
You know, I agree that there's something not right about banning someone for a post they put up 2 mos. ago. It's a bit unfair. There's much less chance they will learn from being banned, because they're so far out from the state of mind that led them to write the offending post that they're not going to be able to tag that state of mind as one indicating it's maybe not a good time to post. Also, in the succeeding 2 months, they may have changed their ways. And if they have not changed their ways, waiting 2 mos. to take action means all of us get subjected to 2 more months, probably 20 or more helpings, of whatever they're dishing out.
But all of that went away with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Whatever replaces the Helsinki Accords, formally or de facto, Europe is in a new world now.
After watching the video... yeah, it's interesting how not long ago the military superpowers seemed like: #1 USA, #2 Russia, #3 China (or maybe #2 China and #3 Russia), #4 etc. not that important...
and suddenly it seems like #1 USA, #2 China, #3 Europe (including Ukraine), #4 etc. not that important; Russia probably still among the top 10, but who cares...
and Europe is mostly like "how the fuck did I get here? do I even want to be here?" :D
Conventional military power yes, but Russia still has that huge nuclear arsenal.
It seems like military power is largely downstream of economic productivity. The US' dominant position in the world for so long was largely based on our being extremely wealthy. China seems to be following that path. (Europe and Japan, for historical reasons, didn't follow that path so much post-WW2, but may do that more in the future.) Russia is a poor, badly run country; it doesn't have a huge economy to pump into its military, and the level of corruption in the military and whole society seems to have meant that even the wealth it did pump into its military was mostly spent on dachas and fancy cars and mistresses and such, rather than on actually having an effective military.
What's interesting is that the USSR was also a pretty poor country, and in many ways even worse-run than Russia. But it was apparently able to keep its military from being eaten from the inside by corruption--I'm not quite sure why.
It seems like the really critical question w.r.t. Russia is about whether they're capable of fixing the rot in their military. Clearly this is possible to do, but will Russian government and society as they are now/will be after they finish losing the war be capable of doing it?
I am not sure how functional actually was the Red Army during Stalin. They basically defeated Nazi Germany by throwing millions of bodies at them, seemingly not too different from what Russia is currently trying in Ukraine. (The difference is that modern weapons can shred the cannon fodder much faster.)
After Stalin, the power in USSR was less concentrated. More competition meant people kept each other vigilant. Cold War included a lot of actual fighting, and there was always the possibility of escalating to nuclear war. (Maybe the more ambitious generals also prepared for a possibility of a coup?)
Putin started with fewer external threats, so he could focus on concentrating the power in his hands, and possibly in certain aspects surpassed Stalin. He eliminated competent people, because they also posed a threat to himself. Russian army, until recently, was only used for bullying much smaller countries. The resistance of Ukraine was unexpected. The countries next in line (Belarus, Moldova) would also be weak opponents.
I suppose the Russian long-term plan (if there was any) involved collecting the remaining pieces of Soviet Union, and dissolving the West using propaganda. Maybe using Trump to disband NATO, or convincing the remaining NATO states that defending their members in Eastern Europe is not worth it. Using nukes as a threat, but never actually using them. Creating puppet states in Africa; accusing the West of colonialism if they try to do something about it. -- If this plan worked, Russia actually would not need a strong army. Maybe much later, but that would already be a problem of Putin's successor.
> But [the USSR] was apparently able to keep its military from being eaten from the inside by corruption
I don't think we should assume that at all. The full scale of the corruption and incompetence in contemporary Russia's military only came to light once they directly attacked a nation with serious military and financial backing by Western nations, right from the start. When was the last time the USSR tried this?
It's also well known that the political system of the USSR was deeply corrupt, from the top right down to the bottom. Why would their military have been spared from this corruption?
Wikipedia mentions that since the beginning there was a disagreement about radio jamming. USA argued that foreign radio contributes to the declared purpose of "mutual understanding". Soviet union said nope, criticism of socialism is a weapon that sovereign countries are allowed to defend against.
That was the concern in 1975, makes me think how the logic extends to internet communication today. At the end, USA did their radio broadcast anyway, and Soviet Union did their jamming; and recently Russia is doing their information warfare, and the West starts to respond by banning some sources.
Here's an additional reason to make some effort to trim back the number of post: This page, which currently has 930 posts, is virtually impossible to use on mobile. Takes more than 60 secs to load. Glitches in weird ways. Would not let me put up a brief post -- just kept telling me, in red type, that "something went wrong." Mmm, thanks, I'd figured that out actually.
Wrote the above on the computer. Approx. 1 minute later page froze for 30 secs or so. Got a notice that "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." There's also a notable lag when I type into the comment box -- text takes a few seconds to appear. These huge pages seem to be too much for Substack's system.
My page loaded in a couple seconds on a phone over two years old and regular home wifi. Maybe there is data bottlenecking occurring on your device or processor deterioration?
It seems way worse to me on these huge open threads with up to 1000 posts. I can't remember noticing it on hidden threads, which tend to have around 200 posts. But I'm not sure of that. Do you think it's true?
I was in an Uber and not on Wifi. But I was not having trouble accessing other sites. Also, I just added to the post you're responding to: this page froze, while loaded on a computer in a building with good wifi, and I got a notice that page was using significant energy and Mac would perform better if I closed it. I don't know how fast the wifi is where I am now, but we tested it a while ago and upgraded to the fastest offered in our area, since multiple people in the building are using it for Zoom sessions, often at the same time. I never have any trouble with the wifi here, and I'm on the computer a lot. This page is the only one I can think of that I have trouble with. I have gotten the Mac "this page is using significant energy" notice multiple times on one of these huge comment pages -- I'd say at least half a dozen times in the last few months.
Does anyone have any good advice on buying cars around the $8k-$10k price point?
I know the used car market is kind of crazy right now, and I'm thankful I won't need to buy a car for 4-6 months, but I've been driving 15 year old Honda Civics for the past 10 years until they literally die on the side of the road. These typically cost $3-$4k. I've saved up ~$10k for a new car and it's hard to see anything worth the effort. In general, for an extra $5-$7k I feel like the options are to buy 10 year old boring Japanese sedan instead of a 15 year old boring Japanese sedan which...doesn't seem right for almost tripling the amount of money I'm willing to spend. I'm seeing something around the $15-$20k mark that look like a significant step up, and I'm capable of buying that, but that's a lot of money to spend on single item I use for mostly practical reasons. Is this just part of being the only weirdo who only pays cash and never takes auto loans?
Am I missing something? Are there makes and models that are fun or...just feel like a step up from a beater Honda around $10k?
Are you sure you can still buy a 15 year old Honda Civic (without major issues) for $3-4K? The whole used car market is a mess right now.
While old Toyotas and Hondas are good cars, I feel like "just buy an old Corolla/Civic" has become such a meme at this point that those cars are probably overpriced compared to some almost-as-reliable competitors. Consider a Ford/Hyundai/Kia/Mazda/Buick.
Back when I bought used cars, I had excellent luck buying them from high-end luxury car dealerships. The people who trade in cars on new Mercedes, BMWs, etc. tend to have taken good care of their cars, even if old and with high miles. Like virtually all new-car dealers, they sell the lemons wholesale and offer only the best trade-ins on their own lot - to keep up up their own reputation.
Check out your local top-end new car dealerships and consider the cheapest used cars they have on offer. And haggle.
I just bought a 2012 Honda Fit for 6.7k. This is private party. And overpaid for it too, because I'm not great at negotiating. For what it's worth, Fits are known to be fun to drive. People race them! I liked how well it cornered. It doesn't accelerate well but it does handle well.
My perception is that dealers are taking advantage of market craziness to buy very low "well look how many miles it has!" and sell high "all used car prices are up." Similarly, everything on Craigslist is overpriced 30-40%. It's annoying, but you can get much better deals than list price if you hold your ground in negotiations.
Yes, lots of scammers on Craigslist - if you see a too-good-to-be-true deal, beware.
Also for some reason most CL sellers seem to overprice things by like 2x. Many of them will sell for much less if you show up in person and haggle. But unless you're a "car guy" (or gal), you won't know what you're buying.
Better to buy from someone with a reputation to lose. The "lemon" tradeins wholesaled by new-car dealerships end up on independent used car dealer lots. Often those dealers buy wholesale, fix up any problems, then resell. Some of them are actually honest, but you have to be careful. Check out their reputations online. (High-end luxury new car dealers are basically all honest - they wouldn't last in that business if they weren't. Their wealthy customers have zero tolerance for that and related BS - high pressure, etc.)
Also - don't pay "dealer fees" added on after you agree on a price. Shame works on mostly-honest people - "hey - a deal is a deal". If shame doesn't work, you probably don't want to buy from them.
The primary reason to buy a 10 year old Civic instead of a 15 year old one (in my opionion) is if you drive for long periods of time, >1 hour. Cars have improved their comfort a lot over the last 20 years.
Also, newer cars tend to have better gas mileage, which may save you money in the long run and reduces the frequency of the inconvenience of stopping at a gas station.
Some of the comments about easy jhana make me suspect that some things described as "jhana" are just people pausing to think for the first time in their life.
Ethics question: how evil would it be to develop a payload for a mechanically suitable off-the-shelf remote-control multirotor drone that would enable a remote user to pierce a car or truck tire and render it irreparably leaky?
For numbers, let's say:
* the drone is viably controllable up to a quarter-mile from an off-the-shelf controller station (read: phone or lap, maybe with a radio dongle)
* the drone is not autonomous outside basic flight stability and safety features to other humans, so it has to be guided to a tire and the knife triggered by the user
* the knife can be triggered 4 times per flight
* the drone's battery and knife can be replenished within a minute by the user
* the knife is captive, so it can't hurt anything the drone isn't immediately adjacent to, and magically can't be modified to do otherwise by end users.
* the drone and ground station are readily replaceable for <$10K, so accessible for a small organization or an org with donors, but not a typical individual.
This is prompted by my trying to inhabit the viewpoint of modern dirtbag left activists, such as those who protest by gluing themselves to roads and suchlike.
Factors I can think of offhand:
* This enables grassroots enforcement of no-car, no-truck zones for the anarchistically-inclined
* This makes destruction of property safer for the perpetrator
* This enables wider-scale destruction of property viable for a single user
* The payload designer isn't hard to replace, since the payload is easy to design, but the payload only needs to be designed once and then plans distributed
* Obviously, this makes hit-and-run violence easier and safer, but that rate is already low and dropping, but maybe someone out there is only held back from a spree by having to be present for the attacks in person? If so, why aren't they a sniper on a spree already?
* Once the payload is built, how much harder is making the entire thing autonomous? To the degree of "here's a car-shaped thing, slice the tires"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all car-shaped things in it"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all cars without a badge"?
For your last question, making it fully autonomous would be extremely difficult, because SLAM is hard, and the best current approaches require a lot of power hungry computation (although there is interesting research on bio inspired algorithms for this which radically reduce the power consumption, they're not really in production and also very proprietary). This is not the kind of thing where you can just download a model from HuggingFace and press go. You would probably need quite a hefty drone (think the kind of hexacopters that're currently dropping AT munitions on Russian armor) to be able to support the power budget necessary for the various modeling tasks, which probably pushes the per unit cost over $10k. This would be a large, dedicated engineering effort, probably involving dozens of high skill engineers, and possibly novel research.
Couldn't you have a land based system do the computations and then send commands to the drone? It adds a layer, but that sounds much easier than putting it all on the drone itself.
Dirtbag left hat firmly in place: sure, the device can only be used for destruction of tires, but the cause is noble: forcing the creation and/or expansion of ICE-free zones is actually a good thing because it forces transition away from greenhouse-gas-producing technologies in some of the regions where they most impact densely-packed human lungs, and act as a proof of concept for other urban cores. It democratizes and accelerates the deployment of urgently needed policies without the overhead of de-facto captured political processes, and it doesn't even get anyone hurt, since it's just destruction of insured and replaceable property.
Whoever developed this would be intensely naive to think it would only be deployed against people they dislike or in favor of causes they support. If this were used at the kind of scale you seem to anticipate, it would be for so many reasons and cause so much general chaos that any environmental message is lost in the fog: "drunk teenagers slash all the tires in neighborhood," "pro-life activists slash all the tires at the abortion clinic, pro-choice activists retaliate by slashing tires in church parking lots," "laid off factory worker slashes all the tires at Earth Day rally," "feuding neighbors slash tires of guests at each others' house parties," "local gang slashes tires of local police force," etc, etc, etc.
So the public response wouldn't be to demand that government "stop X environmental or other policy problem" it would be a demand to "end the tire-slashing machine menace."
So the response it would prompt wouldn't be "reducing use of cars," it would just prompt officials to waste a bunch of resources developing some kind of drone disabling field or something to counter the drones, while simultaneously raising everybody's general distaste for whatever advocacy interest group they blame for having created this thing... and all the while, the tire industry would probably be making record profits, cranking out more and sturdier tires (expending *more* resources, and emitting *more* CO2 and pollutants along the way).
Indiscriminate punishment don't have a great track record at creating willing compliance. At best you get reluctant-to-malignant compliance, and create a lot of resentment, backlash and hardening the opposition. How do you think "rolling coal" trucks came to existence?
"It democratizes and accelerates the deployment of urgently needed policies"
What it is most likely to do is not turn people away from buying Chelsea tractors, it will result in a lot of pissed-off people demanding that whoever does this be thrown in jail for a long stretch, and the authorities acting to give them that.
So you're reinforcing harsh criminal punishment and making your cause even more unpopular at the same time. Plus, there will always be the edge cases where someone needs that big car for mobility issues, or you burst the tyres on a car that was trying to bring someone to hospital, and the like. Dead granny because some activist group punctured the tyres of the car taking her to dialysis or urgent medical treatment is not going to "force the creation and/or expansion of ICE-free zones", whatever those may be.
When you find yourself thinking thoughts like this, it's when you really should start taking the Efficient Market Hypothesis of Morality seriously.
If you find yourself saying "Well, this is a morally terrible thing to do according to 99% of people, but my own personal value system says it's perfectly justified", your next thought shouldn't be "Hoo boy it's marvellous how much more enlightened I am than everybody else", it's "I should really take the views of those other 99% seriously and consider the fact that I might be wrong".
You might also like to consider all the other occasions in history in which someone has managed to convince themselves that a universally-frowned-on action would actually be the right thing to do. Have people like that been a net benefit? Or have they been history's greatest monsters?
The efficient-market hypothesis relies on the idea that if stock X is undervalued, smart people can notice this and buy stock X until it's no longer undervalued.
There's no analogous feedback mechanism in morality - if of smart people "notice" that action X is good when most people think it's bad, there is no reliable way for them to change public opinion.
"I should really take the views of those other 99% seriously and consider the fact that I might be wrong"
Or, if you're still certain you're right, "I should really take the views of those other 99% seriously and consider that they outnumber me hugely and some of them have bigger guns than I do". And more lethal drones. Because Deiseach is definitely right.
I've spent a lot of time reading and trying to reproduce different experiences, so I've tried to put together a list of heuristics for evaluating reports. I think our default attitude should be skepticism, but that shouldn't keep us from experimenting.
> there are huge social and psychological rewards for believing you’ve reached a special level of spiritual attainment. Enlightenment is the ultimate status symbol. There are an absurd number of Redditors out there doing AMAs about how enlightened they are.
I have read some of those Reddit AMAs, and their descriptions of "enlightenment" do not seem very different from my "normal" (before I had kids). There is nothing wrong with having a huge ego, as long as you do not believe it literally.
I'd be curious to hear how having kids changed your "normal".
Having a huge ego can be devastatingly bad--IMO it's the force behind every great atrocity. Ego (especially ego driven by religion) is what allows people to do evil things while believing it's OK or even good (e.g. Naziism, Catholic sex abuse, 9/11)
> I'd be curious to hear how having kids changed your "normal".
Less time to relax and stop worrying about things to do.
The Reddit!enlightened mood easily comes when I can relax on the couch, or take a long walk, with nothing urgent to do. The kids are small, they need something all the time, or they make a lot of noise, or I am too tired to relax properly (get too sleepy instead). Right now one of them entered my room and wants something to eat, haha.
> Having a huge ego can be devastatingly bad
If you believe it. You need to understand that it is not real, and just enjoy the emotions privately.
Hah! I worry about having the same issue if and when I have kids. Hope you manage to find some space for yourself eventually.
> If you believe it. You need to understand that it is not real, and just enjoy the emotions privately.
So I actually thought I could do this. I had a manic ego-inflation episode (LSD-induced), and it felt *so good*. I thought maybe I could indulge in that feeling privately.
Maybe I'm just weak, but it turned me into an asshole. It also made me borderline psychotic. I literally wouldn't hear when people criticized me--my attention would just drift elsewhere. It took years to undo the damage.
The worst part, so far, is when kids are 3-4 years old. Old enough to have strong ideas about what they want, too young for self-control.
Kids 2 and younger are cute, when they are not crying. When they are crying, you go through the usual checklist (diaper? thirsty? need to burp? too warm? too cold? tired?), that usually solves the problem; otherwise, rocking them for some time and then going through the checklist again usually solves the problem. If they want to play with something you cannot give them, they are super easily distracted. They sleep a lot.
Kids 5 and older can be negotiated with. You can set rewards and punishments. You can explain: "We need to do X now, but I promise we will do Y afterwards." They want to be helpful (when they are in the right mood). They can spend an hour playing by themselves, or reading a book, leaving you alone.
But between 3 and 4, that's exactly the "Masha and the Bear" scenario. :D
My younger is currently 4, so I hope it gets much better soon.
The individual priests who perpetrated the abuse seem to have been in a weird headspace. There's a scene in Spotlight that touches on this (the only one to feature an accused priest)...he says something like "You don't understand, we were helping those boys!"
There's a 60 minutes episode that goes into this more deeply as well--will see if I can dig it up.
Having read a report by a Dublin diocese on sexual abuse in the early days of it becoming known here in Ireland, a lot of the abusers genuinely did not realise that they were doing something wrong. They were paedophiles, or Minor Attracted Persons as I am now supposed to call them, because "paedophile" is a stigmatising term, and they had that same blindness about what they were doing and what the consequences were.
Maybe it was ego, but some of them, for example, did downplay "I only had children sit on my lap, that's harmless" and other instances (they forgot to mention that the lap-sitting involved them getting erections). And a lot of it was in the 60s and 70s where therapists *did* downplay it, that such behaviour could be cured by therapy, so offenders were often sent for a course of treatment, certified that they were 'cured', and then put back into service because the church authorities 'believed the science'.
It's messy and complicated, and heart-breaking and horrible, and I would not recommend you to get your facts from movies, even from a docu-drama, because they go for the 'drama' too and if something makes a good plot point for movie purposes, that is what they will go for over dry boring facts.
I'd be very interested in reading that report! I've been looking for any kind of factual material on the psychological state of pedophile priests. The best I've found is Robert Moore's "Facing the Dragon," which is pretty speculative and very much attempting to defend his own pet theory.
Complicated deletion methods with 33% threshholds have the major effect of avoiding transparency. They let you delete anything you want for any reason you want, nobody can understand exactly why their comments were deleted, nobody can meaningfully dispute it, and whether their comments were deleted can depend on circumstances outside their control (for instance, it means that it is now bad for someone if other people post good comments).
If you want to be able to arbitrarily delete comments, it's your blog, so why not just arbitrarily delete comments? (Note that I'm not saying it's necessarily *good* to do so, just that arbitrary+honest is better than arbitrary+dishonest.)
The same goes for "50% bans". All you're doing is pretending that your arbitrary decisiuon is based on numbers. If your policy is to arbitrarily ban people, at least admit it.
I think you're the person who was asking me for standards when I was a moderator at Less Wrong. I actually wanted to give you (if it was you) what you were asking for, but I hadn't figured standards out.
Is there any venue you've found with what you'd consider to be satisfactory explicit standards?
Is there a difference between Scott's deleting posts he thinks are low quality and Scott's arbitrarily deleting posts? I think the latter is just the former dressed up in ugly clothes. Did you decide to write your post objecting to the plan, or did you just arbitrarily put up a post objecting to it?
Or by arbitrary do you mean "random" -- so, for instance, Scott might use coin flips to select the 33% he deletes? Why the hell would he do that when he has the more satisfying option of deleting posts he thinks are low-content, or that don't meet the 2 outta 3 criterion?
Or by arbitrary do you mean that Scott will maybe *feel* like he's applying actual standards, but in fact his choices have nothing to do with standards -- a month from now he would choose an entirely different set of posts to delete? I don't think that's true. I think he'd demonstrate good test-retest reliability. It's not that hard. There are 2 rubrics: 2 outta 3; high content to word ratio. Apply them. Teachers grading things do it all the time.
Perhaps he meant 33% on an absolute, and not relative scale, in which case your concern that the rest of us might sadistically start writing original sonnets that compete with Shakespeare so that fewer can get a word in edgewise might be unnecessary.
...although...just in case, maybe I better get out my copy of Wheelock's and make sure I can toss off a learned Cicero quote if I need to.
Scott has always had the explicitly stated power to arbitrarily remove comments.
The purpose of the "numbers", however arbitrary, is to get people to consider what they think Scott thinks of as bad posting, and solve for the equilibrium. It matters literally not at all what exact criteria this actually solves for, that the number was arbitrary, or that Scott is the ultimate arbiter. If it makes people change their posting habits, in a good direction, it's a success.
The experiment is to find out, empirically, whether it does actually change the equilibrium at all.
It's the blog equivalent of stack ranking. You throw out the lowest X percent of your employees. Even if that works once, now that you've gotten rid of the bad ones, the next time "lowest X%" may be good employees, and you start throwing out good ones. Furthermore, you create a system where it's in every employee's interest that other employees do poorly.
I suggest that Scott and everyone supporting this idea look up stack ranking.
Also, you're going to end up Goodharting "being in the lowest X percent".
No it aint the blog equiv of stack ranking because (1) Scott's not getting rid of (i.e. banning) people, he's getting rid of posts. (2) Even if this system makes it in our interest that other users put up poor posts, (a) it's also not in our interest, because we want to enjoy reading this open theads & (b) I doubt there's a way we could influence each other to put up poor posts. (3) there's no reason to expect it's going to happen over and over til we're down to a handful of users.
Yeah iterative stack ranking is destructive unless there really are fewer and fewer slots, say in a contracting business, or you are using it to evaluate who move up the ladder into rungs where there are fewer employees.
Or if the quality is just lacking and you need to ditch a bunch of people in the current crop.
Or, which is more common I think, you are continuously hiring and you pretty much need to get rid of a certain number of people every year in order to make room for the new blood. This is kind of typical in sales, I believe. And it doesn't imply that the average quality goes up (and number of employees goes down) every year. The number might be static, growing, or shrinking. For that matter, the average quality might be growing or shrinking, too, depending on whether the incoming people are better or worse than what you've already got.
Yeah when there is a lot of hiring it works well. I was on a project recently where we staffed up from ~100 to ~2000 for a year or two, and we would bring in classes of 20-50 people a week, and a couple weeks later ditch a third of them. And maybe half a year later ditch another third.
Always culling out the chaff and keeping the wheat.
I think this misunderstands, I don't think it's a curved ranking it's mastery:
"delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be."
In other words, it's comparative to another base, not to itself. It's entirely possible that 0 posts get deleted in the challenge thread if people meet the challenge, which is the entire point.
I was just typing effectively this, although less smart sounding :)
It seems quite obvious to me that this is what is meant, and not committing to throw out a certain number or percentage of posts.
It just sets the quality bar higher, rather than at some minimum viable politeness and content.
Example: If this was a challenge mode open thread, I would be neither offended or particularly surprised if this comment was deleted, as it doesn't really add much.
I never have, though I considered going there a year ago, but dropped the idea because flights were hotels were so expensive.
I just checked again today, and prices are much lower: $400 round trip flights from the DC area where I live, and as low as $80/night for a decent hotel. This is for a February trip.
What happened? Was Aruba abnormally expensive a year ago, or is it abnormally cheap now?
"Roughly speaking, the island's high season runs from mid-December to mid-April. During this period, hotels charge their highest prices, and you'll need to reserve a room well in advance -- months in advance if you want to bask on the beach over Christmas or in the depths of February."
High season is considered to be July and August. The cheapest month to fly to Aruba is February."
So maybe the flights are cheap in February 2023 if you are booking now? Another site seems to suggest that, although it's talking about booking flights to Europe:
"The sweet spot for the best deals, according to the data, is about four months in advance."
I gave up watching after episode 4 or 5 so I agree with your views on this & I'm using your reviews as a more entertaining way to keep track of the show.
I find this reviewer very entertaining and I agree with most of his points, but I should warn for a lot of swearing and harsh language. He's done a set of reviews on Rings of Power and he's not a fan, to put it mildly:
Steven's awareness recursion method reminds me of the start of Tolle's book The Power of Now:
<<“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with.“ ”Maybe,“ I thought, ”only one of them is real." I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.>>
I've seen people argue that the "necessary" in true, kind, necessary isn't necessary, but I've got a meaning for it.
Necessary can be interpreted to mean not redundant. If the commenter is saying the same thing a lot of times (an ill-defined standard), the new comment isn't contributing to the discussion.
I would tend to interpret "necessary" as meaning the conversation is otherwise going off the rails, and you happen to have the information that can save it, because of some specialized background et cetera. But then I would add a fourth category, "interesting," for stuff that isn't "necessary" but which is worth the sharing. To preserve the rule exactly, instead of going to the onerous 3 out of 4, or the decadent slacker grade-inflation 2 out of 4, you would need to hit 2-2/3 of the 4 categories, raising the interesting possibility of hitting a 2/3 in some category ("mostly but not entirely kind"), or even partial-crediting your way through by getting solid 1s in two categories and a weasely 1/3 in the other two ("not really very kind, but not quite vicious" plus "a distortion of truth, but not an outright lie").
It would have been better for me to say "Necessary can be interpreted to include not redundant".
"Interesting" is always welcome, sort of by definition in this crowd, but perhaps it should be a top-level comment if it's not connected to previous discussion.
I don't know whether someone could or should get into trouble if they kept dropping interesting but irrelevant things into existing discussions.
Interesting but tangential is about three parts of why I read comments at all. Most of the time, the on-point argument is too predictable and insufficiently novel to be worth it.
I take "necessary" to be like a visit to the dentist. Nobody is going to enjoy this, but it has to be done or else worse outcomes will be the result if the decay is left unattended.
If someone is stating something that is incorrect, then the correct information is both true and necessary. Sometimes there may not be a kind way to phrase it, especially in more subjective matters like "I feel" or "I believe" such and such a thing, particularly when it's "I am convinced Those Guys are all moustache-twirling villains".
Scott has managed to more or less corral us into not responding with "You effin' idiot, what a moron, I can't believe someone so cretinous even has the spare brain capacity for breathing", so the Reign of Terror clearly is a success there 😀
But sometimes it has to be said that "You're wrong" and sometimes there is no soft way of doing it. Now lie back in the chair while I stick all these metal implements in your mouth.
Oh indeed, but sometimes there's no way to be soft when telling someone "no, this is incorrect".
That's why it's a minimum two out of three of "true, kind, necessary": sometimes it is true and necessary but you can't be kind (you should *try* to be, I'm not excusing just tearing into someone without any effort to be understanding or charitable, but sometimes it is "this is flat-out wrong, I can demonstrate that it's wrong, and if you continue to insist it is correct then there is a problem there").
I would probably list the facts, possibly starting with "no", but nothing stronger.
I wouldn't make claims about my ability, and I absolutely wouldn't talk about the person possibly continuing to disagree with me.
On the one hand, I've hardly ever been banned from anything. On the other, I don't think there'd be a campaign in my favor to bring me back if I were banned.
To be fair, you are very likely a much nicer and more agreeable person than me (sometimes when I get going, Genghis Khan would be nicer and more agreeable).
How well does the colloquial usage of things being 'meant to be' (e.g. "my partner and I were just meant to be") square with the deterministic view of the universe? For some reason they feel like two different things, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why. Is it just that the former usually presents as a non-scientific folk belief, while the latter is espoused by very smart people who've spent years thinking about it?
I think tons of language we use every day makes little sense if you view it through such a strict deterministic lens. But FWIW 'meant to be' to me is a description of a quality, not so much the outcome. It's like, these things are so well matched in their nature, or this outcome was so over-determined, that even if we ran this universe simulation a million times with different seeds we would keep getting this result.
I would guess that the most common actual usage of that kind of phrasing is meant to express that there was some reason for what happened that passeth the understanding of the participants. For example, in the case of the partner, perhaps the intellectual judgment was that this potential mate was unsuitable ("Can't stand his politics!" "I don't like blondes, too shallow!")....but some other nonconscious factor -- unconscious drives, sensory impressions, pressure from friends or family, et cetera -- intervened to impel the association until the conscious reasoning "caught up," realized its error, and became in harmony with the non-conscious.
In that particular arena, it doesn't seem hard to credit. Nature has hardly been relying on bulgy prefrontal cortex ratiocination for mate selection these past 40,000 years -- she has an armory of tools to get it done, including wired-in or early-learned preferences for certain physical forms, movement, behavior and speech patterns, probably pheromones as well. There are probably plent of instincts and drives below the level of conscious reasoning that can carry away our initial conscious reasoning in other areas, and which we think (later) turn out to be superior to it.
But this is indeed quite different from a feeling that the universe is deterministic, because there is still the impression that a choice is being made -- it's just not being made by the conscious logical deliberataion of the chooser, at least initially. It's more the kind of choice a dog might (at least seem to) make when torn between a tasty morsel of food and a thrown frisbee, which we don't attribute to a logical assessment (by the dog) of the utility gained either way. It's what people mean by "listening to your gut," more a form of to what interior agent do you trust the decision, then what is the decision in detail.
Part of the reason people may feel they are highly distinct is that I think a colloquial understanding of determinism would not include a lot of interior conflict. I mean, why would there be the sensation of interior conflict, if everything is predetermined from 13 billion years ago? What would be the point of such weird useless and wasteful epiphenomena? Why would it ever evolve? So I think people associate the interior feeling of conflict and a difficult decision with a non-deterministic view. Since a "meant to be" decision is sort of by definition on that is initially difficult (the implication, if my interpretation of the usage is correct, is that at least initially heart and head are in disagreement), then a "meant to be" decision is in conflict with phiosophical determinism.
I think "meant to be" generally connotes some kind of benevolent intelligence causing the meant-to-be thing, whereas "pre-determined" is compatible with a non-benevolent, unintelligent cause.
Not well at all, but then again I don't believe in things like soulmates or the one true love or Mr/Ms Right.
You find someone who matches well with you and you with them, and you forget all the others that didn't match as well. But mostly I think it's just a commonplace saying about how you feel that things worked out really well.
I notice that "computers" tend to be associated with "math"...but many of the most common pitfalls for the tech-illiterate stem from, well, illiteracy rather than innumeracy. If you can't spell well, search won't work well*; if you're sloppy at composing consistent strings, that just compounds the problem. I suppose it's true that in many regards, the architecture of "how computers think" is math-based, and so that's a more useful lens through which to conceptualize them...the sort of way that I get frustrated by so-called natural language model search algorithms, because I'm used to phrasing queries in bit-comprehensibe ways, regex, etc. (C.f. search apps searching for what it assumes you *really* meant to search for, rather than the actual term as entered.)
But I wonder if it'd be more efficaceous for raising the tech savviness waterline to focus on wordcelling rather than shaperotating. At least, for the median user who doesn't want to think about how computers work, they just want them __to work__. (Sometimes I wonder if this is the real secret behind Apple's historical success, realizing sooner than others who the actual median user was/could be.)
*a particular bother for me working in grocery - it's sometimes embarrassing seeing a no-hits search left open, and boggling at how coworkers or customers think <mildly ethnic food> is spelled...but they can identify the package on sight, no problem.
I think the problem most people have with computers is not so much about "math" but symbolic logic and logic generally. They are bad at if-then statements and parsing them in natural, or unnatural language.
And get more complicated than that and they totally lose it unless they have past experience with programming, symbolic logic, or say reading board game rules or legal documetns or other logically heavy things.
So many errors and problems with computers are just about nested basic logic. If x then y, but not if z. If z instead do if x then y', unless q pertains, then instead do if x then y''.
Give that in written or in schematic form to most people and they have little idea how to parse it.
It's very, very rare for anybody to actually read anything, especially people whose job depends on reading. Where "reading" means (1) "looking at the letters shown and correctly matching them up to a word in a language you know" but not (2) "pointing your eyes at some letters and getting a feeling about what they probably mean".
This is why it's so hard to proofread your own work. Once your brain knows what a sentence is supposed to say, you switch from (1) to (2) and it's very hard to switch back. Once somebody knows what's in a package of food, they're in mode (2) and the actual spelling of the words on the package doesn't exist for them. It's just shapes.
I'm also convinced that the more literate somebody is, the more time they spend in mode (2). It's just a brain hack that makes you a more efficient reader. And very literate people need to be the most efficient readers.
Intuitively (from my knowledge/understanding of it as well as my personal experience of the inside view), I feel like people with ASD, of otherwise equal intelligence, might be better at 1, and possibly have a harder time with 2?
I tend to be very good at spelling (in principle, not counting incidents of butterfingers on phone screen) and don't find it as difficult as others seem to proofread my own work (borne out by results).
Otoh, I am a relatively slow reader by default - if I want to read quickly, I to some extent need to force myself to "ignore the details" and only take in larger units of meaning. It takes a lot more effort; the difference is spent on ignoring the lower levels, not perceiving the higher ones.
So "the actual spelling of the words on the package" always noticeably exists for me.
(Btw, when I think of words - not the concept the words point towards, although the word is linked up to the concept - they generally appear as big letters correctly spelt out in my mind)
The efficient thing is to solve the problem on the technology side, rather than the user side. Id est, stop requiring people to get their search terms correct on the first shot. This is silly, and not how humans communicate at all. The computer should be capable of having a short "conversation" (printed or spoken) with the human user:
Search Engine: "Here's what your search produced. Does this look right?"
Human: "Um...no...I was expecting an image somewhere in the results of a package of food I would recognize."
SE: "OK, would you rather search by describing the image of that package?"
Hum: "Sure! That sounds like a good idea. Let's see....I think it's white and the seaweed stuff on the cover is green."
SE: "Is the package bigger than a breadbox?"
Hum: "No, smaller."
SE: "Is there lettering on top of the picture?"
Hum: "Yeah, but I can't read it."
SE: "Does it look something like this?" [shows example of hiragana]
Hum: "Yes!"
SE: "Here are some images of Japanese seaweed salads that come in a white box. Do any of these look close to what you want?"
...and so on. Humans describe a search object to other humans in a conversation, in which questions and answers go back and forth until the meaning is clear. Nobody would dream of giving complex directions to another human being in one long perfectly formed paragraph, with zero questions needing to be answered.
Google does approximate searches. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't.
It should be very feasible to have a search on a category of product and a description of the package, but harder to keep the information about where it used to be in the store.
The idea is successive approximation, which arrives at a precise result by iteration, and the iteration is crucial to the accuracy of the result. It's the verbal equivalent to Newton's root-finding method.
My God, that's a totally accurate portrayal of most of my customer-question interactions. They're looking for the thing, you know, the little chocolate about yea big, with the stripes on the package, squarish, sort of like a Kit-Kat, and it used to be kept right here...what's it called, what ingredients does it have besides chocolate? Fuck if they know, so impossible to search for algorithmically. But refining-via-dialogue usually jogs one or both people's memories eventually.
I would absolutely give up a chunk of my paycheck to automate this process away to a 2022 version of Ask Jeeves. Pretty sure the company would pay seven figures if someone came up with "Grocery Google", too. (We're pretty opposed to efficiency-through-technology improvements, because the company believes customers value interacting with a human over actual results, but that principle doesn't extend to infinity...if your actual workers can't look up products either, then it's A Problem Worth Solving.)
From my fleeting time working in a shop, I'm still proud of being able to identify that a child was asking for a particular new seasonal bar of chocolate, only due to the serendipity that I had seen the new branding TV ad featuring Mr Cadbury's Parrot 😁
Yes. I have actually used this slightly in an application and it seems a strong approach, one which I am always surprised I don't see more often. People take very naturally to any kind of dialogue much better than a stringent requirement that they formulate a query or command precisely in one shot. It's just not the way we think.
Certainly controlling the "spread" of the conversation can be a challenge, for a robot, as is having the robot ask productive questions that vary with context. You have to have a good way to represent states of partial knowledge, too, and figure out how to evolve from one to the other. But I'm still guessing it's easier to make headway on those problems than it is to retrain the human species to think like a calculator, in precise 32-bit FLOPs.
"Nobody would dream of giving complex directions to another human being in one long perfectly formed paragraph, with zero questions needing to be answered."
...they would, in at least one situation I can imagine. And that situation happens a lot. It happens whenever someone gives an order and expects that order executed the same way, many times (anywhere from three times to several million). It might even happen so routinely that you don't even notice. Any time you go to a fast food joint and order a "number one combo", you're typically not going to enter into a heavy interactive session with the provider; you just press the button and wait.
Which is to say that that "place an order, press the go button, then forget about it" mentality is probably getting into things like searches (which could indeed use more interactivity) because search is being implemented by a programmer who started as a run-and-forget problem solver.
It might even be that college training by and large stresses this, which is why *any* programmer you assign a task is likely to produce something you could operate with a non-interactive command; it's just how we're trained to approach programming. Any problem worth solving, is worth solving millions of times, automatically, the same way.
I've watched just that kind of interaction, because this has always been a bit of an interesting of mine, and I don't think that's right. Even ordering a fast food meal, there's a ton of slight variation that goes on to clarify things. Unless you are exceedingly experienced, go to the same place at the same time, and order exactly the same thing from the same servatrix, there's usually a bunch of rapid back and forth. "What would you like? Oh, you order here, pick up there? OK. Uh...I think I'll have the #1. Excuse me? I said, the #1. OK, do you want to make a meal of it? What's in a meal? Fries and a drink. What size drink? Medium. How big is a medium? [shows cup] Yeah OK." I've seen very few people just rap out an order precisely and have it received without the slightest comment or question.
And that is, indeed, one of the most stereotyped of possible interactions, with a very restricted choice set and very clear (by design) ways to specify the choice. In almost any other human interaction, it usually takes 10-90 seconds of rapid back and forth to transfer the information adequately. I mean, just try telling your spouse you want anything more complicated than a jug of milk[1] from the store without at least one back-and-forth. It's amazing how frequently we do this, how exceedingly rare it is for information to pass in person without an exchange.
We can guess this is way more efficient for humans, because we prefer it so strongly when the stakes for a clear comunication rise. For really important decision, we always want to all be in the same room, facing each other, and having a conversation. An e-mail memo is never considered adequate.
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[1] Whole or skim? I think also the organic might be on sale, do you want me to get that if they have it? Now I think of it, it's always more expensive at that store, just get a quart and I'll pick up a gallon on Thursday from Costco.
It is true that scripts like that are annoying, but on the other hand you will get customers who argue about "I ordered the large fries!" (they didn't) or "This is the wrong soda!" (but you asked for regular not diet Coke) or "I specifically asked for the McGigaTriple burger, not the GiantDoublePatty!" (no, you said GiantDoublePatty).
So you have to check every step of the way or else someone is going to hold up the line arguing and yelling about how you screwed up their order.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other: for every mindless drone on the other side of the counter, there's an idiot customer who will have a screaming match about 'I expressly asked for *six* sugars and you only put *five* into my quadruple espresso".
I've had this kind of training when doing the course for receptionist/admin assistant work; when you take a call, you repeat everything back to the person on the other end of the line to be sure you are getting it down accurately and so they can correct any mistake you or they made. So it's "Just let me get this clear: you are Mr. Brown calling for Ms. Green about the 11:30 a.m. meeting on Wednesday 25th and you want to change from the large conference room on the third floor to the small meeting room on the ground floor, is that right?".
Yes, it makes you sound like an idiot, but it would be even worse if Mr. Brown turns up on Wednesday and is waiting in the first floor room while Ms. Green is waiting in the third floor room, and you *will* get it in the ear from the aggrieved parties.
I can't really find much to disagree with here. (Just the fast food interaction/non ratio - I think that's just our respective experiences.) I also think the above is consistent with my comment. I agree there are a lot of high-interaction requests, and I'll also agree that I think that needs to be a feature in various apps, including search. All I wanted to say above is that I think there's a "order and forget" mentality we're up against.
I'm not a military guy, but I imagine there are ops in there where you want it a certain way, every time, don't sit there and ask for clarification, or else the enemy will get inside your OODA loop. The catch is that such orders are low-level and simple, like "fire a shell at $grid". Higher-level commands like a mission briefing will naturally involve a lot of questions.
I'm thinking this happens mostly with procedures and checklists, like when you start up an airplane, which are weird in the sense that the checklist itself is mindless and precise, something you have to memorize until you have it cold, but what you do if something doesn't go right on the checklist is much more free-form and undetermined -- it's a "stop and think" moment -- which is presumably why the whole shebang isn't turned over to the computer. I wonder if anyone has added a "checklist minder" program, which would just read off the checklist and ask the operator to say "yeah OK next/ whoopsis need a moment here" to each step? That seems like low-hanging fruit for a critical application.
One is for casual users of ubiquitous tech to be more proficient at basic use cases. You're probably right that an improved baseline of functional literacy would help here, but you can also make progress through improved interface design (c.f. your mention of Apple's success) and just by generational turnover as today's kids who grew up with smartphones and tablets grow up into tomorrow's adults.
The other problem is enabling more people to progress further along the spectrum from casual users to power users. This is where math and logic becomes a big deal, as you need to be able to reason about what the computer is doing (at least at a very high level) in order to do stuff like nontrivial Excel formulas or basic scripting.
A power user is someone who has a fit when the user interface changes, because their use of the tool is suddenly slowed down to the speed of a brand new user, and their favorite (but arcane) options are no longer available.
I'm skeptical of the generational change narrative, just because it clashes so frequently with actual lived experience...hard to properly quantify, I suppose (is there a standardized exam of compsci skill, outside of academia?). But the actual young people I interact with on the regular, the so-called "Digital Natives" that supposedly grew up on smartphones and tablets and stuff...they're basically just as helpless as Boomers or whoever, when it comes to doing stuff on a Real Computer. Strip away even a little of the Apple-type streamlining, and they have no clue what's going on. It keeps ending up on me, self-admitted luddite Millennial, to "fix" people's computers, compose coherent word documents, make basic spreadsheets, etc.
(Paradoxically, of course, me being totally helpless with smartphones, tablets, and touchscreens makes it look like I'm less handy with computers than my younger cohorts...since that's increasingly what the definition of "computer" means to more and more people.)
So there's certainly an argument for "improving" interface design to make everything that customer-oriented...after all, as long as things Actually work, does it matter what goes on under the hood? I think it does though...there are tradeoffs to that sort of design, which I think start to impose design limitations that hobble possibility-space. Used to have a great article about this - it also referenced the casual-vs-poweruser divide...I can picture the infographics in my head, but don't know any appropriate search keywords, how ironic. The elitist phrasing would be that "dumbing down" UIs trades off against utility for powerusers, which is maybe not made up for by increased use at the other end of spectrum. I think the Big Solution was to attempt design which incorporates both sets of needs, and give people the option of effectively toggling Advanced Mode or whatever. Instead of the sorta paternalistic design choice of making such toggles extremely difficult to find/access, so that the children can't accidentally hurt themselves.
Regarding needing to understand computer thinking - I feel like there was a road not taken somewhere in the tech tree, where we coulda doubled down more on stylus and visual-language type stuff. Kids might be useless with Word/Excel, but they're perfectly capable of __drawing a spreadsheet on paper__, or otherwise illustrating ideas that are harder to put into just-words. Streamlining towards that vision woulda produced different tech than we see today. I wonder why it didn't happen.
My impression of the biggest generational shift is that younger programmers are more used to constructing applications by putting together much more high-level blocks. There's a library that does this, or a class someone else wrote, or I could send the output from this app to this other one. An older generation would be dissatisfied with the inefficiency and build stuff at a lower level. On the one hand, the kids get big complex tasks done much faster. ("Look! I can build a web server in about 2 minutes! Takes 10 Gb when it loads and is as fast as Apache on a Pentium 90, but it took very little human time.") There's defiitely something to be said for this, particularly when programmer time is expensive.
On the other it probably contributes to the fantastic resource demands of modern software (e.g. the ridiculous slowness of the Substack comment code, which is doing something pretty trivial, but probably with 15,000 lines of script because of how it was built out of large high level blocks).
At some point you probably do miss some of the core insight you get from knowing how to do stuff at a lower level -- but now I start to sound like the fossils around when I was young who sniffed that if you didn't know how to write your I/O routine in assembly you were just a poser.
I don't think generational change will help as much as you think, because the digital interface designs don't remain static. They are constantly being "improved" in ways that make them impenetrable to the oldest and least adept users. Twenty or more years ago, when my mother, who'd done fine with DOS, couldn't adapt to Windows beyond 3.1, let alone to a Mac - too different to what she'd learned - I was annoyed with some changes, but could easily figure out anything.
Now I dread every update to my phone. Each user interface change functions as a denial of service attack, with a sometimes major research effort required to discover how to do things I was able to do on the previous day. This is in spite of working as a software developer until the day I retired. Updates to my computers are generally less disabling, but essentially never make the computer easier or more pleasant to use.
My prediction is that some of the cute young digital natives who regard cell phone UIs as easy and obvious today, will one day be confused, baffled, and angry at software changes their grandchildren will find trivial. And if I'm still around to see it, I'll probably express my schadenfreude in unkind ways, at least to any who had, in youth, personally insisted to me that things I found difficult were easy and obvious.
Well, I learned to use terminal (more correctly, the command line, aka the shell) to do many tasks before anyone coded up slower ways to do them requiring multiple mouse clicks.
If *I* am launching the console or terminal to do a standard task then it's a design *success*. I haven't had to learn a new way to do whatever-it-is every 2 to 5 years. I can almost certainly do the task much faster from the command line. And if I want to do it from a script, I don't have to learn an entirely different way to do a task I already know how to do by hand.
This is even more true in the modern era, when macs, at least, display most user interface elements _only_ when you hover the mouse in the location where those elements will appear.
Yeah I'm kind of amused by the idea that nobody needs scripting. I would completely sink if I couldn't fire off a little pipe or, if it gets a little hairier (or I want to reuse it later) a Perl script. And it is indeed a God-send that the basic tools here -- e.g. grep, sed, awk, find -- haven't really changed in 40 years.
Almost all modern TV series I can think of do parallel plot threads, i.e. Two Lines, No Waiting or more https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting. Is there a modern, popular TV series where we just follow one single protagonist the entire series?
I suspect you'd find any recurring TV show with a Lone Ranger-style premise (main character goes from town to town solving problems) would avoid the A-story / B-story trope: Quantum Leap, the old Incredible Hulk live-action show, The Fugitive, etc.
I know these are old shows. I don't really watch broadcast TV, so I'm unfamiliar with current offerings. My impression is that this style of show has fallen out of vogue.
Even those shows had multiple plot lines, even if they were light. Quantum leap usually had a few threads in each episode, maybe a bit in the future with Al, and bits of longer plots like the Evil Leaper. The Mandalorian would be a modern example.
1) It allows you to boarden your audience which is generally the name of the game in TV. If you have an A story and B story each week, there is more chance there are plot elements and characters a viewer likes, and you just want to be good enough for them to come back.
2) It allows for lower quality writing because a little bit of tension and suspense and drama is built in from the bare structure of skipping back and forth. So you want to know what happens in A? Well we got to B now, and then once you want to know what happens in B we go back to A. This way you can keep people very engaged.
Writing something that is enaging throughout on just a single story and character through rises and falls in tension is a lot harder, and so rarer.
I think it was while watching an episode of Rings of Power the other day that I noticed myself noticing how unnecessarily & distractingly often they cut between the various plot strands. It was mildly infuriating, and while I didn't have these exact thoughts, it seemed clearly designed to squeeze some extra tensiom from otherwise fairly bland scenes.
(Note: I haven't finished it yet, and would say that I went into the series with largely suspended judgment, and it largely remains suspended - I just noticed this one particular thing.)
It's not just judgement that should be suspended, it's the entire thing - by its thumbs.
I do think they thought that jumping around all over the place would lend suspense. What it meant in practice was that just as something looked like it might be going to happen with plotline A, they jumped to B (quite often nothing but the Harfoots prancing around) and then off to C and then away to D.
So you had an entire hour or so of "nothing much happened, because it happened all over the map". That saying about "too many cooks spoil the broth" comes to mind, because it had two producers, thirteen executive producers and only seven writers, five of whom were also executive producers (I'm counting the two showrunners here as well). Three directors, one of whom was also an executive producer.
Do you *need* thirteen executive producers, or is this just a Hollywood way of giving status?
Anyone know a great model of flip phone? I'd like to de-smartphone for attention and time management reasons, but ideally retain decent photo and emoji texting abilities, maybe navigation too.
It's surprisingly hard to find a decent dumb phone.
Have you tried putting your smart phone into grayscale mode? I did this and it made a big difference in how interesting I found my phone while still being useable.
While people are thinking about this - my housemate would love to have a real dumb cell phone. No Android OS. No software updates (= UIs that change). A real manual describing how to use it, for things like text messages (if it supports them) rather than a guessing game relying on memories of previous similar phones. Her 3G phone became unusable due to standards change, and there was no similar/compatible replacement. She's stuck with a 4G "flip phone" that's basically a crippled Android smartphone, and we've only managed to decode a subset of its quite limited functions.
I'm in the same position as your housemate. I am getting a Kyocera DuraXA, since that was the closest to what I was looking for of everything available. I don't yet know if it will work out for me.
I get the impression that there really are no good options like that left anymore.
My friend is developing a new predictions market platform that's more point and shoot than the usual. His first product is basically a March Madness bracket for the Senate elections on Tuesday. He's looking for early users and I figure this might be a good group. Feel free to join my league or better yet, make your own! It's still in beta so it's a little buggy but it should work.
As other commenters pointed out, ADHD is not that bad in a supporting environment that someone organized for you and doesn't let you forget about things.
There are some surprisingly specific signs of ADHD, like losing track of what you were supposed to do in a room* or having a constant urge to interrupt people and finish their sentences for them, because they're talking too slowly. Consider if you had those in childhood.
* - there was once a twitter thread where some guy insisted that "finding yourself in the kitchen, not knowing what you are doing" is not an ADHD thing, just normal human experience, and people should stop pathologizing everything. Turns out he parsed that in some kind of existential melancholy way, instead of literally going to the kitchen then forgetting why.
I doubt it's possible to be totally fine, but it's possible that your environment/circumstances were masking ADHD symptoms to some extent. Nobody ever suspected I had ADHD because I was fairly quiet (inattentive type), but basically smart enough to coast through school with minimal amounts of studying. Sometimes I got in minor trouble for not doing homework or whatever, but then I aced the class, so it didn't matter. My parents knew I wouldn't do chores, or do them badly, so eventually they stopped asking. It wasn't until I'd struggled with adulthood for years that I finally put the pieces of the puzzle together in the right order.
Do you wake up tired often? Have you ever gotten a sleep lab? If you have sleep apnea, that can cause very similar symptoms as ADHD (some believe there can even be causality between the two).
For those who are interested in prediction markets this year, the PredictIt market for Nevada was an absolutely brain melting 80/20 for Adam Laxalt. Until Jon Ralston posted his Nevada predictions roughly 30 minutes ago after which point there was a swing of 25% to 67/33. This swing is ongoing. And anyone who actually followed the ballot updates for Nevada saw this coming a mile away. But when you want something to be a specific way you interpret the ambiguous data in your favor. Motivated reasoning.
It looks like a huge update, but it corresponds to a change in the result slightly more often than one in every ten cases, which doesn't seem like such a big deal.
Does anyone know if there are guidelines for what is meant by low quality posts/can provide a good summary of what “high quality” posts have? ls the metric strictly insightful thoughts here, or is there some level of clarity/grammar, logic, ethos, or demonstration of knowledge that is being accounted for? Do expressions of sheer goodwill or enthusiasm for a topic make the cut?
Presumably the highest quality comments include the comments that show up as Highlights from the comments. So, new information with at least decent prose.
If you look at the comments that have got people banned, it is generally obnoxiousness that is the relevant variable. Dumb, confusing, boring, illogical? People just skip over things that appear that way to them.
Normal comment standard is "at least 2 of True, Kind, and Necessary". If you want to be "high quality", try and hit all three - even criticisms can usually be phrased kindly.
> I feel like these standards are pretty lax. In fact, they probably permit most spam – this spambot saying “this is a wonderful piece of writing” is both true and kind – so I’ll inelegantly add a kludge that spam is also unacceptable (I have it on good authority that this was in the original Sufi saying used by the Buddha as well). Remember that before you worry this is too unduly restrictive.
So sheer expressions of goodwill and enthusiasm are accepted as long as you don't spam it.
I recently started started re-reading Gödel-Escher-Bach after about 3 years. I never finished it though, I only read approx. 3/4 of the book. The reason being that, to my experience, the book has an immense amount of content to the point that I really start to get lost. I mean you get to a point in which you wonder what the book is even about, but in a beautiful way. Has anyone here had a similar experience? Is there another way to approach this book?
I've read it two or three times. I'm torn between the material being a really important metaphor for... something and that it's good technical stuff which is just about mathematics.
I read it in three legs (with a lot of rereading each time), in 2011, 2014 and 2019. The first two times, my interest in reading the book fizzled out because I felt I'm not getting enough from it, and when I continued later I felt like I have more of the needed background knowledge.
This book is about intelligence. It's generally said to be about artificial intelligence, but I don't see the point in making the distinction - the book is more useful as a mathematical/philosophical examination of the concepts that make intelligence work, whether human, animal, artificial, alien or purely platonic, than as a roadmap for future development of AI.
I believe it's written the way it is, in a convoluted, expansive, self-referential manner, for two reasons:
1. It's fun. (It's weird laud this way a book it took me 8 years to finish, but... it really is.)
2. It allows you to read it more actively - to examine the workings of your own mind while you're reading about them, to feel the book's lessons intuitively. I realized it when I reached the middle, where there was a semantic map of the entire book, and thought, "this is my head right now. This is a diagram of my attempt to keep track of all of the disparate concepts, references and thought experiments, and to understand the underlying theme."
I got about halfway the first time, before finishing it five years later. I liked the incompleteness theorem and the playing around with recursion, but I can't even remember what the rest of the book was about.
It's a long time since I read it, but I thought it was interesting to start with but drifted into "recursion is the theory of everything". Maybe I am misjudging it.
I wound up reading it very slowly - over the course of several years, I think. Pick it up, read until he blew my mind after a few paragraphs, wait a bit, repeat. I suspect that was far from optimal, but it did seem to work pretty well.
This book is the axis of Hofstadter's career as a cognitive scientist. Nearly all of his subsequent academic work (and some of his non-academic too) is an extension of concepts he first explored in GEB. It's not a textbook, but it's one of the most frequently recommended popsci books regarding cognitive science, and MIT once had an online course built around it.
It's an overview of certain results and fields of logic, together with analogies to music and drawings. (IIRC it also teaches a bit about music with analogies to the other two, but I think the main part is the logic one.) IMO, it's not meant as research or as a textbook, but as a popularization of those logic results.
Nah. That's a recipe for wasted time and frustration.
If reading it three times weren't enough, just skip it. Maybe the passage immediately after that can clarify it. If it's your copy, you may highlight it and return to it later.
Or just give up on this particular phrase. Like, there needs to be a balance between how much time you invest in reading and how much you retain, and always insisting on 100% completion seems off-balance.
I would very much love to be able to enter a jhana state, preferably without spending months and years of my life on it. I suspect that this should be possible, given that, as an amateur hypnotist, I was able to get more than one willing and receptive subject into a very similar state of absolute bliss/continuous full body orgasm (not sure if there is a difference for AFABs) within a very short time. Sadly, I do not seem to have the ability of being easily hypnotized, at least not from what I have tried, so that route is not promising for me. I wonder if there are other shortcuts that can be explored.
Like you, I'm pretty good at hypnotizing people, but thought I myself was not very hypnotizable. But later I discovered that the problem for me with being hypnotized by friends and fellow students in my hypnosis seminar was that I found the situation of having someone try to hypnotize me awkward. I'd get preoccupied with whether I was hypnotized enough, and worried about the point where they would do something to test my level of hypnosis, like telling me my arm was going to float upwards -- and there's that gray zone where you sort of feel hypnotized, but not really hypnotized enough for your arm to feel like it's rising of its own volition -- and if I was in the gray zone should I just half-voluntarily raise my arm? And if I didn't, how awkward would that be for my hypnotist?.
But one day a friend and I were running a group, and he was going to hypnotize the group thay day, and so I just sat with everyone else and experienced the hypnosis. And it worked really really well. It was very pleasant, and I was just -- *gone*. I'm pretty sure even some pretty far-out suggestions would have worked well on me. Unfortunately I never got to experience the next phase because at that point something came up that I needed to help with so I reluctantly dragged myself out of hypnotized bliss. Anyhow, might be worth a try -- getting hypnotized as part of a group, where you don't have to be concerned with your personal impact on the hypnotist.
As for other shortcuts -- well, there's the drug route: mescaline, MDMA, candy-flipping (LSD followed several hours later by MDMA), even ketamine, though I personally hated the stuff.
Wouldn’t using drugs to achieve a bliss state run completely counter to the original discussion idea of exploring therapeutic usages of jhana/other meditation to help curb addiction or risk seeking behaviors?
I don't believe that's the context in which jhana was first discussed on here -- I believe someone asked put up apost asking in general about jhana. In any case, Sergei is asking about ways to achieve a bliss state -- is willing to use hypnosis to get there. Sounds like he's interested in the bliss state and is not particular about how he gets there.
I was relating back to the discussion questions from Scott and quotes from Cammarata as the original context, though I suppose not everyone in the thread here necessarily read it. For context:
A lot of literature associates hypnosis with meditation under the umbrella of "altered mental states achieved through instructions and thought", and Sergei was asking about methodology so it seemed like an important part of the answer, though if not, that's fine too! Have your experiences with hypnosis led you to associate it more closely with psychedelics than meditation?
No, in my experience hypnosis is much more like meditation. However, he was asking about achieving bliss states, which probably come in many flavors, the psychedelic variety being one.
Mescaline and LSD are not addictive in the least, and using them is not a risk seeking behavior unless you have really weird ideas about your set and setting.
MDMA should be handled with care, but is also not habit forming if you don't go overboard.
Both are explored for the purposes of psychoterapy, with MDMA explicitly developed for that purpose before rave culture took it and ran.
Experience+literature has given me a pretty strong prior to 'addictive' and 'risky' but I would love to see new literature providing evidence against--- though as a note, I only ask out of interest and I likely won't update my current views unless I see compelling stats addressing the aspects of 1) chemical addiction 2) emotional dependency 3) accidents or violence caused by usage 4) risk of drug reactions 5) risk of lacing (and lacing related drug reactions). As that's a long list, I would never expect any single commenter to address all these priors, no worries :) I only clarify since I think they should all be taken into account by individuals when making a good ol' cost-benefit analysis before usage, potentially with personalized weights based on individual risks. (I enjoy analyses in general, as I'm sure many folks here do, so they're a standard for me before engaging in anything risky.)
Therapists don't give out prescriptions where I live, though every drug I have tried from my psychiatrist has had addictive or dependency-developing properties. Presuming there are non-addictive low-risk drugs that can meet the same needs, I am incredibly curious what reasons there are for blocking them if you know?
> Presuming there are non-addictive low-risk drugs that can meet the same needs, I am incredibly curious what reasons there are for blocking them if you know?
I mean, if you look into the entire history of the "war on drugs" you'll quickly realize that it's mostly about governments banning things they don't understand, often against the expert consensus.
Psilocybin, for instance, has a very good safety profile. You can probably find the page I saw by googling something like "safety profile recreational drugs." In assessing safety, the factors considered in chart I saw were addictiveness, harm to health, and likelihood of causing psychiatric problems. Psilocybin is low on all 3. I don't believe there were any other drugs that were low on all 3, except possibly some other psychedelics. Weed is mildly addictive, and not infrequently sends people to the ER with panic attacks. Alcohol we all know about. As for lacing, psilocybin mushrooms are fairly easy to grow, so you do not have to worry about the mushrooms's being laced with other drugs if you grow them yourself or get them from a trusted acquaintance who does.
I didn’t know psilocybin is easy to grow; that’s SUPER useful for a cost analysis, especially in such heavy contrast with the other options discussed above. Preliminary lit. has suggested healthiest usage from it is bi-annual, so I’m not sure where that would put it in the limbo between “healthy” and “looking for an interesting experience (as described with meditation)”. I imagine the lower time investment is a big draw for folks (though of course since I’ve already developed meditation skills, the investment there is a zero for me personally).
If I understand the concepts correctly, then looking for a shortcut is the best way to guarantee meditation will have the least results/take even longer. Instead of something easy, think of something hard you’ve already spent a lot of time building your concentration with (for me this would be math problems, reading novels, and wildlife observation) and go from there as a springboard maybe? What is your focus state like doing those activities/challenges? How easily do other thoughts interrupt you? What is your awareness like?
(As a note, this is somewhat novice advice, albeit I would consider my own meditations highly successful for my personal goals.)
Hmm, I definitely can enter a flow state when reading/coding/walking, if that is what you mean. Though it is harder now being conditioned by all the interruptions from mobile sources. But even if successful, how do you get from there to bliss?
Ahhhh, pardon, I do also have to put my phone in another room or a box to maintain focus. The notif conditioning is absolutely malicious.
I don’t know how widely applicable my experience is, but I would say: observe what it is like to be in your flow state- what your concentration and awareness feel like- & work towards redirecting that focus to physical or pleasurable sensations you are feeling. I imagine chasing the idea of a bliss state will distract you, so starting with a neutral sensation may help?
As this is probably the last open thread before the midterms in the US, anyone have good (or bad, we'll know pretty soon) predictions?
I do not have any major insight. I guess I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters, which suggests a disaster of Democrats.
However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.
An interesting link that was posted on the subreddit a little while ago: Ann Seltzer's polls of Iowa have historically avoided some of the challenges that have plagued other state and national polls. Heavily weighting FiveThirtyEight and The Economist's models based on Iowa polling data has done very well in backtests at predicting election results. A similar weighting this year gives Democrats a 45% chance of holding the senate and a 15% chance of holding the house.
This is weird because most election forecasters believe that Selzer suggests a *better* result for Dems than 538 or Economist. The main issue I see is looking at the Senate race. Grassley is actually way below what you'd expect due to local reasons. Her previous poll actually had him even lower, +3, which shocked the polling world. But even the +12 poll suggests something like a D+2 environment.
I predict a surprise victory for Elvis Presley in at least three races. He will give all the victory dances simultaneously in the respective districts; people will know most of them are performed by impersonators but won't be willing to call him out on it.
I'm expecting an epic Democratic wipeout. People are really, really pissed off about the price of things, and almost nobody likes Joe Biden. Simple as that. History tells us that's a recipe for disaster for the governing party, and for me the brute facts of history make a stronger case than any amount of rationalization or complex theory.
I think that, as with any party in government world-wide midway through their term of office, there will be a swing away from the Democrats.
I don't know about a Red Wave anymore than the Blue Wave. From what I'm reading, there's a good chance the Republicans will take the House but it's much closer for the Senate, so it could end up Democratic president, Democratic Senate by a very slim margin, and Republican House or Democratic president, Republican Senate by a very slim margin, and Republican House. Plainly, if option two happens, that's not good for the rest of Biden's term but in a way it would serve the Democratic candidate for 2024 - 'we were gonna do all this wonderful stuff, honest, but the nasty Republicans blocked us in Congress'.
I expect it to become mostly useless after this election. Certain pollsters key to the idea would probably change their practice. In fact I am suspicious of one pollster already since I had told him about the theory a few months ago. I guess we will see.
A friend of mine that studies polling methodology suggested the issue isn’t polls being fixed but rather the classic issue of sampling bias. The type of people willing to participate in a voluntary polls about elections heavily lean one way.
Sorry, to be clear, my claim wasn't that the polls are 'fixed' as in 'rigged' but that they aren't 'fixed' as in 'repaired' given their accuracy issues the last couple of elections, which indeed does appear to be consistent undersampling of Republican voters.
From what I've seen (ok, one friend and some stuff online) this might not only be sampling bias. At least some Republican voters are strategically not answering polls so the Democrats have less information to work with.
Also agree with a 60% chance that the polls are still undercounting Republican voters, which if true would on its own certainly imply the GOP crushing the Dems in the House and in state-level races. But....that factor isn't on its own. Some things that seem to be happening may be pointing the other direction. E.g. I'd say the GOP has around a 2 in 3 chance of gaining a House majority but most likely a narrow one. (As the Dems have right now.) And the Dems seem to be doing a bit better than that in state governor races.
My general summary of the current electioneering by the two parties is that the Democrats are worse at campaigning while the Republicans are picking shittier candidates. (Overall I mean; obviously there are plenty of individual exceptions to each generalization.)
If either the GOP stopped picking absurdly-unqualified clowns like Herschel Walker, or the Democrats stopped behaving as if voters who don't already agree with them must be dupes or racists, while the other party continued as-is, then this election could have become a blowout. The actual reality though will have the effect of holding down the degree to which either party dominates.
Ah come on, the guy is named after the discoverer of Uranus, that's worth a vote from any fans of astronomy 😀
He is a former sports star? Reagan was an actor, that didn't hurt his career in politics. I see that his rival is a Baptist pastor, so that should be just as disqualifying or not.
As someone who isn't a Baptist but is very familiar with them, being a Baptist pastor seems way more relevant experience for a political leader than being on a sports team.
It amuses me that with all the fuss over theocracies (Mormon last time round, when Romney was running, and just general 'Christian Nationalist theocracy they are plotting to do away with gay marriage, contraception, and everything else, abortion was just the first step' this time round) that electing an actual clergyman to your national government is not remarked upon.
I guess theocrats are okay once they're the right sort of theocrat? 😁 (I note the gentleman has the correct views on abortion etc. according to his Wikipedia page).
It is very funny that laymen running for office can be accused of wanting to impose their religion, and that the church should be kept out of politics, but electing actual clergy is just fine! The Catholic Church position is that no, priests should not run for political office (which was one of the reasons for conflict with a former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in the 90s; he was a priest but left the priesthood and was elected as president because of this ban on getting involved in politics if you're a cleric).
When Reagan first ran for office in our national government he'd been governor of our largest state for terms. When he was first elected to that governorship he'd been doing national policy speeches (which later were proven to have been composed by him personally) for a decade, and had led a prominent labor union.
Warnock, before running for the Senate seat, had spent a decade publicly working on health care policy and campaigning for candidates for local and state offices.
Walker has a toy badge from a local police department.
Being a Senator isn't (or shouldn't be) rocket science. We're not looking for brilliant philosopher-aristocrats who can reason their way to a super genius bit of legislation, the Special Relativity of Federal Law.
I mean, if we *did* have such ambitions a popular election would be about the dumbest way imaginable to do the selection. You don't pick brilliance by a popular vote. Might as well have a committee gathered from the street outside the hospital vote on who should be a brain surgeon and who should be a janitor inside.
The junior senator from Georgia is supposed to (1) be even-tempered, courteous, and patient in the public spotlight, not often say weird things, (2) be good at working with people, especially those who don't see eye to eye with him, and over whom he has no power other than persuasion and negotiation, and (3) represent his constituents well, meaning he kind of instinctually and by experience has a good idea of what they want.
None of this has squat to do with having a brilliant CV as far as I can see, it's all character stuff, and by me a decade hobnobbing with politicos and pundits is probably a slight negative if anything in terms of being close to what the average schmuck in Atlanta thinks about. I have no idea if Walker in particular is any good at (1), (2), and (3), but I don't see any obvious reason why being a pro football player would make the proposition laughable. I mean, he probably does have to know how to get along with people and work with a team, so that's something, and he probably needed some serious level of grit and self-discipline to make it to the NFL in the first place.
Walker may be absurdly unqualified to be a senator but it is not obvious that he is absurdly unqualified to win a senatorial election. He is a sports star in the most popular sport, and while that isn't much qualification for office it is probably worth a fair number of votes.
"The court got taken over by Dems in the 2018 Trump backlash election and proceeded to gerrymander all the districts to try to lock in an effective one party state for the county"
But surely not! This never happens except when it's the bad naughty wicked Republicans doing it! Democrats are pure and virtuous and care only about maximising the voter turnout!
(Yeah, the sarcasm is heavy-handed there, but at this stage I'm sick to the back teeth of the phrase "election denialist" and the implication, if it's not outright stated, that only Republicans engage in election fraud, vote rigging, or gerrymandering).
(P.P.S. No, I'm not saying the Dems engaged in vote fraud in the last election, untwist your knickers ladies, gentlemen and others. But just that the party line seems to be 'Republicans in power will gerrymander so vote Democrat').
And it's hard to tell if it's fiddling or natural movement.
I remember there was a lot of fuss about Maricopa County, so I went and looked at it, and on the *face* of it, it did look odd: last election Maricopa and surrounding counties all ended red, this time only Maricopa turned blue.
But going deeper, it was simply a matter of 3,000 votes going one way not the other. That was enough to flip from red to blue.
Now, you could say "Someone in Maricopa County fiddled around to flip those 3,000 votes" or you could say "3,000 people changed their minds this time round".
Saying "This looks fishy" wasn't conspiracy theory or irrational, so we have to accept either that election fraud/fiddling by the Democrats did happen (so the 'election denialist' isn't that strong an excuse) or that margins do change naturally. Either way, if the Republicans are to be suspected Because Reasons, there were also Because Reasons to be suspicious of the Democrats.
Like you say, tight margins can give rise to suspicions.
I agree that Republicans "should" have picked up 3-4 seats. Sadly Trump foisted off a bunch of terrible candidates on them and screwed them over. On the upside for them Fetterman had a stroke but on the downside the Trump endorsed candidate is so widely hated he is still gonna lose.
Also maybe the Trump Supreme Court isn't as partisan as I thought cause those fools really dropped a bomb on Republican Senate candidates in June.
It looks as though Trump sabotaged his party's chances in the midterms in the process of maintaining his control over the party. But it also looked, in 2016, as though Trump's nomination meant his party was going to lose the presidential election. It's possible we are again underestimating the popularity of what he is selling.
The interesting question, which I hope someone with no axe to grind will look into after the midterms, will be whether Trump's "terrible candidates" do better or worse than other Republican candidates relative to how well one would expect a candidate running in that state or district to do on the basis of past elections, demographics, and the like.
Walker has no been leading in the polls since the debate. I suppose if you only look at RCP, which cherry picks polls you might think that. Maybe he ends up with a surprise win, though I doubt it, but RCP being correct will only be incidental. He achieved his current 0.1% lead in 538 only on the 4th although that is still impacted by a flood of partisan polls.
You have the opinions of an RCP believer so the rest of your post isn't a shock. Fetterman is ahead on every aggregator that actually looks at all the polls, though like Walker the flood of partisan polls has pushed his number down. The same for Laxalt. There's barely any non-partisan polls this year because of the cost. Whereas the partisan R polls are cheap to conduct in relative terms and there's several wealthy right wingers supporting them.
In any case anyone following the data knew that Ralston was going to put Laxalt behind. He's been talking the whole time about how Laxalt is an Oz/Walker level candidate in NV, and the recent mail drops, now that in person is over, have heavily boosted the Demcrats and their chances.
A partisan poll is a poll from a Republican polling firm, typically but not always commission by a right-wing group. Trafalgar did a series of polls for The Daily Wire for instance. Or Insider Advantage doing some polls for American Greatness.
Nate is constrained by the polls that exist. That's why people are talking about flooding the zone. He also has the issue that his house effects are out of date. For instance Data For Progress has historically been friendly to Dems in a significant way, which makes sense because they are run by Sean McElwee. This year they radically redid their methodology and sample choices causing them to get results functionally idential to Trafalgar. This means that they'll have something like 45-46 Warnock-Walker and that would then be weighted to something like 43-48.
I don't have a ton of respect for conventional wisdom. I had Trump to win in 2016 after he started leading in the R primaries.
I think the conventional wisdom is only useful in a dull generic election. And I think we haven't really had one of those lately.
A few questions I have to the regular commenters here, especially the "EA types":
1 - How come that Betting Markets (at least PredictIt) are favoring the GOP to take both the Senate and the House quite heavily, while polls and early voting data so far paint a much better picture for the Democrats? Which one should the "layperson" trust more? Or is it, as I think, that PredictIt overstates the GOP's chances because of self-selection of the bettors (I.e. Thiel-Style Libertarian/Alt-Righters?)
2 - Would people here consider Robin Hanson to be alt-right? Because recently he seems to be posting quite a few opinion pieces that are very sympathetic to the alt-right...is he on the "libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline like Herr Thiel?
PredictIt specifically is tainted, as you suggested, by the self-selection of the user base as well as by the structure of the system due to their attempt to avoid legal challenges from the US. The other markets are only tainted by the self-selection so they are slightly better.
Laypeople shouldn't trust anyone, though, I would argue. They should just live their lives, vote for the people they like, and see what happens on Tuesday.
Wait, shouldn’t price discovery still work when there is participant bias? Insofar as the price is skewed Republican, an opportunity is created for unbiased participants to make a profit. Only a small number of actors should be required to bet the other way to remove any bias.
Or do I have this wrong and efficiency is easily perturbed by market participant bias? (I’m judging from intuition, not mathematics, though a toy mathematical model would be appreciated!)
You'd need like 100 people able to invest at least $17000, the $850 max on 20 trades, to counter the existing bias, if not more. There's just not that many people who know about the markets or care enough to do that that aren't irrational Trumper Pumpers.
Although now is an excellent time to be since you are incredibly close to the resolution so you aren't letting the money sit for months like some of the Trumper Pumpers did.
You got me. I just placed a modest but personally meaningful bet against republicans taking both houses. Funny how I care 100x more now than I did yesterday. Skin in the game changes how we think about it?
I think the greatest inefficiency comes from the fact that PredictIt limits trading volume per user. A rich, unbiased user can still only bet $850 on a particular trade.
1. PredictIt probably slightly overstates the GOP's chances because it has mostly Republicans. But the narrative I hear most often is that overall prediction markets are righter than polls, mainly because Republicans are more paranoid anti-establishment and refuse to cooperate with pollsters, and Democrats are super-fired up about this election and *love* talking to pollsters. See eg this New Yorker article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/why-republican-insiders-think-the-gop-is-poised-for-a-blowout
2. Robin's first commitment is to economics and his second commitment is to being an annoying controversial contrarian. I think the first commitment pushes him away from the Trumpist right and his second commitment pushes him towards them, but overall he is way too independent to fit into any movement. I assume he has unwoke positions on race and gender because I assume he's seen most of the same arguments I have. I assume he's anti-Trump for the same reason, and also because Trump has a lot of economically disastrous ideas. I don't think "alt-right" has a definition much beyond "Republican who I don't like and am about to accuse of racism" so I don't think there's a fact of the matter who belongs to it, but I doubt Robin would self-identify that way.
Could you explain what you mean by unwoke position on gender and what are the arguments in favour of it?
As far as I understand, the ideas from "categories were made for men" are pretty woke even by modern standards. Have you changed your opinion on the matter since then? Or are we using different definitions of "wokeness"?
My own model of Robin Hanson is based on my reactions from reading his allegedly top blog posts varying from "that's an interesting and clever idea we should think more in this direction" to "that's something I thought when I was doing primitive pattern matching in my teens and am cringing right now about". So with moderately low confidence I expect his position on transgenders being closer to thinking them stupid and following social contamination.
Now, after I made this public postdiction, does anyone have a link to some of his thoughts on the matter?
I'm guessing Scott is referring to the opinions expressed in "Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences". Maybe also the things he said in "Untitled", though that was more about feminism as a movement than "gender" as such.
I don't like likes. Starts off well-intentioned, devolves into "I hate you but since I can't get you kicked off here, all I can do is hit the 'like' button for the guy you are arguing with".
My impression is that this would be a bit more like deleting the top 66% of comments. Sorta tongue in cheek/
But at least, all of the other times we've had this argument over whether likes should even be visible, it seemed to be the consensus that they were toxic and encouraged partisanship and such
I am not an American, but watching the upcoming midterm elections from the sidelines feels like a buildup to a calamity, were this a TV show. With the most sane Republican being Liz Cheney, and most of the rest being 2020 election denialists and proponents of a nationwide abortion ban, the Dems' progressives (AOC, Warren, Sanders etc.) sliding ever further into commie think ("Billionaires bad!") and anti-tech, and the center either non-existent or extremely uninspiring on ether side, the odds of a post-election conflict worse than Jan 6 seem unnervingly high. And yet, I don't see much in terms of alarm bells going off, so maybe I am missing something here.
Don't believe too much of what you see about American politics on ACX. It is way more right wing that at first seems evident. The election arguably *was* stolen from Gore, but not by votes as much as friendly court fiat. Regardless he let it go and America was plunged into a decades long hell and giant money pit.
I actually don't like Stacey Abrams due to her politics and I think she has overplayed her hand on the 2018 election. There's some level of voter suppression in GA but it isn't "the new Jim Crow" as she and many of her allies like to portray it. She lost because she sucks as a candidate. Maybe we can give her credit for voter turnout, although I'm skeptical of her votes above replacement and think a lot of it was structural. But as a campaigner she is terrible.
I don't think there is any level of voter suppression in GA. Don't they have extremely liberal voting rules, like far more liberal than New York for example, and black votes are way up?
I'd say it's pretty easy to vote here (we have lots of early voting, they mail you a registration form when you move here), but I do think it would be a bit hard to vote if you were homeless, since you do need proof of residency and the like (which can be done with a letter from a shelter/halfway house, but I know those aren't always easy to get into)
I honestly want to start a “fuck both these parties party” and make yard signs and run candidates and everything. But I am not a good person to start a movement because I am too tactless and care to little for what “normies” think about things.
Markets are great and amazing and one of our most effective economic tools, and we should use them where-ever we can and stay out of their way, but then intervene when/where they fail and do things we find unacceptable. Collective action problems (a change that costs individuals $1,000, but benefits everyone on earth $0.01, where you need the government to step in and make people participate), natural monopolies, places where consumers are irrational in incapable of getting good info, etc. All those are places where the market needs intervention.
A bigger focus on incentives and human action and motivation in terms of social safety net. While also being in touch with the fact that sometimes bribing people with social support is cheaper than oppressing/policing an underclass. It is a balance.
But the biggest part of the platform would be the systematic dismantling of the current parties and their sinecures, and replacing that with a new system. I am not sure ours is a terrible design, but it has gone WAY WAY too long without a "reset" and the players are too entrenched and too "efficient" at the game, and their strategies too orthagonal to running the country well.
Wait...what about free Internet for everyone? And steak. Every other Friday, maybe. Professional grilled.
Also...differences between the parties that can't be settled in 30 minutes private face-to-face conversation must be resolved in weekly gladiatorial combat between the oldest Senator from each party. Each combatant is armed with a gladius, or trident and net (his/her/xer/xor choice), first blood wins except in the case of Supreme Court nominations in which case it's to the death, and the games are available on pay for view with 1/2 the proceeds benefiting orphans and widows.
Well all I can say is you should have been around for the election of 1980, when Ronnie Raygun was going to send the world to nuclear hellfire January 22 fer sure, or the election of 1972 when McGovern was going to sell out to the commies, the election of 1968 in which RFK (the presumptive Democratic nominee) was shot and killed after winning the California primary and there was rioting and tear gas at the Democratic Convention.
Politics ain't beanbag, as Tip O'Neill used to observe. On the broad scale of American elections, this one is on the mild side. A bit worse than some, better than many. It may not seem that way if one is glued to social media (which naturally encourages hysteria) or media sites, which encourage also hysteria and obsession for those sweet, sweet page clicks that advertisers reward so well. It's also the case that the party currently in power (the Democrats) are bracing themselves for heavy losses, and of course that means a lot of highly visible people, starting with the President, are going to be predicting The End Of Things if that comes to pass, to encourage any slackers among theirs base to bestir themselves to the polls. You saw the same heavy breathing from Team MAGA once it became clear in 2016 that Trump was headed for the dumpster.
I'm less worried (though not zero worried) about a post-election conflict, mostly because Americans don't care about midterms the same way they care about presidents. I could imagine something bad happening if some party wins or loses by exactly one seat, otherwise everyone with an agenda will wait until 2024.
Also, this election the most likely scenario is that the Republicans gain (or at least don't lose anything), and I think the Democrats are less likely to protest, partly because of who they are and partly because they've been saying that protesting an election result is always evil fascism for the past two years, and it will take them more than one week to pivot.
"partly because they've been saying that protesting an election result is always evil fascism for the past two years"
Ah but you see, it's only evil fascism when the *other* side do it. See cancel culture or whatever we're calling it; when They do it, it is censorship and suppression which is bad and wrong but when We do it, it is fighting hate speech and not tolerating the intolerant.
>>>mostly because Americans don't care about midterms the way they care about Presidents.
I think this is...incomplete.
The level of obsession that the Democrat party has with national politics, and especially with the executive branch, is far in excess of their interest in non presidential, non national positions.
Not to say that Republicans don't care more about Presidential races as well, but local *contested* (ie not CA) politics tend strongly to be more conservative on off years, because conservative voters still vote to some degree in off years.
I have actually read some research data on this but it has been a few years, and Trump broke many things, so I am not sure if the trend is currently holding.
My personal expectation is that Dems gain in the Senate and are 60/40 to hold the House so I expect a lot of furor even if there are no riots in the streets. I'd give riots in the streets, pending Democrats holding both chambers, 60/40.
For what it's worth, I don't think there will be post-election conflict as I think the Republicans will likely win both the House and Senate. Democrats won't challenge this. '24 might be more chaotic if Trump wins the primary and loses the general election again.
Also, I appreciate Liz Cheney's stance on Trump and extremism within the Republican party, but I think it's worth noting that she and other prominent anti-Trump Republicans like the Bush family, Bill Kristol, and Adam Kinzinger are neoconservatives who strongly support military interventionism abroad. These are people that liberals would have absolutely hated 20 years ago, some of whom have blood on their hands, and whose policies would likely lead to further bloodshed abroad if they were elected to office. I really don't know whether I would classify them as "sane" Republicans for prioritizing election integrity at home while often condoning regime change efforts and deaths abroad. (Not talking about Ukraine, where US aid is merited in my opinion).
Centrism could refer to multiple things. There are proposals that the vast majority of the public agree on, which could form the basis of a reasonable centrist platform (largely, fiscally liberal and socially somewhat moderate). But centrism for others refers to social liberalism, fiscal conservatism, and neoconservatism in foreign policy, which is mostly only appealing to certain elites. So I guess it really depends on the implementation.
>I really don't know whether I would classify them as "sane" Republicans for prioritizing election integrity at home while often condoning regime change efforts and deaths abroad.
For my entire adult lifetime, the moderate bipartisan consensus has been endless war, unlimited spending, the expansion of arbitrary executive power, and an ever-escalating and increasingly flagrant surveillance state. When that's the moderate position, denouncing people as radical is unlikely to turn me against them in and of itself. The only problem with the ejection of Liz Cheney from the republican party is that it didn't happen 15 years ago.
>Democrats won't challenge this.
Weak disagree. While I doubt there will be large scale violence, I strongly suspect it's about to become cool to question election results again.
I think there could be a handful of notable Democratic politicians (I would guess < 5) who claim something like voter suppression, as Stacey Abrams did in 2018. There also might be claims of Russian misinformation, etc. as in 2016. But I doubt it will be anywhere near the the scale of Republican election denial claims of 2020.
>There also might be claims of Russian misinformation, etc. as in 2016
>But I doubt it will be anywhere near the the scale of Republican election denial claims of 2020
You do realize that the efforts to overturn the 2016 election were both of a larger scale and came far closer to succeeding than the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Efforts to overturn the 2020 election were pretty bad but they had virtually no institutional support.
Do you have examples? I did not follow politics very closely back in 2016, but all I remember were some recounts that Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein asked for in certain states. And then something like 6 Democratic congresspeople who objected to elector certification but were overruled by Biden, who was presiding over the vote count.
I don't think the first qualifies as election denial as Clinton accepted the results (she called Trump to concede the day of the election) and then afterwards accepted the recount results. The second incident was unfortunate but I don't believe it was seriously entertained by Democratic leadership.
I liked the appeal to the Faithless Electors, because it blew up in the faces of those faintly hoping that Democracy could be saved by annulling the results of the Slaveholder's Electoral College by asking people to vote not as their state directed but by the burning in their bosom.
And some of them did, and they took slaveholder votes *away* from Hillary 😁
(Why mention "slaveholder"? Because that is what all the squawking about the Electoral College that I saw online harped on. The Electoral College is bad because it was set up to allow slaveholding states to continue being part of the system, so it should be abolished because slavery bad).
What was the institutional effort to overturn the result of the 2016 election? As opposed to the effort (well, really just the talk) to reform the election process. I recall Dems being stunned, not questioning the outcome, just grumbling about how electoral college is undemocratic and outdated. What "came close to succeeding"?
I think you're basing your views of both sides too much on hit pieces written by their opponents. I think there's rather a lot of people who are going to be elected who are neither Nationwide Abortion Ban supporters nor Outright Commies.
There are an unfortunate number of politicians that try to suggest they will support the few folks that actually would push a nationwide change to bodily/fiscal autonomy, though they tend to be testing the waters to see what will get them votes and wouldn’t actually support said policies unless a clear path reveals itself for the above types of policies to directly benefit them (ie. if they happen to be a politician from a family that owns a business that will gain a natural monopoly through the legislature, or maybe a high chance of improving their platform for the next voting round.)
Re Intelligence II: I am of a logical bent so this question drawn from R.J. Sternberg, a very big name in intelligence studies, appeals to me:
"You are at a party of truth-tellers and liars. The truth-tellers always tell the truth, and the liars always lie. You meet someone new. He tells you that he just heard a conversation in which a girl said she was a liar. Is the person you met a liar or a truth-teller?
Well logically the answer should come swiftly, but there's a problem with the question and the higher your Intelligence the more likely you will answer "incorrectly"
At another such party, a man approached a woman and asked her whether she was a rich truth-teller. She answered yes or no. Some time later, a second man independently asked her whether she was a rich liar. She answered yes or no. Finally, a third man, acting independently of the other two, asked her whether she was a poor truth-teller. She answered yes or no.
None of the three men had enough information to deduce whether she was rich or poor, or whether she was a liar or a truth-teller.
So what was she?
(Of course, everybody knows that all partygoers are either rich or poor.)
If she answered the first question with "no," the man would deduce that she is a poor truth-teller. A rich truth-teller would say yes, as would a liar. Therefore she said "yes" and she is either a rich truth-teller or a liar.
If she answered the second question with "yes," the man would be able to deduce that she is a poor liar. A truth-teller or a rich liar would not be able to say yes. Therefore she said "no" to the second question, which implies either she is a truth-teller, or she is a rich liar.
If she answered the last question with "no", the man could deduce that she is a rich truth-teller - same logic as the first man. Therefore she said "yes" and she is either a poor truth-teller or a liar.
Combine all the information we have, and she can only be a rich liar.
We first ask, do the people at the party know the truth of everything? That's crazy. For example if I ask X "if I asked a liar whether they were a liar, would would they say"? This tells me if X is a liar. Next I ask "Is P=NP"? (Or anything else). So since now I know whether X is a liar, I learn whether P=NP (or any other yes/no question.)
So next, perhaps they people are not super knowledgable - but truth-tellers can't attest something that is actually wrong (nor liars state the truth). But that also doesn't quite work, assuming there is at least one liar:
"Is P=NP?". Truth-tellers have to say 'I don't know', presumably. Liars can't say that (assuming they don't actually know), but also can't say the actual truth (since that wouldn't be a lie), so they must say the opposite of the truth. With a couple of details omitted, this lets you find out anything that has a truth value so long as there is at least one liar.
So what is left? Truth-tellers can say 'I don't know' but liars can't do that (unless they actually do); so t faced with a "yes/no/I-don't-know' question they can say *either* 'yes' or 'no' even though one of them might be true (so long as they don't know it's true). They can't say 'I don't know'.
The girl at the bars is a liar. She doesn't know it. When asked 'what are you?' she has to answer 'yes' or 'no' and is not restricted by what is actually the case (since she doesn't know it). So she can say 'yes'. The man you are talking to heard this; he is honest.
In the first two cases, you can find the truth of anything out. Indeed, things sort of fall apart if there are meaningful assertions without a truth value. I think that means the very situation being described cannot exist, i.e. it is logically impossible (probably some citation to Godel might fit about here) so there's no sensible answer?
If the third case, you might be talking to a truth-teller.
I would think how you should (in fact, must) answer this depends on where you yourself are a liar or a truth-teller (unnatural though either may be, you are at the party, so you must be one or the other).
Without checking, I think the answer is that the person you met must be a liar, because neither a truth-teller nor a liar can refer to themselves as a liar. I don't see what the problem is, or why a smarter person would be more likely to answer incorrectly. What am I missing?
One trick I saw; people at the party ARE truth-tellers or liars. This does not require them to have ALWAYS BEEN that way. So if the girl said she WAS a liar, that might still be truth; she may have changed from liar to truth-teller at some point in the past.
And I think someone already pointed out the puzzle doesn't actually say everyone at the party is exclusively a liar or truth-teller; the girl could be some other group entirely.
Point taken (assuming you are replying to me), but there's got to be some 'trick' here and it's not entirely clear that my interpretation is wrong. 'You' are *AT* a party. You ARE one of these two types of people. Someone is asking 'you; a question (the entire puzzle could have been phrased entirely third-person (i.e. you aren't a party participant, just being told a report of something that went on - but it wasn't: it's all about 'you').
Why shouldn't it be read as 'tell me your answer to this question?' The option of 'forget about what type of person you are, tell me what is really true?' presumably doesn't exist in this world; and the question could have been rephrased if that was what was wanted.
I am stretching, for sure, but I don't think entirely unreasonably.
The only other answers I can see with the 'why isn't the obvious answer right' issue involve far more serious breaks with interpretation pragmatics than this. (So I guess that means I'll be embarrassed to learn the answer.)
My immediate response was he was a liar. Rereading the question for gotchas
1. Can just heard cover a longer time period - he could have heard the conversation before the party in which case you can’t determine whether he is a truth teller or liar
2. The girl might be a waitress and need not always lie or tell the truth
Well you are all correct. The man is a liar because the woman couldn't reply as she did..
But if you overthink this one as an intelligent person might do, not accepting the correct prima facie answer, then you might look at it this way (among others) Alter the story slightly and make it "A woman at the party was asked by her friend, "Are you a liar?" She replied, "I'm a liar."
But she could easily see (as any speaker could) that this assertion led to paradox. So really it asserted nothing. If this was a court of law, rather than a cocktail party, it would have been the equivalent of taking the Fifth. She threw up, like a shield, a paradox to avoid incriminating herself. So she actually did not answer the question. She evaded it by invoking her right to make self-contradictory remarks.
All of this implying the person hearing the conversation, reported truthfully and is a truth-teller. Now I might take that overly analytic line and reply to the test "a truth-teller" And be docked credit.
That's bizarre. The premise of a logic puzzle is that statements in it are either true or false, and which it is can be discovered by deduction. Most people wouldn't even consider the possibility that a key statement is neither true nor false, since that defies the premise.
(More intelligent people are probably *more* likely to dismiss this possibility, because they've heard logic puzzles before and know the unstated assumptions.)
But even if you do admit the possibility that liars and truth-tellers can make paradoxical statements, that just changes the question to "A man says he heard a woman give an answer to a question that was neither true nor false. Is he telling the truth?" When you state it that way, it's clear that you can't conclude the man is telling the truth - both a liar and a truth-teller can report a paradoxical statement, depending on if the paradoxical statement actually happened.
You are completely correct. My example doesn't convince even me. But that's the way my mind works sometimes, automatically looking for "none of the above" type answers. In the setup, no one can say, " I am a liar" ; the statement as self ascription leads to paradox. No problem exists with describing others however. "He is a liar" can be used by both groups with no paradoxes raising their ugly heads. How can we use logical machinery to make an equivalency between the two types of statements? Even if we can, it still would be changing the rules of the setup question. So, you are right the answer is very easy as logic puzzles go. I subscribe to Graham Priest and his form of dialetheism and paraconsistent logic as a promising way to get a handle on the Liar. But globally, there are problems with dialetheism as well.
This all seems crazy. If you give this question to an intelligent person *but do not tell them that there is a trick here and intelligent people tend to get it wrong* does anyone, really, get it wrong? If in a book of brain-teasers, the smarter people would surely say 'he is a liar'. Your introduction, particularly citing 'a big name in intelligence' suggest that they do.
Let me go out on a limb here and say: no, I think that is utterly false. In fact, I think you just made it up. I would bet A LOT, *A LOT*, that this is false and that intelligence is positively correlated with saying is he is a liar. How much you would like to bet on this? I will take the other side for a large amount.
"...that this assertion led to paradox. So really it asserted nothing"
It is not a TRUE statement under any commonly understood notions of truth. Maybe it's meaning-less? The girl is not a TRUTH-teller. We are told: Truth tellers only tell the truth. (I am _not_ saying it's a lie; but it's not true, so the girl is not a truth teller.)
(Also, by the rules of the game, these four words ('I' 'am' 'a' 'liar') CANNOT be since sincerely uttered by anyone at the party (i.e. without excuplatory context). They metaphysically cannot. You don't need to ask what it might mean if they did; their larynx would seize - or something. The question might as well be: 'You are at a party. No one there can fly. You hear a man who says he can fly. Is he telling the truth? Or, you might as well ask: "Assume that 1+1=3; is 1+1=4?".
The assertion that 'intelligent' people get trapped into this type of introspection, unless told to try to find a catch, is just obviously false and wrong and just made up out of the blue for god knows only what silly reasons.
"R.J. Sternberg, a very big name in intelligence studies". Big name? As a laughing stock? Or are you misrepresenting him?
Wow, this was diasappointing. I didn't expect anything this empty.
You might also assert a distinction between legal and illegal propositions. Kind of like dividing by zero is an illegal operation, propositions that imply their own converse like if A then not A. A, would be ruled out. You could deny the validity of two valued logic and assert three valued logic or a paraconsistent logic and dialetheism. You might take the line that in essence the proposition is meaningless, just a collection of words that taken together are nonsense. You could take the view that the story conflates lying with saying something you genuinely believe to be true (but later turns out to be false.). Anyway certain minds might be inclined to overthink this problem and get lower grades for their efforts.
If this is conjecture, this is surely wrong and (as stated above) I'd take a large bet against it.
I think you've made a mistake, but maybe I have. However I really want to know: is the above idea (that more intelligent people tend to be trapped down such pathways [*]) real to the extent that 'that the higher your intelligence, the more likely you are to answer correctly' yours or is it from "the a very big name in intelligence studies" you cite? Whatever 'intelligence studies' even is (is there really such a thing?)
[*] Which, I should point out, you don't actually show are wrong.
I think you're right in the main and I confused intelligence with a tendency to over analyze things. You probably have demonstrated more intelligence than I in this topic.
IMO the remaining interesting aspect of this is that you are suggesting that someone notable in 'intelligence studies' (?!? - that's a weird, unusual, term) thinks there's something here. I think this seems rather unlikely, and if not you are mispreresenting this person unfairly (perhaps a clarification/apology is in order?) and if you you do think this is true then perhaps clear citation to this person would be in order? Please?
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, many of the sorts of people who would nowadays be Internet Rationalists (indeed, many of the exact same people) were instead Transhumanists, or even Extropians. They would talk optimistically about how technologies like AI, uploading, cryonics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and so forth would lead to a wonderful singularity, and they would boo-hiss against luddites like Bill Joy who wanted to shut down nanotechnology research for fear of gray goo. I lurked on those sorts of mailing lists back in the day, and I imagine some other people here did too.
What happened to all of that? Many of the same people are still kicking around, but the optimism is all gone. Most of the technologies that used to be discussed on those lists are now dismissed by the same sorts of people as pipe dreams, except for AI which is now more feared than celebrated. The Singularity is no longer celebrated as some kind of Rapture For Nerds in which we all get to live forever, but is feared as a world-ending kaboom where everything becomes paperclips. I just checked and extropy.org is still up (but advertising a conference in 2007) and https://www.aleph.se/Trans/ is still up but doesn't seem to have changed either.
What happened to all of that? I miss the techno-utopianism of those days, even if a lot of it was a bit crazy.
I think part of it was the shift generally from the sunny optimism of the 90s about how we had solved a lot of problems, to the mid-2000s onwards when those 'solved' problems starting causing trouble again.
Part of it was, again, time passing and the expectations that "By such a date, this will have happened!" didn't come true, and the real scale of how difficult a project transhumanism is sank in. You can have a lot of rosy expectations about how fast tech is advancing when you're 20 because see how fast things have changed since I was a kid and that is not that long ago, and then you hit 30 and the advances keep happening, sure, but somehow not in the fields or not in the way you were hoping.
I think what happened to the Transhumanists and Extropians was that Eliezer Yudkowsky argued the smartest ones around to a more pessimistic position. (And it wasn't just him, but he was certainly the most visible "advocate from the inside".) And it was enough to basically collapse the movements as such. Or from a more historical-materialist sort of perspective, the whole thing collapsed from the internal contradiction that people inclined to see the promise of such technology were also unusually likely to be *able*, if reluctant, to see its dangers, and to have cultivated enough mental flexibility to eventually overcome their reluctance.
But I think the whole framework of transhumanism collapsing is confused. It changed, evolved from more naive and optimistic to more aware and cautious form. I believe EY and lots of other rationalists keep identifying as transhumanists, and didn't change their values from "simplified humanism", myself included. We would still want to live in a techno-utopia, it just turned out that the road there is more complicated than we thought it might be.
Maybe better than saying transhumanism "collapsed" is it "changed from a movement to a belief", because it became current that "we won't be ready for transhumanism-as-clearly-distinct-from-ordinary-humanism until we've cleared some more hurdles as a civilization" ...
I personally would rather have some limits on human genetic engineering lest it speed up the rate at which future humans become misaligned from present humans. Life extension/cryonics, yes, would be less controversial.
If all the retoric about AI Alignment had been incoherent and wrong EY would have deserved some blame for fearmongering and slowing the progress towards techno-utopia, indeed.
Well, considering the eagerness to ignore or even count in your own favour the evidence and reasoning, supporting positions you disagree with, that you've shown regarding other matters, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised.
So yeah, if you ignore all the reasons that we have, we have no particular reason indeed.
Yeah IDK either and fully agree with you...the last (interesting?) book on Transhumanism was probably Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus...but yeah, mainstream conversation seems to see Transhumanists as either some kind of "Alt-Right weirdos" (Mencius?), or just as a pipe dream by people like Kurzweil etc.
Also, I don't understand why Transhumanism became associated with the alt-right...is it because of Thiel and Mencius? I mean, Transhumanism is a very revolutionary and futuristic idea, kind of the opposite of conservatism...I guess the fact that the current right-wing portrays itself as "revolutionary" might have some influence on this in the popular discussion...
I'd speculate it's related to the general decline in plausibility of radical egalitarianism, combined with growing skepticism in the downstream benefits of capitalism-driven technological progress.
There's less of the old naive SF-adjacent sense of wonder and hope that tech like genetic engineering and exocortical augmentations might improve humanity as a whole. It's probably going to uplift an elite and its servant class. It follows, then, that the people still excited by transhumanist possibilities in the current sociopolitical context are those who already believe it's natural and just that we be divided into über- and untermenschen.
When I think of "extropian", I tend to think more of direct biological interventions (nanotechnology, genetical engineering, artificial body parts etc.) … A Smartphone certainly is a great and transformative invention, but it's mainly used for communication, entertainment and education...not sure if that qualifies as "Extropian"...
Poor example, even aside from reference class quibbles. Internet access stats in Africa, particularly south of the Sahara where subsistence farmers subsist, are dismal. Further infer urban vs rural, and no, it's not available.
Unless you mean available in the sense that the technology is not explicitly embargoed, which of course it doesn't have to be. It's legal and technologically feasible for me to take a walk on the moon, too.
I'm more at a loss as to why there was a surge of optimism in the '90s and '00s, but I suppose one could provisionally credit the general end-of-history atmosphere: liberal-democratic ascendancy, peace dividend, relative prosperity, somewhat receded threat of nuclear war (at least in the popular view insulated from the scramble to control Soviet stockpiles).
Though, as against that, Fukuyama himself wrote a book on the need for global institutional control of transhumanist technologies (similar to arms control regimes) and was allegedly mildly obsessed with Gattaca, so who knows.
I don't think that's true. I've seen a surprising number of transgender people online who support transhumanism as part of a belief in morphological freedom. Transgenderism is the first step to a broader program of "allow everyone to have the body that they want."
And conversely, there are a lot of conspiracy-minded people on the right who argue against transgenderism on the grounds that it's the first step towards transhumanism - the NWO wants to convince us to give up our attachment to our natural bodies, so they can get us to install the 5G nanomachines and turn us into cyborg slaves. Or something like that.
Has anyone here successfully studied themselves as a data point of ONE, to lose weight or improve on some health measure, by trying different things, keeping intelligent notes, and seeing what works for you?
I study my HRV data. Insights, so far: Alcohol consumption is a stressor, except when its not. And the COVID vaccinations were heavy stressors with weeks of recovery, worse than dental surgeries. And I should live in the woods.
How do you define a stressor? Makes the body do extra work, so, for instance, a long run would be a stressor? Damages the body in a way the body cannot repair? Damages the body in a way thee body has to work hard to repair?
In this context, I consider anything I perceive as reducing my parasympathic activity because it correlates to lower rmssd as a stressor. A long run may have such an effect. The app I use was intended for endurance training so the example fits well. I have to contact the developer because he only has three stages of drinking (nothing, a little and too much) while I document mg of alcohol and my subjective level of "too much" varies.
No particular insight, but my weight dropped fairly significantly while I was on invisalign, which limited me to being able to eat ~3 times a day for ~30 minutes at a time. I'm a bit concerned this might encourage some form of binge eating and starvation, but not being able to snack in between apparently had enough of an effect that I dropped ~20 pounds in ~3 months without changing much else about my diet.
I have tracked my productivity over the last few years. Basically a spreadsheet where I record, at the end of the day, how many effective hours I got done in the day. (In my job as in many others, it is distressingly easy to spend hours in front of the computer and not get anything done). It's been revealing. For example, after I started running last hour, my productivity shot up dramatically. I knew that already, in an intuitive sense, but having the actual numbers was really helpful for convincing myself to keep up with the exercise routine.
Are you looking for success with the studying part, or with the losing-weight-or-healthing-upwards part?
The former I have no clue about, not one for note-keeping and spreadsheets. The latter...frustratingly, most of the Everybody Knows stuff works just fine on me, so it'd mostly be a rehash of the usual canards. If you'd like a recap of working common knowledge from someone who's maintained ~20% lower weight vs last decade's setpoint, I'd be happy to retell that story.
If you've written it up, I'd love to read. Is there such a "best practices" that applies to everyone? Yes, losing some weight and keep it off is a key goal. Strength, flexibility, better health parameters overall...
Thanks to you and other commenters here for responding to me here!
I guess I want the "quantified self" approach to understand what works and what doesn't *for me* because the recommendations out there seem contradictory.
And my memory is not reliable for these details over a period of several months. I need to be super disciplined for recording all this, and I am not great at that either.
I do intermittent fasting. I eat minimally processed food. And I don't seem to exercise much (too boring).
Well, if I had the conscientiousness to systematically analyze health interventions, I would probably also have the the conscientiousness to count energy intake or whatever. :-/
I can thus only offer trivial (and not very rigorous) observations about myself:
- The half-life of candy within my flat seems to be measured in days, so it is likely not a good idea to have any around. By contrast, frozen things which have to be thawed in advance last much longer. Why I would probably be unprincipled enough to eat a piece of cake right now if I could, I have little impulse to to start thawing one so that future me can enjoy it. Let that bastard eat bread.
- Sports work better for me when I am distracted from the fact that I am doing sports. Running is terrible in that way (unless you are running from big cats or something, which generally does not lead to beneficial health outcomes {{citation needed}}). Team sports (given that they are conceptually far away from anything I was subjected to in PE class) would probably work better for me.
> Sports work better for me when I am distracted from the fact that I am doing sports.
Have you tried Dance Dance Revolution? It is a sport that is also a computer game, kind of. You need to buy a dancing pad, the software is free (StepMania).
I imagine Scott could ask Substack to implement such an option and also recommend to other people to do the same. One person asking probably won't do much, but after several people asking it might actually get onto the roadmap.
Personally I do not think that Scott getting martyred for free speech would be the best possible use of his time. We already had a similar situation when the SSC reddit became unable to host the the culture war discussion thread (from what I recall), leading to themotte, whose primary point is that it is not run by Scott, so he does not get blamed for it.
While the culture war threads are not restricted to opinions within the general overton window, there are still rules in place. The unmoderated content in his thought experiment would have fewer rules (e.g. "No CSAM, no bomb manuals" or whatever).
I predict that within hours, an army of trolls would probe how serious his commitment to free speech was. Expect crude holocaust denial, name calling, racist jokes, possibly crime-related communication, and all other sorts of garbage.
Another hour behind that (unless they happen to also be a troll) would be the outraged mob. "How can you host a comment saying X?" They will try to cancel/deplatform ACX. Complaining to substack, figuring out how principled they (and their ISPs) are on free speech. Perhaps DDoS. Or affecting the offline life of their victim. I would not wish that on anyone, let alone on Scott.
Or perhaps everyone would just shrug, think "well, that is about the same as /b/ was" (not that I could comment on that, having never visited it) and get on with their lives and find something more worthwhile to be outraged about. I don't know.
I guess it's the good point that the trolls would abuse this capacity to attack the platform. But that's true for any platform, be it Scott or any other. And any platform that allows witches to communicate (or visibly exist) will be attacked by witch hunters - so doesn't that invalidate the whole idea Scott was proposing, or at least make it useless?
I have recently watched this 30 minute video with John Oliver where, according to the YouTube description, he "explains what critical race theory is, what it isn’t, and why we can expect to hear more about it in the coming months". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EICp1vGlh_U
Now maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I do not remember any part where he explained what CRT actually *is*. It seemed to me like he just spent all that time making fun of people who oppose the idea. I am being unfair here? If you think so, could you please give me the timestamp of the actual explanation in that video?
I have previously watched his explanation of the dialysis industry, which in my opinion was well done. Not sure how fair it was, but at least it felt like someone was *explaining* nontrivial things to me, and making a few jokes along the way. So I clicked to another recommended video, expecting a comparable quality... and was disappointed.
Regarding CRT, in my experience, the leftish media I consume (e.g. the guardian) seem to only mention CRT as the bogeyman republicans are fear. They generally treat these concerns about as serious as the claim that Obama is secretly a Muslim.
I have observed comedy shows to be very partisan. I think this is less of a problem for issues already widely discussed -- whatever views on abortion they may broadcast, the average viewer was likely already exposed to a ton of other takes on the topic and so being "fair and balanced" is not required.
I remember watching an episode of one of these shows (can't recall which) about Venezuela and remember wondering if it was sponsored by the US government. I am not well informed on that topic (and do not have a horse in the race), so for all I know it could be all true that Maduro is Stalin reborn and in the process of dismantling a formerly thriving democracy. However, given the history of the US interventions in the Americas -- which were not always strictly driven by human rights concerns, but sometimes tainted by economic self-interest I think being concerned about something similar happening right now is not totally absurd.
Unlike abortion, Venezuela does not seem to be a much-debated topic in US media, so I feel that for a significant part of the viewers, the contents of that episode will basically form their view on that matter. In that case, I would indeed like some form of journalistic neutrality in that episode.
Maduro can't really dismantle a formerly thriving democracy, due to the total absence of any thriving democracy in Venezuela. You can find many words to describe Chavez' regime, but "thriving democracy" is not the ones you should reach for.
Venezuela has been mentioned a few times in the US media when it experienced a short-lived boom due to oil revenues, and some extremely gullible pundits thought it's finally would be the instance of socialism working. When it turned out, inexplicably, that socialism and toilet paper shortages are inseparable, and you can actually have fuel shortages in a major oil-producing country (the old Soviet joke: "What happens if they build socialism in the middle of Sahara desert? - They'd run out of sand."), the interest somehow waned. True socialism is still yet to be tried.
I think part of the the problem is that there are two CRTs: an actual epistomological framework that you won't encounter outside of graduate school/more advanced academics, and the term thrown around by conservative republicans to describe a wide range of behaviors. The first one is relatively easily defined but isn't really relevant to the political discourse; the latter is thrown around too much to have an agreed-upon definition.
They are different things and yet the same thing. Classic motte/bailey. The wide range of behaviors - like DIE policies, voluntary and sometimes mandatory corporate trainings, same training in government and military, "diversity" covenants that academics are required to sign, ESG policies in finances, etc. - all that are diverse behaviors that are not directly controlled by any single source, and yet they are all relying on the CRT framework (not only of course) that is provided by the academics, and ultimately reach to them for support and justification if challenged. And yes, there are layers - there would be some dense and jargon-laden academic paper, and then more popular rehash of the same, and then policy article in a specialized journal, and then a summary in training materials sold by a DIE consultancy, and then the implementation of this training by a particular consultant in a particular SP500 company. And all those would diverge a little and allow each layer, if necessary, to tell "no, this particular controversial stance is not my fault" and to disclaim any responsibility for what layers above and below are doing. But it's all part of the same structure. Arguing which layers should and should not accept label "CRT" is ultimately pointless - when we talk about it, we should talk about the whole structure and how it appears in real life, not argue about "if this true <s>socialism</s>CRT or was it still never tried?"
The reason that CRT was seized on by opponents as a metonym for the entire structure of DEI even though it is, as you noted, hardly the only source of intellectual support/justification/terminology for DEI, is because they scoured the overall structure for its least sympathetic-sounding part. It's only one step removed from the "anti-choice"/"anti-life" epithets in the abortion debate.
So you point is it's not fair to criticize the least sympathetic part of the system? Like, when we talking about USSR, it's unfair to mention the gulags, and only fair to discuss the ballet and the Sputnik (which was also made by people imprisoned in gulags, but it's unfair to mention that). Or if you make a religion which promotes universal peace and love, but also involving priests kidnapping 12 virgins each solstice and sacrificing them to the gods by cutting out their hearts and devouring them, then it's fair to discuss the peace and love part, but mentioning the heart devouring part is unfair?
Nope, it doesn't work this way. Of course it would be criticized by its worst parts - because they are the freaking worst parts! If you don't like that - get rid of the worst parts. If CRT/DIE adepts don't like to be criticized for the parts where they proclaim white people are racist from birth - maybe don't have CRT/DIE practitioners that proclaim white people are racist from birth! If they do, it's entirely fair to find this unsympathetic part and expose it. If CRT/DIE adepts regularly proclaim that math is racist and black people can't make appointment on time because being on time is a white supremacist concept - it's entirely fair to discuss it. If they publish a document where they say hard work and rational thought is part of "white culture" - then it's entirely fair to discuss that document. Yes, these are the worst examples. That's the whole point. If you want to be better, get rid of the worst parts.
It's fine to criticize the gulags, it's fine to criticize *actual* Critical Race Theory. It's not fine to call the USSR "the gulag", pretend that everybody in the USSR is in the gulag, pretend that the gulag is conceptually inseparable from the USSR as such, and claim that anybody who doesn't want to eliminate the USSR entirely is merely looking for excuses to throw more people in the gulag.
There's plenty to legitimately criticize about the USSR. While less, there's still plenty to legitimately criticize about DEI! Matt Yglesias recently criticized the fabled "document where they say hard work and rational though is part of "white culture"" [1]. That was a great article! What you don't need to and shouldn't do is make things up and straw man the entire movement.
I think it's completely fine to say if you support USSR - at least without making it very explicit that you are against the gulags and are on record for criticizing them, and explaining why your support for the USSR does not include that particular part - then it's fair to assume you are at least OK with the gulags. Experience shows it to be not a bad heuristics.
> pretend that the gulag is conceptually inseparable from the USSR as such
That is not a "pretend" but entirely correct statement - gulags ARE conceptually inseparable from the USSR. The only way USSR was possible is by gulags being part of it.
> claim that anybody who doesn't want to eliminate the USSR entirely is merely looking for excuses to throw more people in the gulag
That is not entirely correct, but correct with good accuracy - most of people that wouldn't want to eliminate the USSR (meaning not the people living there, but the state that created the gulags, of course) would end up supporting throwing more people in the gulag. That's how that thing works, and it can't work any other way. You can *imagine* that could be other way and delude yourself - but only for a bit, you'd end up pretty soon either with "we'll have to do some changes", after which it won't be USSR anymore, or "actually, gulags aren't that bad and in general worth it, ballet and Sputnik considered". Depends on your mental agility and compartmentalization skills, you could try to balance between them for some time, but it's not a stable state.
It doesn't mean your ultimate goal is to put more people in the gulag. Your goal may be to optimize human happiness, or production of paperclips per capita, or any other goal you would have - but if your means include the USSR, then your means are also the gulags, and there's no other way. You may internally be very sad about it, but that doesn't change the outcome.
> What you don't need to and shouldn't do is make things up and straw man the entire movement.
I didn't make up the single thing. And neither do most prominent of CRT critics - the bulk of their work is literally quoting various DIE materials and statements by various DIE/CRT activists. If you look at works of, say, Chris Rufo - you will see very extensive quotes and links, which refer to statements made by DIE/CRT theoreticians and practitioners. If you go to https://criticalrace.org/ - it has extensive links to the sources of all policies and statements mentioned. Which part is "made up"?
If we can argue about "fair/unfair" aspect - which argument, as I explained above, is wrong, there's nothing unfair in criticizing the worst part of movement's theory and practice, in fact, this is the only criticism that is worth anything, if you avoid criticizing the worst, you're not doing anything - but at least this is argument-worthy. The charge of "making things up" is plain falsity.
Of course the movement is composed of different people, and not all of them have the same thoughts and the same goals. But as long as they are part of the movement that contains the worst parts, and are embracing, supporting and advancing those part, instead of denouncing and eliminating them from the movement - these parts are as much part of the movement as they are, and are a fair target for criticism as the part of the movement.
I would agree with this: in graduate school for library science, where we actually went into all this stuff, CRT was by *far* the most obnoxiously-presented framework, even though it wasn't actually ridiculous and had it use cases. But there's a reason that the Republican strategists decided to go with "critical race theory" and not "post-structuralism" even though a lot of the time they're essentially attacking equally (while employing post-structuralism themselves!)
more precisely its the use of the first definition to invalidate questions about those behaviors that use the second definition, rather than engaging in the defense of those behaviors.
Isn't the burden of labour here on the conservatives to establish that second definition, though? If there are specific behaviours that are a problem, then refer to them clearly instead of confusing them with an old piece of legal esoterica.
Of course, this might require giving up a term that really is a delightful linguistic concoction for the purpose of riling up the conservative audience: Critical (evocation of crisis AND academic chicanery in one), Race (self-explanatory), and Theory (something dreamt up in academia and crammed down normal people's gullets like it's a real thing). I can see why it's a piece of rhetorical real estate worth fighting for.
Well then, let's take the educators at their word (any thing I looked up about Critical Race Theory rooted it in legal theory and kept attributing it to Kimberlé Crenshaw).
So if it's in schools, it's not CRT (Critical Race Theory), it's CRT (Culturally Responsive Teaching). There we go - that preserves the acronym and is the chosen descriptor by those engaging in it, so surely there won't be any objections if conservatives use that term?
"Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
...Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.
Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.
Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.
As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment."
So there you go. And what is Culturally Responsive Teaching?
"For decades, researchers have found that teachers in public schools have undervalued the potential for academic success among students of color, setting low expectations for them and thinking of cultural differences as barriers rather than assets to learning.
In response, scholars developed teaching methods and practices—broadly known as asset-based pedagogies—that incorporate students’ cultural identities and lived experiences into the classroom as tools for effective instruction. The terms for these approaches to teaching vary, from culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy to the more foundational culturally relevant pedagogy. Though each term has its own components defined by different researchers over time, all these approaches to teaching center the knowledge of traditionally marginalized communities in classroom instruction. As a result, all students, and in particular students of color, are empowered to become lifelong learners and critical thinkers.
...Culturally responsive teaching means using students’ customs, characteristics, experience, and perspectives as tools for better classroom instruction.
...What is culturally sustaining pedagogy, and how is it different than culturally relevant teaching?
Schools are still places where white norms are considered the default standard in the curricula, behavioral expectations, linguistic practices, and more. Culturally sustaining pedagogy says that students of color should not be expected to adhere to white middle-class norms, but their own cultural ways of being should be explored, honored, and nurtured by educators.
...Culturally responsive teaching also must have an element of critical consciousness, where students are empowered to critique and analyze societal inequities. For example, Teddi Beam-Conroy, an associate teaching professor at the University of Washington, was teaching the Declaration of Independence to a class of 5th graders. When they got to the line that said, “All men are created equal,” Beam-Conroy asked her students, “Who were the men who were considered equal at that point?” To illustrate the point, she asked everyone to stand up—and then told them to sit down if they didn’t identify as male, if they didn’t identify as white, or if their parents rented instead of owned a home. "
I feel like the Left, though, is happy to play the definitions game all day long.
If the Right comes up with another label to describe the class of thing they're objecting to, then the Left will object to that label too -- either it's "too vague, I don't know what you're talking about" (like "woke") or it's "too specific, it actually means something different" (like "critical race theory").
Yeah, I've read that essay (and agreed with the spirit of it; I'm usually appreciative when Freddie calls for the US left to have more balls). Personally, I come down firmly on the side of specificity, but CRT, by referring wrongly to something specific and being obscure jargon to boot, goes back around to being another Rorschach test, no better than "woke."
Specificity would sharpen the argument on both sides, too. If the right objects to a class of proposals such as that there be more Black-sounding names in math problems or greater acknowledgement of the contributions of al-Andalus to the field, that's one thing. If they object to a class of proposals of the form that since socioeconomics (and therefore race) play a role in access to advanced classes that lead to calculus, we should remove calculus as an admissions litmus test for some university programmes that might not need it, that's slightly different. But it's convenient to conflate and convenient not to articulate precisely what the problem is.
I was less than impressed with that essay. The people in question use terms like "anti-racis(t/m)", "feminis(t/m)", "LGBTQ activis(t/m)" to describe themselves and the positions they support, and this is not so hard to find out, so his not even mentioning such terms as possibilities makes the essay seem disingenuous.
maybe in an academic setting, but if conservatives gain support among voters by confusing the two, that will continue. to win voters back you need to adress their concerns not tell them they are invalid by definition.
My point is not that the left has no possible responses, my point is that we can't "switch the definition" to what the conservatives use, because there is not a single thing the conservatives are referring to; CRT is used to refer to everything from "teaching literal critical race theory" to "looking at American history through a balanced lens, inviting both praise and criticism" to "even mentioning that US slavery was race-based." It's sort of designed to be impossible to really respond to or defend against, because the arguments are not specific enough to really counter: you just say "they're forcing critical race theory down our children's throats" and the only way to *really* address that substantially is to spend a bunch of time trying to break down all possible things they might be trying to talk about, at which point you've now dominated your discourse towards this one specific issue, which is precisely what the Republicans want. I think this is the main reason the left is dismissive (sometimes to a tone-deaf degree); it might not be "winning" to refuse to play, but it's losing to engage.
John Oliver is not so much an educational program as a series of talking points presented in fairly formulaic fashion with comedic interludes. If you want to know the basic progressive/elite left consensus on an issue he's pretty good. But even on stuff like dialysis he's pretty bad at actually educating people on the issues on something more than a surface level. I expect his overview of CRT is less suffering from purposeful obfuscation and more that he rarely actually explains ll that much.
Oliver is certainly a talented comedian. Though his political stances are usually quite nonsensical to me, I can appreciate his considerable capabilities it the comedy arena. Didn't watch Trevor Noah much, but from what I saw Oliver is well above him, comedian-wise. Maybe it's just roles they are playing, but that's my feeling.
Oliver's the more talented comedian to be sure. Last Week tonight tends to have a few small leads and summaries but focuses on a "deep dive" (~20-30 minutes) on a specific topic. Usually something of interest to his audience which, as far as I can tell, is well off coastal liberals.
I put deep dive in quotes because, while deeper than a seven minute Daily Show segment, they're still pretty shallow. They're also more openly willing to advocate for their preferred solution and will directly endorse plans or condemn candidates and the like. In contrast Trevor Noah's got the same three-ish segments that are humorous takes on current events and is more reactive to what's currently in the news.
Haven't watched the video, but seen many other John Oliver videos. If I make a guess that his point is "people opposing CRT just oppose the idea that black people are people/have rights/suffered from injustices/that there's racism/that there was slavery in history/that we need to avoid discriminating minorities", and similar motte/bailey arrangements, and he is mocking people for it, while not advancing a positive argument of what CRT is about, would I be very far from the goal?
Thank you, the books sound interesting! And thanks for covering both sides.
What I am specifically interested in here, is that it seems that some people propose -- and other people oppose -- teaching something specific at schools. Or rather, training teachers to do something specific. I would really like to figure out *what* exactly both sides are referring to.
I am not asking what is racism, or whether racism is real, or whether it is the most important problem in the world. I want to know the specific things that the teachers are told to do, in the name of fighting racism. Are they perhaps required to introduce debates about racism into math lessons, or perform weekly struggle sessions and apologize for their whiteness? This is the type of answer I am looking for. If I were at the school where the teachers are doing "the thing that the current controversy is about, in exactly the way it was proposed", what exactly would I see them doing?
Or maybe there isn't a specific proposal yet, just a vague idea of doing something inspired by CRT? Like, maybe each school is doing something completely different? I have no idea.
How does this work from the perspective of a teacher?
Suppose someone comes to the school and says "hello, here is my independently designed course called 'how to punch your inner Nazi', feel free to meet me each Tuesday evening", and the teacher says "thanks, but no thanks"... and that's it?
As far as I know, there are organizations that prepare course materials to be used by teachers. If you just come out of the blue to the teacher, they'd probably send you on your way, but if, say, a local Union has a list of respected NGOs that prepare model curricula and accessory materials and recommended textbooks, and one of these models would be "how to punch your inner Nazi" and the teacher may be on the lookout for a DIE-flavored course she was asked to add because you can't not have anything about diversity, we're not in Jim Crow era anymore... Then she might have a choice of either spend a very considerable time making a new course from scratch - or using this convenient prepared one, which yes, also talks a lot about punching Nazis, but is it really that bad? After all, she doesn't have to present all the punching parts to the class if she doesn't want to...
I'm not saying it's always the way it happens, but it definitely can be one way it happens.
I just had some exemplary customer service from HP, and there are a couple of policies I recommend in general. One is that they asked me at the beginning what I'd already tried. This is great. I'd already done a number of the usual things.
They gave me a service ticket, so that if the chat ended (it did), we didn't have to start from scratch. (I'm looking at you, LabCorps.)
These are simple, objective policies. The more complex part is hiring smart people and giving them enough time to do a good job.
The specific issue is a paper feed problem in an Envy 6000 printer, and I can post details if anyone cares. HP didn't solve the problem, but they're sending me a replacement printer.
This is a considerable improvement from their customer service last time I had an experience with them, which was ~10 years ago. It's nice to hear. Maybe I should consider recommending them to people again.
Hewlett Packard? That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Two generations of my family made their careers (sometimes their entire fortunes) off that place...I think we still have a couple of those old-fashioned Actual Gold Pensioner's Watches around somewhere.
Growing up, the stories were always about This Once Great Company that had a Downfall and Stopped Providing For Families (tech version of General Motors)...so it's nice to hear they're still around and apparently not all bad.
There are many movies depicting the evils of Nazi regime; for example "Schindler's List". Are the similar movies depicting the evils of Communist regime? If you know them, please post names.
To explain my criteria:
I want movies containing stories, not mere documentaries. Movies based on real characters or events are okay, of course.
I want the movie to show the suffering of people living in the regime. Can be the average people, or can be people who were especially persecuted e.g. because of their faith. (Not outsiders fighting against the regime, e.g. Rambo.) It must be the regime that initiates violence against the protagonist.
Despite the initial impression, it's not really about police brutality - the violent incident is the start of the movie, instead it deals with the aftermath. The way the regime tries to cover the incident up, wiretap everyone involved, find, bribe and threaten witnesses... It's really good at depicting the way the system searched for any lever they can use to turn a citizen into their agent.
The 1994 film "To Live" (活着) by Zhang Yimou fits your criteria, it follows a family through 50 years of Chinese communism and explores how various policies impact them. It's also a very good film. I can also vouch for The Lives of Others and Chernobyl (though the latter has some fake news issues) that have been mentioned.
If you're open to book suggestions, Mo Yan's "Life and death are wearing me out" also follows the protagonist family through various eras of communism but has a more whimsical framing.
Oh, I have seen that one. Technically, it shows problems with socialism (the guy is blacklisted from practicing medicine, because of some interview he gave to a newspaper), but 90% of the movie is about sexual life of the protagonists. :D
I wouldn't say it discusses or even attempts to illustrate the problems of socialism like a class on the subject does. But much of the main events in the film are driven by what it's like to live under the Soviet boot (not nice), and I think there is some intertwining of the themes of betrayal and pretence that are related to what that life was like.
Can you recommend some movies set in Nazi Germany - not ones dealing with the horrors of its militarism, or of its genocide/persecution of minorities, but more on the ordinary domestic experience of living in that kind of state? I would have said if anything there are fewer films (or books for that matter) about life in Nazi Germany compared to works about life under communism, perhaps because the communist experience was longer/more widespread/often didn't morph into active militarism
Casablanca is set in a French colony under Vichy control, not in the Reich proper, but it does have more of the focus on ordinary domestic circumstances that you're looking for here. Although it also suffers somewhat from having been produced in the US while the war was still ongoing (1942), so it's got Allied propaganda elements, and it was made with restricted access to good info on what life under the Nazis or Vichy was actually like.
I do not think there are tons of apolitical films set in the Reich. Any movie produced within Nazi Germany should probably be considered propaganda until proven otherwise. And for some reason, few makers of apolitical movies (e.g. romantic comedies) are setting their story in that period.
It has been decades since I watched it, but I think "Hitlerjunge Salomon" (aka "Europa Europa") shows some aspects of everyday life in the Reich.
"Der Stellvertreter" contains some scenes taking place within German society, but is mostly about the holocaust.
Death of Stalin is pretty silly and funny, but I think gets across the true horror and madness that was the top of that regime. Especially if you know a bit about the characters.
It's a rather fantastic allegory, but the evils of the regime are described very accurately - up to certain scenes which are exactly as they were described by survivors.
Fair warning: if you see it, you might not be able to unsee it.
Operation Hyacinth, about the Polish communist regime persecuting gay men in Warsaw, came out last year and is very good. It is in Polish with subtitles available in English.
Mr. Jones, The Lives of Others, Katyn. Not a movie but the Chernobyl miniseries could fit. It falls slightly outside your criteria, but The Death of Stalin is good if dark comedy is your jam.
Katyn is about an important event, but a fucking terrible movie, sorry.
The problem with Polish movies about the evils of communism is that back then they were illegal, and now they're cringe and associated with lunatic far-right hacks. There's a few good ones that made it somehow, but Katyn is not one of them.
The first one that leaps to mind "The Lives of Others", a 2006 German film (released in the US with subtitles) about the surveillance state in late East Germany.
For a broader selection, wikipedia has category pages for "Films critical of communism", "Films about Soviet repression", and "Films about the Holodomor":
Looking through the bans, the PEG one seems unnecessary. It highlighted that one man's deeply rooted belief is another man's absurdity, and that some such beliefs are labelled religion, while others are labelled "science" or "reality." It was not particularly polite, but describing reality without sharing someone's dogmas often seems impolite. The reality of a trans existence becomes "magic," just as a god becomes a "sky daddy."
The Bernard Gress ban also seems excessive, although less so. Sure it is grating, but I think in general it is worth it to lower the average quality of comments while raising the variance in their content. So although the comment didn't elaborate, it did provide an alternative perspective and was not overly offensive.
Obviously, any comment that would result in a user ban wouldn't be a great comment, I just don't personally think those two warranted bans.
Conversely, the Descriptor and Impassionata ones seemed more overtly hostile, and seemingly ban-worthy.
The Machine Interface one seems difficult to understand. He was accused of "Attacking other commenters, falsely accusing them of ideas they don't believe." But he cited exact quotes from the user that said precisely what he accused him of. Letting other users know what sort of stuff a user has written so they can choose to engage with them or not seems helpful and productive - certainly not banworthy.
I disagree strongly with your contention that the Bernard Gress ban was excessive. I'd suggest that it's exactly what Scott wants the least of on his blog, and for good reason. It was gratuitous, offensive and entirely unsupported, which is perhaps the most important part. To call an entire movement (one which the blog author is very sympathetic to) as 'pathological' without a single word of explanation or justification is about as ban-worthy as I can imagine
It's worth pointing out that I share Bernard Gress's view. But I try not to express it without some attempt at defending it.
The banned comments are a little harder to judge than the warnings because only one of the reported comments is provided, so I extended a little more of a benefit of a doubt if some of them didn't seem ban-worthy in isolation.
The original Machine Interface comment that got the warning didn't have the cites provided later, and it had a quotation that wasn't a quote, and made a mistake in the attributed belief by substituting "Asians" for "Arabs". Presumably this mistake would be important to the poster in question. A warning seemed appropriate, although "50% of a ban" severity seemed a bit high to me, especially with the poster who was attacked being someone who ended up banned within the week ...
I find myself often thinking about situations/topics where reasonable and smart people seem to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. I'll give two examples of the kind of topics I have in mind:
1) The limit/existence of human agency. I think most people who don't ascribe to the notion of a soul think that our actions are for the most part pre-determined (putting aside any quantum shenanigans). Here I have in mind the kind of people who are influenced by things like The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel, and who believe that our actions are some function of our society, culture, upbringing, genetics, etc. and are not determined by our personal "will". At the same time, very few of these individuals will apply this logic to situations that are far uglier. In those cases, the language used implies that certain individuals involved could have acted otherwise if they just wanted to enough.
2) The objectivity/subjectivity of art. For many people the language they use when describing movies/paintings/books/games they like implies that there is some objective way to grade these things. They'll say stuff like "x is a masterpiece" or "y is a very good movie". Yet, if you push them enough, or if they don't enjoy something that is generally well-received by critics, they jump to a subjective view of art. They'll then say stuff like "there's no such thing as 'good' art, it's a matter of taste and taste is relative".
I think a common thread across these situations is that our reasoning really clashes with our intuitions. If we think about the nature of the universe, it seems very likely that our actions are determined but it definitely doesn't feel that way. Similarly, when I watch a really good movie I feel that it's objectively good, but I have a hard time making a coherent theory of aesthetics to justify my feelings. If anyone has any thoughts on scenarios like this, or any links to share, they would be well appreciated.
For question two, it's fairly common to think that something is good but you personally don't like it, or that something is bad or mediocre, but you personally like it a lot. That's not a contradiction. Some people will insist on rationalising that everything they like is "good" and everything they dislike is "bad", and those people might get into some epistemic trouble if their opinion goes against the common consensus in their group. But saying something like "this is a good movie by movie making standards, it is well made and tells a coherent story, but I don't like it for this or that reason" is totally consistent.
I agree with you but this isn't quite the situation I'm referring to. The people I have in mind won't say things like "Citizen Kane is objectively good but I just don't like it and would rather watch Fast 5" they'll instead sometimes say things like "This movie I like is a master piece" and "The Oscars are stupid because movie quality is subjective"
On my "intersubjective" view picking something like the single best movie of the year does seem like kind of a fool's errand even if taste is shared enough that you can *universally* call something a "masterpiece", simply because "the tails come apart".
1) Determinism is not at all incompatible with human agency. The circumstances leading up to the act determine what sort of agent the human is, and then the agentive human acts, deterministically, in accordance with their nature and the *immediate* circumstance. It is not the concept of "will" that is wrong or incoherent, but rather the specific view of "will" as being some sort of magic separate and somehow "above" cause and effect. If you accept this, then actions can be praiseworthy or blameworthy even though they can be traced to antecedent causes.
A variety of views are possible within this framework. On one extreme, you assign all credit and blame to the circumstance and none to the agent ever. (I don't think anybody really does this.) On the other extreme, you take agency as "screening off" all credit and blame and assign everything to the agent and nothing to antecedent causes. (People *do* do this, it's a way of "things adding up to normal" for some people.) What I think is most common is inbetween, where credit and blame are either split or duplicated between the agent's decision and earlier causes.
You also have a split between people who view credit/blame as something normative, and those who view it as something purely instrumental. Determinism probably pushes people towards the "purely instrumental" view. From the normative point of view, someone who believes in the instrumental point of view will probably seem to equivocate between blaming the circumstances or the agent depending whether their focus in discussion is society-wide policy or an individual case; for the instrumentalist, there simply is no fact of the matter as to which is "really" to blame for a bad outcome.
2) I think rather than "objectivity" or "subjectivity" of art a better framework is "intersubjectivity"--art is fundamentally subjective, but our subjective valuations of art are predictably not independent of each other, so we can still meaningfully talk about objective characteristics of art making it "better" or "worse" at least within a common frame of "similar tastes". What's switching back and forth here is not necessarily any absolute view on the nature of art, but just the perception of whether or not there's enough alignment of tastes across the discussion to make an "objective" frame a productive one or not.
Are you just getting at the distinction between reasoning and rationalization, and how surprisingly hard it is for even the owner of the mind in question to tell the difference?
It's an interesting question *why* we have such sophisticated abilities to rationalize stuff, so much so that it's very hard to tell the difference between a superb rationalization and correct reasoning. What's the use of this? It isn't in order to get at the truth -- that's what reasoning is about -- it's about how to argue that something you've already decided upon for other reasons is the truth.
There are two possibilities that spring to mind:
(1) Emotional denial. If you have some truth that is just too hard to bear, emotionally speaking, like you killed someone out of carelessness, or perhaps your own or your child's mortality, then rationalization is a way to blunt the emotional impact to keep yourself functional. This seems like a good survival trait among a reflective conscious species, such as ours.
(2) Group persuasion. Perhaps there is value in a group decision that is taken a bit in advance of a factual basis persuasive to all, e.g. a brilliant or creative person realizes the truth of Proposition X, but the rest of the tribe doesn't have the wit or experience to follow the reasoning. It can have significant survival benefit to the tribe if Mr./Ms. Thought Leader is able to persuade the rest of the tribe using something other than the true reasoning -- some form of rationalization, which may make use of tribal prejudices, emotional attitudes, social shibboleths or motivations. I mean, the difference between a Pied Piper and a Visionary Leader is...subtle. Sometimes only history can tell the difference.
Determinism i.e. lack of "free will" is perfectly compatible with various ways of motivation, guilt, punishment and changing of behavior.
Even if a certain individuals actions were/are solely determined by some function of individual genes, upbringing, past experiences and current external circumstances, criticizing and/or punishing them matters, because the expectation of that could have resulted in a different action - it's just that we wouldn't call it "a change of heart" but rather "a change in external circumstances", because whatever "non-free will" results in actions does take into account things like expectation of physical and social consequences.
Are you saying that we should punish/criticize these individuals so they can serve as an example for other individuals in the future, or that we should punish/criticize these individuals because they knew there were expected social/physical consequences at the time they committed the actions? If it's the former I do agree with you, but I don't think that's how most people view the situation. My problem isn't with the idea of punishing/criticizing people who commit crimes, it's that our notion of human agency isn't consistent across different situations when it seems like it should be
> In a Challenge Mode Open Thread, I‘ll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.
Fair enough. Only ... this means I won't ever see what fell below your threshold (until it happens to me), and I won't be able to adjust my own calibration accordingly. This is also true more broadly: folks won't see what counts as not accepted.
I don't have a good solution though. In general just deleting those comments sounds nicer than the alternatives.
It'll be interesting to see if the total comment count reaches anywhere near as high. Some will sit out rather than face the shame of being deleted (raises hand). Perhaps others will take it in Contra terms..."Are You Man Enough To <s>Save The President</s> Comment In Challenge Mode?" And of course, some people won't notice the announcements anyway and will be confused about why their posts don't show up in next OT.
Personal prediction: fewer but higher-quality comments, more skewed towards The Usual Suspects veteran personalities, about perennially popular rather than unorthodox topics. At least it'll make the midterms reaction gifs less painful to read. (Coincidence?)
And lacking for a measuring stick, you will overshoot the mark so as to avoid falling short: not only do we increase SNR by trimming off the fat, we also encourage the meat to be meatier!
They could be the highlight of the next Open Thread, like the ban/warning list is in this one. "These comments didn't make the cut last Challenge". Maybe even set up some automatic function that reposts them.
I miss the hidden open threads. Much fewer number to read, and I could ask more intimate/ personal questions... which I don't feel as comfortable doing on the open threads. More comments is more noise.
Oh, I'd also approve of a rule that says each person can only start one new thread, though they can comment on other threads as much as they wanted.
I think if one person makes three careful arguments, one about free markets, one about AI, and one about AI and one about discussion quality in open threads, it would be fair for them to make three top level posts for them. On the other hand, making one top level post giving a short abstract of each argument and then self-replying three times to post their actual arguments, while asking other posters to not reply to the top level post would achieve the same thing. (Apart from substack notifying the people interested in discussion of free markets to the AI replies and so on.)
What I do really dislike are the (almost) bare link top posts. twitter link + hot take. Or 'read my blog article', with no summary (fine for classified threads, though). Generally, I would expect top level posts to adhere to higher standards. In the discussion, there will be posts with the content of "actually, I agree with your minor correction to my comment", which do not have much meat on their own.
There's a huge first-mover advantage to getting a top-level post in while an OT is still fresh, so I wouldn't want to narrow that window of opportunity even further. We already get plenty of "I asked this in a previous OT, but it was too late for traction, so I'm reposting it..." type threads.
HOTs are nice for extra-personal stuff; I also like reserving extra-spicy topics for the hidden threads, mostly out of lingering paranoia of getting doxxed, haha. Won't stop anyone with halfway serious intent, but feeling-safe is certainly correlated with openness-to-posting-controversial. At least for me.
Re-asking if fine, and yeah the fact that first to post gets more attention is part of the problem. I guess part of my thought is if there were less threads started, there would be more attention paid to each one.... pick your most important question for that week. Hmm a single always open OT would get rid of the first to post problem.
As far as HOT's I also like the limited number of people. I feel like I sorta know a bit about the posters on the HOT and so like friends I can judge their response... 'mumble mumble, Dunbar number.'
I understand. You want to make the discussions better... and so let's try throwing things at the wall and see what sticks. I approve of this. As a dream of better discussions, I loved the usernet model, where it was one continuous open thread. Many advantages, with a discussion on a topic started, then someone brings it up again, you can go back and point them to the older thread... "Well here is what we all said about this before, do you have anything interesting to add or ask about?" It also lets one go back and more easily find old threads that you wanted to read again... or find a reference in. Here it is sometimes back to square one, when an older topic is brought up again, like Groundhog Day, and that gets old and boring.
OK this is probably just a personal preference. I much prefer a few threads that go deeply into a topic, rather than twenty that are shallow. On the HOT's there would often be half a dozen threads started by the same person within minutes of each other. (I usually just skip them so no big deal to me really.) I would much prefer one well thought out question/ discussion topic, where the OP, put more thought into it, really fleshed out their opinion, or question and we could have a deep, meaty talk about it.
Anyway this doesn't have to be a rule, but maybe just a suggestion for better threads.
(I'm dreaming of starting a discussion, of how suffering is necessary, and so in some ways 'good'. ... It gets hard to do because in almost every individual instance of suffering, it's easy to say, "yeah this is bad, it would be better if it didn't happen." And yet in total... or from the next level up, or somewhere, suffering is good. I know this needs a lot of work.)
What are the current options for a barely responsible wannabe pharmacist who's trying to lose weight? Something not as lethal as DNP but not as ineffective as moderate exercise.
Seeing alot of supplement or medicine suggestions, and wanted to mention alternative I don't see mentioned. Fwiw, I lost about 100 lbs on a strict low carb diet over the course of about 9mos iirc. IME diet is far more of a factor than the exercise.
Just beware that low carb eating and keto type diets can increase your LDL cholesterol if that's a concern. It's effective, but if cholesterol is an issue, you may look for another approach, due to saturated fats mainly.
I use Intermittent Fasting (16:6, 20:4 or 23:1) combined with whole grains, fruit and vegetable. I find that the whole grains keep down blood sugar spikes and there is a very positive hormonal reaction, where you do not feel strong hunger pangs, even with the 23:1 protocol, or One Meal A Day (OMAD).
Moderate exercise will help your fitness, but weight is lost with food. I tried a form of slow-release amphetamine prescribed by a doctor in the past, but it just didn't work for me.
Semaglutide is pretty dang effective but also pretty expensive. I've heard the knock-off variants ok but I haven't put in any effort to verify this myself.
Agree with this, I have a post on semaglutide coming up which might help.
If you can't get semaglutide, Qsymia is a potentially unpleasant but often effective alternative.
If you can't get any of those, stimulant of your choice, Wellbutrin would probably be the easiest. Or you can homebrew Qsymia out of phentermine and topiramate.
Get a Vyvanse prescription, nowadays I skip breakfast, take Vyvanse, go about my day, don't get hungry until about 7pm and eat one 1200-1400 calorie meal.
That said I have found it tends to trigger binging when I'm not on it, so for this method to be effective moderation is needed.
That said, I think losing weight is a worse health goal for most people than "increase cardiovascular fitness". My weightloss is entirely about aesthetics, frankly at some detriment to my actual health.
After being aggravated by too many bad press releases* about epigenetic inheritance, I've decided to write a post series explaining how epigenetics really works. The first post, which covers the basics of epigenetic marks, is here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/what-is-epigenetics
Later posts will cover the epigenetics of the mammalian germline, and why transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in mammals is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
Thank you for this! For years I’ve been hearing epigenetic hand-wavey Lamarckian evolution stories and the mechanisms involved just slide out of my mind shortly after. Maybe another pass through will nail things down a bit better
Reminds me of an example of epigenetic determinism I found in the wild, where the author was arguing in favor of the welfare state by claiming that it's impossible for the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps because of their inferior epigenomes. Shades of Scott's Gattaca post!
This is not based on any epigenetic mechanism, but stress from economic poverty has been shown to retard brain development at a very early age, even at one month of age! See this article, for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17227
...although readily admit there's a longstanding bias against sociology in this community and many of its followers. Do the bad studies cause the harsh evaluations, or the harsh evaluations cause the bad studies (to be the only ones talked about)?
Not the same thing at all. The study I linked is based on measurements of the brain size, such as cortical surface area, cortical thickness, and hippocampal volume. Furthermore, this is not the only study that shows this. The research has been repeated for different age cohorts, such as at 6 years, at 1 year, at 6 months, etc.
Re Intelligence: I always scored high on standardized testing, always in the top 2 percentile, both in childhood, college and army. So in Stanford Binet, Weshler Bellevue, SATs, NMSQT, AFQT (armed forces qualifications test) I did really well, but the deck was always stacked in my favor: culturally, not being test shy (my father was part of mid-century IPAT and we faculty children took LOTS of standardized tests), tests giving alot of weight to verbal ability (I was an early and lifelong reader), etc. So it wasn't too surprising I did well.
But my supposed "intelligence" was a peculiar kind: a general rapidity of response and quick learning in some areas, total bafflement in others. It was very quick to move laterally, not so good at in depth analyticity. So high test IQ perhaps but not translating all that well to real world abilities. I am left with a measure of skepticism of IQ tests as predictors of real world success
For what it's worth, my impression is that the outcome of a well-designed IQ test has squat to do with any learned abilities, such as language. There are definitely IQ tests that can be given to children before they are verbal. I believe some of the most powerful test items for adults have to do with the ability to rotate or otherwise manipulate 3D objects in your head, given a 2D drawing of them. I recall one test item on the kid test that had 3 puzzles pieces with which to make a horse, and the trick was that the 3rd piece was the middle of the horse and didn't look "horsey" at all -- you had to be a smarter than average kid to realize it could go between the obvious front and back parts of the horse.
But having a high IQ doesn't, alas, uniformly translate to high achievement. Indeed, in my own family I've observed that high IQ can often be a nontrivial handicap, because it short-circuits the need to develop mental discipline and patience. Very smart kids can figure stuff out so fast, they tend not to develop mental habits of patience and discipline that less smart kids need to figure the same stuff out. (For the same reason, they have a hard time developing the ability to pace themselves, or stick to a schedule, because they can always ad hoc acceptable outcomes at the very last minute, which the less bright cannot.) It's particularly hard for parents to push these kids to develop these habits, too, because the kid can very reasonable argue that if he's getting the desired outcome, what's the problem with how he does it? In vain does one natter on about what will happen 10-20-30 years hence, when the very smart kid runs up against the limits of what he can pull out of his ass suddenly, and needs habits of mental hygiene to master.
Agree, with anecdotal evidence concerning myself. Martial arts training was helpful for developing discipline in my case. Plus the experience of being overwhelmed in a court of law-like situation.
I'm always on the lookout for times when my boys fail at some task they could have easily completed had they studied/practiced/started early but chose not to. I know I wont convince them to do those things in a normal scenario where they achieve every metric an teacher gives them in school, but I've had some success in noting when they could have succeeded but didn't. I might be able to force them to do it now, but it's not building that into their personal philosophy unless they see the value and accept it themselves.
For various reasons my daughter has no such issues, and is an over-achieving perfectionist who seems to always listen to my advice about how to achieve even more. I'm honestly working on ways convince her to let things go and not always need to succeed.
I agree that the problem you describe exists, but if the kid is not being challenged, perhaps one should say that the problem lies with the adults failing to provide suitable challenges, rather than the kid being "too smart"? Current schools are atrocious in this regard. It shouldn't be difficult to just give the kid a stack of eg. math textbooks and let the smart ones do 2 years' worth each year, or whatever pace is actually appropriate for them.
Try and get back to me! Keeping an undisciplined IQ 145 kid interested for 6 hours a day would be a full time job for someone very smart herself, highly and broadly educated, with considerable time and energy resources. If you're wealthy you could hire a small team of Stanford professors, I suppose, who could take turns.
As for the math textbooks...remember the part about "lack of discipline?"
How strong are claims of IQ tests as predictors of real world success? I know a few multimillionaires. They’re not dumb, but their seeming intelligence varies significantly; their success seems much more a matter of character, competitiveness, and social moxie than sheer intellectual firepower. Likewise, I’ve known some high achieving scientists and mathematicians. The way we attach ‘success’ to those people (publication count; organizational position; degree pedigrees) varies considerably from this individuals’ basic ability to draw correct conclusions about systems in the world.
All this is to say I fully agree with you that testing well is necessary for a lot of things in the world (and surprisingly not necessary for some things, like starting businesses) but I don’t find it at all sufficient.
Do you feel like you’ve been able to find worthwhile places to put your talent to use? Separate from issues of intelligence, I know lots of people with outstanding unique talents, and relatively few of us are able to find places in the world that best use our own particular forms of genius.
Worthwhile places? Yes, but for me, all employment for the last forty odd years has just been to pay the rent. If I myself had any particular talent I'm not sure. You bring up a complex issue of potential versus actuality. Why it is so complex is because there are terribly many variables at work here- some internal to the person, many external, and how over the course of a person's life the two interact. If your last sentence were proven true, I would guess that external, economic drivers would be the problem.
"I am left with a measure of skepticism of IQ tests as predictors of real world success"
I think it is reasonable to believe that:
(a) IQ tests measure something real, and
(b) A population of 10,000 people with a high IQ will (on average) do "better" than a population with non-trivially lower IQs, but
(c) Lots of other things matter, too.
For (c) a sports example is that, for a while, hard work can keep up with more raw athletic ability. This doesn't mean that athletic ability isn't a predictor, just that there is more than raw athletic ability. I believe the same is true for IQ. Hard work and a lower IQ can compete with higher IQ and poor work ethic ... to a point.
a. We want to measure intelligence, but IQ is the thing we can actually measure. IQ positively correlates with intelligence but isn't synonymous with it.
b. Intelligence is one factor in success in pretty-much any field, but only one factor, and others can swamp it. A brilliant person with a shitty work ethic can easily end up a failure.
Can't disagree. With me it's a moot point in that when I took a three hour long neuropsych exam recently, it showed in some functional areas I was "very superior" but in other areas, very poor. Aging is the great leveller sometimes.
Thank you for those helpful comments and the cites! An interesting study by Blackwell, Trzesniewski & Dweck showed that our beliefs about intelligence can effect our real world performance. If we are told that intelligence is changeable (and internalize that belief) we actually can improve our performance or halt declining performance (at least among the adolescent math students studied.
I'm interested in the total number of votes cast for each party in the US midterms, for both the Senate and the House. Breakdowns by state and district are readily available, but I'm not interested enough to compile the totals myself.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!
To everyone here who was long on Crypto, especially via FTX, my condolences.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/09/binance-walks-away-from-ftx-deal-wsj/
Note that this is unlikely, maybe 5-10% chance tops, but because we live in the stupidest timeline there is a case to be made that Dems win the House and Rs win the Senate.
Gentlemen! All this discussion about politics, and yet none of you saw fit to tell me about Thomas Jefferson's mammoth cheese? A cheese that was given a room of its own in the White House, and guests were conducted there to view it? Partisan cheese that had no Federalist cow involved in its manufacture?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrKafmzGNJc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_Mammoth_Cheese
"The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was a gift from the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802. The 1,235-pound (560 kg) cheese was created by combining the milk from every cow in the town, and made in a makeshift cheese press to handle the cheese's size. The cheese bore the Jeffersonian motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
...Given the political landscape of the time, there was a fear that the more Republican Jefferson, considered an "infidel of the French Revolutionary school," would harm the religious interests of the citizenry, and that "the altars of New England would be demolished, and all their religious institutions would be swept away by an inrushing and irresistible flood of French infidelity."
One pastor in Cheshire, Elder John Leland, opposed this line of thought. A beleaguered minority in Calvinist New England, the Baptists were perhaps the strongest advocates in the early republic of the separation of church and state. Leland had met Jefferson during his time in Virginia and the two grew to have a friendly relationship. Leland remembered this as he served in Cheshire, and campaigned strongly for Jefferson.
Leland, believing that his efforts helped Jefferson win the Presidency, encouraged his townspeople to make a unique gesture to Jefferson. He urged each member of his congregation "who owned a cow to bring every quart of milk given on a given day, or all the curd it would make, to a great cider mill..." Leland also insisted that "no Federal cow" (a cow owned by a Federalist farmer) be allowed to offer any milk, "lest it should leaven the whole lump with a distasteful savour."
Three cheers for giant Jeffersonian cheddar!
You obviously don't talk to me enough. I have an entire rant somewhere about it. The entire thing was a gesture towards rural industry and an attempt by Jefferson to assert an alternative economic vision to the more urban, financial-industrialist-Hamiltonian view. Further, it was (probably) American cheddar which at the time was one of the few exports the US had that was good enough that it would actually get exported directly to European consumers. So this is a giant block of rural manufactured cheese was basically an attempt to assert that Jeffersonian smallholder democracy could do large industrial production of high enough quality goods as to compete with urban development even in Europe. Cheese became a common symbol at the time and while Jefferson's was the first it wouldn't be the last.
Clearly I have been justly punished for my egregious neglect of the role of cheese in American foreign policy, now I am chastened and ready to learn!
"lest it should leaven the lump" is a wonderful phrase. Thank you for that Deiseach.
I do wonder if French infidelity is worse than ordinary infidelity. I mean, you know, those Frenchies! 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylp3gzqAG_k
Tooting my own horn a little bit, wrote about how SBF is a tribalism litmus test for EA https://sergey.substack.com/p/sbf-is-a-tribalism-litmus-test-for
A billionaire yesterday, a bankrupt today.
Makes "stick your money in a sock under the mattress" look like a better investment strategy.
NOTE: I say 'correct or incorrect' for percentage predictions, as most folks made 1-2 predictions, so there's no useful calibration to do. This required reducing them to a binary, e.g. 60% chance of X, if X didn't happen is recorded as incorrect.
Okay, so we’re still early, but let’s take a quick look at the midterm predictions from last thread and earlier:
Starting with my own predictions:
“I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters,”
This looks to have been wrong. We’ll know more later, but this looks basically in line with the polling, so far.
“However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.”
Uncertain, but looks right so far.
Argentus:
“Something like 80% chance the Repubs win the House.”
Uncertain, but appears almost certainly correct.
“I think something like 50% chance Repubs win the Senate, 20% Dems win it, and 30% they tie.”
Uncertain, but looks like we’re falling in the last two boxes.
Yug Gnibrob:
“I predict a surprise victory for Elvis Presley in at least three races.”
Everything hasn’t been called yet, so still possible. Also, amusing.
Carl Pham:
“I'm expecting an epic Democratic wipeout.”
Incorrect.
Note, Deisach responded to this, but I couldn’t pull a concrete prediction out of it, so much as a description of the options.
Education Realist:
Begins with a reference to conventional wisdom which appears likely to be wrong, but I don’t think that was their prediction? Feel free to jump in if I misunderstood.
“I think there's a 40% chance the Senate stays tied ,which was all the GOP could hope for six months ago, but would now be the downside.”
Uncertain, but looks like it may be tied.
“There's an enormous likelihood--not a 60% chance but closer to 90%--that the polls are understating GOP support.”
Uncertain, but looks incorrect? Just like for me, it looks like polls did significantly better this time.
Axioms:
“On the upside for them Fetterman had a stroke but on the downside the Trump endorsed candidate is so widely hated he is still gonna lose.”
Correct. Fetterman won.
“I'd say 53-54 Senate seats for Dems.”
Incorrect.
“The House is 60-40 and I expect the majority for either side to be like 10 tops.”
Unclear wording, but I think this was saying 60-40 in favor of Democrat victory, based on the above predictions. If so, uncertain, but appears likely to be incorrect, current projection is R-224, D-211, but this is obviously in flux.
Paul Botts:
Agreed with my predictions, then added “I'd say the GOP has around a 2 in 3 chance of gaining a House majority but most likely a narrow one.”
Appears correct, though not certain yet and depends a bit on definition of narrow. It’s projected to be broader than the current D one, but not by much.
Other predictions.
Matt Yglesias final (https://www.slowboring.com/p/pre-registering-some-takes-on-the):
“10 percent chance that Democrats gain one or more Senate seats
20 percent chance that there is net zero change of seats.
30 percent chance that Republicans gain net one seat.
20 percent chance that Republicans gain net two seats.
20 percent chance that Republicans gain net three or more seats.”
Too early to tell, but it appears we’re likely to be in the top two boxes.
AstralCodexTen prediction markets (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-248):
“Polymarket, Manifold, and PredictIt now have shiny interfaces for predicting the upcoming US midterm elections. In terms of the Republicans taking the Senate, Polymarket is at 65%, Manifold at 58%, PredictIt at 73%, and 538 at 49%.”
Uncertain, but it appears this is not likely to happen.
Vox and AstralCodexTen and Matt Yglesias, earlier (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22824620/predicting-midterms-covid-roe-wade-oscars-2022 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest https://www.slowboring.com/p/predictions-are-hard) :
Democrats will lose their majorities in the House and Senate.
Vox: 95%
Scott: 90%
Matt: 90%
Uncertain, but it appears this is not likely to happen.
Democrats lose at least two Senate seats
Matt/Scott: 80%
Appears almost certainly wrong.
Democrats lose fewer than six Senate seats
Matt/Scott: 80%
Correct.
It looks like in cases where I deviated from Trafalgarian Augury I was wrong. Their last poll accurately predicted WI, GA, OH, PA, NC, probably AZ, and NV when you consider only the Republican vote share as stated in my theory.
I would consider my House projection correct. Things are still in the air and we got Boebert. Also I was right about the majorities, probably. I expect Dems to get closer than -13.
Dems will max at 52 seats and 51 is more likely. I guess I will take the L on that, even though 53 is even or better compared to most predictions.
All in all I'm happy with what I predicted. My original theory was right but I deviated, and projections of a lost Senate or a Dem wipeout were totally discredited.
Florida though lmao. That is a Kentucky level result. So red.
could you repost your predictions again? from what I can remember they were pretty out of line.
bump?
I appreciate the work of collating these. I don't think the words "correct", "incorrect", and "wrong" are quite right for percentage predictions.
I considered that, and just went with the underlying prediction as there's insufficient predictions to compare usefully and calibrate percentage accuracy. I thought about a disclaimer at the top, but it was already way too long, but I can still add one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh7oPAZH4yY&fbclid=IwAR0GR-MsQV2Q0fFVLpfiPxJ9hr5YyRKOvHcmrLLhCViGQ4SsqIiPVoooMLk
To tell you the absolute truth, this video about why it makes sense to cook a turkey in pieces got a lot more response than why there wasn't violence at the polls.. Possibly of interest to rationalists because it's an example of goal factoring-- is that Norman Rockwell image of bringing a whole turkey to the table and carving it worth it compared to having a turkey cook faster and the ability to cook dark meat and light meat separately?
It's coming up to Thanksgiving for you in America and then Christmas for everyone else as well. Of course we're going to be interested in 'best ways of cooking a turkey' videos over "same old dog and cat partisan politics fighting". I'm starting to look for recipes online myself (turkey generally comes out okay, not too dry and not burned, but I'm wanting to spread my wings now that I've got the basics down and try something a little more adventurous).
EDIT: The video looks good so far, and I'm glad he does the "idiot's guide" version about removing the giblets in the plastic bag inside. One year I totally forgot to do this and only remembered while the bird was three-quarters cooked. I have no idea what guardian angel of the kitchen was looking out for my idiot self, but by some fluke the plastic did *not* melt inside the bird, it was *not* undercooked, and nobody got food poisoning or plastic poisoning. But ever since ALWAYS LOOK INSIDE AND CHECK, DON'T ASSUME.
I think a lot of people avoid talking about politics, in order to avoid conflict or just because they aren't interested. But food is relevant to everyone.
People were worried about violence at the polls. It didn't happen. Any theories?
Was the possibility of violence actually a matter of excessive concern about some people who were talking big? This might have an implication that Republicans are less violent than Democrats expect.
As a rough estimate, there are some 75 million Republicans in the US. If as little as one in a million of them had chosen violence yesterday, it would have been a very bad day.
Was the punishment of January 6 rioters enough to get potentially violent people to think hard about whether they wanted to wreck their lives?
I don't believe there could have been adequate protection against violence at polling places to have prevented a determined attempt.
I've posted this to Facebook, and haven't gotten very interesting replies, though one person mentioned significant police at their polling place, and another claimed that violence at the polls has been predicted for years (possibly decades) but never happens.
I'm hoping for some discussion about what went wrong with the prediction, and by that, I mean something more sophisticated that the left generally gets things wrong.
Among other factors already discussed, literally suicidal martyrs are exceedingly rare, and even go-to-prison-for-twenty-years martyrs are fairly rare. If it's not going to accomplish anything useful, and it is going to get them killed or thrown in prison for twenty years, virtually nobody will do it.
Now, maybe there's a hundred thousand Americans who, if they believed a hundred thousand Americans were going to storm the polling places with AR-15s and deliver the vote to the Trumpublicans, would want to be a part of that. With a hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand guns, they might pull it off. And with a hundred thousand Spartaci, the police won't be able to hunt them all down afterwards even if it does fail.
But here and now, after years of Qanon failing to deliver, after 1/6 fizzled out ineffectually, after Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo persistently didn't happen, each of those hundred thousand is pretty sure that the other 99,999 are going to keep wimping out. So the plan where they and their two buddies grab their AR-15s and hit the local polling place, is just going to be pointless ineffectual suicide.
That's a coordination problem that requires a lot of suicidal martyrs, or a very successful conspiracy, or a very public recruitment effort, to pull off. The Trumpublicans didn't have any of those things this time around, and that's not likely to change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defeating_prophecy
I think you're underestimating how easy adequate protection is. While the January 6th riot involved several hundred people, a lot of the most concerning issues were being driven by a core of 10-30 Oathkeepers and Proud Boys. These 10-30 individuals did a big chunk of the violence and virtually all the targeted attacks on office holders and officials. I think it's very plausible they were a major contributing factor as how violent a lot of the more "casual" protestors became.
So basically, the theory is that police and the FBI have gotten better at targeting "rablerousers", ie high commitment individuals with a real interest in violent/anti-government action. For people on the right-wing, this would probably be the equivalent of Antifa in a large BLM rally. You don't need to stop a large violent mob, you only need to isolate and remove a few dozen individuals to turn a potentially violent mob into a bunch of protestors. Conversely, removing or intimidating/isolating right-wing groups like the Oathkeepers and Proudboys from general rightwing protests could be all that's needed to prevent violence.
I did a pretty deep dive back on DSL on the Oathkeepers and distinguishing different groups at 1/6 by the severity of what they got charged with, you can go through it here: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5326.0.html
Given the very local nature of most polling places, and how self-segregated people tend to be (red vs. blue counties and such) I think anyone contemplating election violence would necessarily be facing all the problems of attacking while outnumbered and inside hostile territory. Which might give pause to anyone even halfway sane, and likely exceeds the logistical skills of most completely insane people.
My haven't-gathered-any-evidence take is that the January 6 riot was less about the election and more a reaction to the country-wide BLM riots throughout 2020. The feeling was that the left had turned to violent oppression, and that had won them the presidency, so the right had their own violent rally. you won't see that level of election violence again from the right unless you also have that level of pre-election violence from the left. For now, the genie's back in the bottle.
I think "the democrats are stealing the presidential election through mass fraud and all nonviolent means of stopping them have been exhausted" is a much more convincing reason to riot than "left-wing protesters have been rioting and the media have been taking their side". Honestly, if you believe the former proposition then rioting is a rational course of action that isn't in need of further psychological explanation.
Mass fraud was believed because of the preceding violence.
Even before the 2020 racial unrest plenty of people (more than stormed the Capitol) believed that covid was an establishment hoax, a belief which was far more absurd than the big lie. No matter how well you treat people, some proportion of them will believe dumb conspiracy theories. The thing that made the 2020 election result in so much more violence than previous ones was that the charismatic president fully backed the idea that the election had been stolen.
How many COVID hoax riots were there?
I don't think most people who violated mask ordinances, refused to social distance in urban areas were treated well. I also don't think they deserved to be treated well. Much in the same way i dont think people who refuse to shower, dont wipe their ass, or violate other societal norms deserve the pleasantries we reserve for people who do. Also, the qualified experts seemed to think it would be better for everyone involved if we just follwed their safety precautions for a little while.
However, in rural areas where science denial is more common place you were likely to be scoffed at for wearing a mask or worse for getting a vaccine, that is a safe and effective way to prevent the spread of COVID.
I didn't intend to imply that, but I see how my comment could be read that way.
> This might have an implication that Republicans are less violent than Democrats expect.
> Was the punishment of January 6 rioters enough to get potentially violent people to think hard about whether they wanted to wreck their lives?
I'd say it's these two. People usually overestimate how awful their political opponents are, and deterrence works. (And also, the January 6th riot completely failed to change the outcome of the election.)
> I've posted this to Facebook, and haven't gotten very interesting replies
This tends to happen to whatever people post on Facebook.
Not really. I can get decent discussion on Facebook.
I really appreciate your fair-mindedness Nancy. This reply is an example.
>As a rough estimate, there are some 75 million Republicans in the US. If as little as one in a million of them had chosen violence yesterday, it would have been a very bad day.
Wrong category. There may be some 75 million Republicans, but a fair share of them are in states that are either too blue or too red, where, even if you believe fraud is commited, it would not change the result, and therefore they have no pragmatic reason to act.
The other part of the answer is that R are very civil, and that jan6 wasn't, in fact, an insurrection, and that people expecting widespread violence were, in fact, "getting off on their own supply".
It's possible to argue about whether jan6 was an insurrection, but I'd call it a riot and definitely destructive.
Modeling error. In a very general kind of way, the right don't engage in "partial violence" at a social level; you don't punch somebody unless you intend to kill them, at which point you should shoot them. Violence at the polls would be "partial violence", in the sense that it is an effort to use violence to try to shape the system from within, instead of destroying the system outright.
Some on the right describe this as "Violence as a switch vs violence as a dial".
"You don't punch somebody unless you intend to kill them" This is just not true I have punched people that I did not intend to kill. As have many others. If you have never had the misfortune of being in a violent environment I suggest you not speculate about its nature.
Thanks, that's interesting and something I haven't heard before.
On the other hand, the January 6 event (as I will tactfully call it) was pretty partial violence.
It's a fairly lossy generalization, granted. Even to those whom it applies, it's not like right-wing people do not in fact ever accidentally kill people or get in bar fights; they are not, in fact, perfectly emotionally stable.
Notice that the right's model of what happened with J6 involved outside agents deliberately whipping the crowd into a frenzy - but the crowd failing to maintain that frenzy after the provoking individuals were no longer present, and started milling about and taking selfies. Also notice it's the same model they had for how BLM protests kept turning into riots - antifa agents came in and incited violence.
Which I think shows that they're not necessarily any better at modeling the left's approach to violence; like, I don't think the right can even really understand the idea of a halfhearted assassination attempt.
Eh, I'd say two things:
1) The absence of Trump, and
2) I'll say I'm less concerned about violence at the polls and more concerned about violence post-election once people know what happened. I think the odds of significant (organized with more than 20 people involved, or more than 5 separate individual actions) post election violence this election is ~10%.
So previously I predicted that the polls would lean suddenly rightward leading up the election, and that there would be a general right-wing victory.
So I got the first part right, but I'd say my prediction overall was wrong. And even if I do end up getting the second part right, at this point, it will be by accident rather than good planning, because looking at the little data that is coming in - it looks like young people actually voted.
I, uh, didn't expect that. And I'm pretty sure neither did the pollsters. Because I'm reasonably certain what will come out in short order is exactly my mistake: A misallocation of likely voters as we approached the election.
I think it comes down to that abortion was enough to bridge some of the enthusiasm gap, but we'll see.
That's all, really. Got a thing wrong, here's why I think I got it wrong, in case any of you find that helpful.
Legal question: A friend of mine recently took the LSAT, but on the day scores were released he received, instead of a score, a notice saying that the LSAT companied believed he had cheated, & were investigating the situation, and it might be up to 4 months til he learned the outcome. If they conclude he cheated he will not be allowed to take the LSAT again. Friend has learned from an online forum for LSAT-takers that LSAT never shares info about why they suspect cheating, and how they arrived at ultimate conclusion that person was guilty or not guilty.
So my question: Can this possibly be legal? My friend did not cheat, and if testing company decides he did and locks him out of taking LSAT again his life & life plans will be greatly damaged. The only forms of cheating that are possible could not be proven through viewings of the video of his taking the exam -- at most a viewer might see something that would make them suspect cheating. It seems to me it should at least be possible to insist that my friend be allowed to retake the exam under conditions where whatever form of cheating they suspect could not possibly be carried out -- let's say in some setting where his pockets or whatever are checked beforehand & someone sits in the room watching him the whole time he's taking the test. Those of you who understand the legal issues here: Do you agree it would be possible legally to force the test company to allow a re-take of this kind?
A couple additional details: My friend took several old versions of the LSAT in prep for taking the real thing, and got perfect scores on some and near-perfect on the rest, so it is likely that he achieved the same on the actual test. It seems likely that the testing company would be particularly suspicious of someone who scored a perfect 180, and we suspect that's why he is now under investigation. That's understandable, but this sure is shabby treatment of someone who worked hard to prepare, then managed to do better than 99.9% of the other test-takers.
Definitely legal, LSATs are administered by a private company who can set their own policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_School_Admission_Council
Schools aren't required to respect the LSAT, and apparently various schools are dropping the LSAT requirement, so a court would probably tell your friend to apply to those schools.
This looks like their appeal process. https://www.lsac.org/applying-law-school/misconduct-irregularities
Thank you. It does say in the info about appeal process that he can have a hearing, and bring counsel. Can you make any suggestions about how to identify someone who would do a good job representing him? Neither he nor I know people in that world.
He *could* go to a law school that does not require the LSAT, but this guy worked his ass off to get into the score range where he was by the time he took the LSAT this time. A perfect score, or a score within a point or 2 of that, will guarantee you a full scholarship at a mid-range law school, pretty much guarantees admission to Harvard or other high-prestige school, and is likely to get a person some financial aid even at Harvard. So going to a law school that does not require the LSAT would mean giving up a couple hundred thousand dollars in scholarships OR the many advantages that go with attending a top-tier law school.
I know him well, and am positive he did not cheat. But setting aside my opinion, which is actually irrelevant to everybody involved except me, it just seems crazy that they might just conclude that he is cheating. There are only 3 ways of cheating, and none of them would be obvious to a person observing him taking the test. None of them would make an open and shut case, I mean . At most the video could have captured him doing something that looks suspicious. "His hair looks dyed -- maybe the person taking the test is not him but a hired look-alike." "He has a funny way of stopping and blinking every so often. Could this be a signal to a collaborator that he needs help answering a question?"
I've got no advice for going forward, I'm just pulling stuff off of Google.
From their Determinations section:
"Because intent is not an element of the findings, no inquiry into or determination of intent shall be made. Determinations about the seriousness of an instance of misconduct or irregularity are left to individual law schools and other affected parties."
So, even if they find an irregularity, it might not matter, depending on how common the irregularity is. The school might be willing to wave it off.
Yug, just wanted to let you know that the LSAT apparently thought better of accusing my friend of cheating, and went ahead and sent him his score: 180. He achieved a perfect score. That's probably why they were suspicious. 99.9th percentile starts at 178. He's one in something like 50,000! and can probably get into any law school now.
OK, thanks yug.
FYI Scott, your Moloch article links to http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html however the domain has been squatted, so the link took me to a “you have won a Samsung phone” page. I am guessing you know, and that maintaining old links is a burden, but just in case you didn’t! Cheers
Any predictions for what's likely to happen in Kherson?
My assumption is that the Russians are Up to Something, but what?
Looks like the retreat is officially underway.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135513599/russia-withdraws-kherson-ukraine
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-orders-pullout-west-bank-dnipro-kherson-2022-11-09/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63573387
My ill-informed opinion is that the Russians are leaving a city so filled with mines that it isn't worth having. I hope I'm wrong.
Hopefully not, but even so, the Dnipro is a heck of a defensive barrier - kicking the Russians out of their only toehold on the western side of it still does a lot to improve the Ukrainian position, even if it's full of mines and they can't push across it or use it economically.
I'd expect that too. In their shoes I'd probably push up to the Dnipro, then relocate forces to Donetsk and Zaporozia and try to push South to the coast.
A southern thrust to Melitopol or Mariupol could strand huge numbers of Russian troops in Kherson and Crimea with only the Kerch bridge for supply - a bridge that is both currently out of commission and in range of ATACMS from Melitopol (if the US were to agree to supply them).
Toss up between:
(a) fighting retreat/orderly withdrawal which allows Russia to evac their equipment to prepared defenses on the Eastern bank of the Dnipro like UI mentioned below; or,
(b) evacuating civilians in preparation to dig in for high-intensity urban fighting to try to hold the Western bank of the Dnipro.
I've seen both theories put out there, and my belief tends towards (a), but it's not a strong lean.
Both of these, and if the Ukrainian General Staff's assessment is correct, the Russians are trying to bait them into a premature urban assault in Kherson - basically what the Ukrainians did to Russia in Severodonetsk over the summer. Taunt them, bleed them, then pull back your own people in good order before it's too late.
The Ukrainians are less likely to fall for it, and having a bunch of demoralized conscripts with a minimally-crossable river behind them is going to make it hard for the Russians to pull off any of their part.
So today is election day. Some people are gonna look smart and some will look very foolish. Hard to say who is who right now. Some very weird stuff going on this election. Win or lose I'm ready to be done, though. Election day is gonna suck for me regardless cause I have some weird jaw pain that is not going away. Well unless I chug Tylenol. Florida is look pretty rough in the EDay vote but old Republicans vote early in Miami so it doesn't say a ton yet.
Sounds like you were predicting something outside general expectations. Either a larger than expected red wave or the opposite. So you were either correct, or extra super wrong!
I don’t understand your comment. Are you calling this a larger than expected red wave? Axiom had a theory that put the blue margin substantially higher than most others had it, FYI.
Popular expectations were for a moderate red wave. In particular, betting markets, which had a Republican Senate at 70+ percent. I remembered an Axioms comment that suggested his predictions were different than the betting markets, but he did not reveal them. So either he was predicting larger or smaller red wave. I think you could classify these results as smaller than expected than red wave, possibly much smaller. So I was curious if Axioms was either extra correct, or extra wrong.
I just realized he has his Twitter linked in his profile and it's pretty clear the answer is he was extra correct. Hope he won some money in those markets!
Still not sure I understand your terminology. Seems like the boring "trust 538" is the strategy looking solid now and I don't see why Axioms would qualify as "extra correct". I actually have a hard time imagining any position that could be called "extra correct" with this kind of middle-of-the-line result and I'm also not even sure what you think Axioms' position was. A Republican senate is still definitely in the running and we could easily not know until Georgia runoffs again, so let's not grade that too early.
I found Axioms final senate predictions in Open Thread 248. Here they are:
Bennet +12
Murray +11
Kelly +9
Hassan +9
Fetterman +7
Warnock +5
CCM +4
Beasley +3
Barnes +2
Ryan +2
Demmings +1
We don't have results for all of these, but Hassan and Bennet look on-the-money, Fetterman, Warnock, Barnes, Beasly are too blue and Ryan, Demmings are way too blue.
So the issue with Demmings was that I didn't have a Trafalgar poll. He never polled. So I really didn't know what was happening there. So that prediction was not really safe.
The final Trafalgar poll in each state shifted heavily from the ones that existed when I made my predictions so I shouldn't have hedged and shoulda just taken those results.
I'm pretty happy with Bennet, Murray, Hassan, Barnes and Fetterman. It looks like Fetterman will win by 5 when the last votes come in. Hassan appears to be dead on. She's currently up by 9. Barnes is going to win or lose by ~1% based on current projections so I count that as a win for me. Hard to say with CCM and Kelly. Kelly is currently up ~6. Counting super slow.
The final Trafalgar poll got Walker, Johnson, Budd, Oz, and Vance correct but I didn't change my predictions to match. That's on me.
What appears to have happened with Warnock is that DeKalb, Clayton, and Fulton had anemic election day voting. I was expecting 4.2 million total but it is more like 4mil.
In any case my mistake was not trusting Trafalgar enough.
Then I’ll reserve all judgement until final tallies are in. I’m relieved that “Axioms is correct” is even on the consideration this morning. Thought this (and the democrats) would be dead on arrival.
Any recommendations for interesting an entertaining stories/books/videos/movies where the protagonist has a strong sense of duty? Deontological ethics are pretty far from the mind of the average teenager, I find...
_All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault_ by James Alan Gardner is a strong example.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series might work. The main protagonist, Miles, can be a handful, but he's grounded by his duty as part of the Vor caste. (And it gets especially good when he starts coming ungrounded, and then has to deal with the results.)
The Aubrey/Maturin nautical adventure novels by Patrick O'Brian, and the movie with Russel Crowe and Paul Bettany, give you a double dose of this in that Aubrey and Maturin have strong but distinct senses of duty. And are solid friends, and entertaining to watch if you're into that sort of thing.
I love these books. In the same vein I would suggest that when it comes to a sense of duty that the Horatio Hornblower novels are perhaps even stronger.
But less interesting because there's only Hornblower's perspective on duty, and zero chance that he's going to shirk it. Aubrey and Maturin are going to have to come to an agreement that isn't entirely aligned with one of them at least.
Well, “interesting” is a moveable feast so I will demure. I have read both series twice now (maybe thrice) and find both of them thoroughly interesting.
I would disagree that there is only hornblowers perspective on his sense of duty but the internal wrestling between duty and his sense of other possibilities is front and center. He’s very hard on himself.
Other people’s reactions to him give a strong sense of an outside perspective on his sense of duty, to me. He actually does CHEAT on his wife in one of the final volumes and ends up as a rather bitter old man who has spent his entire life at war, lost all his comrades, and at a loss to make any sense of that.
Aubrey is a more elemental character, less prone to introspection, and much more colorful. When he gets confused with himself he generally acts it out, rather than having a long chat with himself.
Hornblower is a rationalist as well, which should not go unmentioned here. Loves Whist, finds listening to music painful, and is always quick to chastise himself for not making the perfect move. The short story about how he handles being challenged to a duel by a fellow who is a much better shot than he is very amusing.
Books I’d walk the plank for...
Pretty much all of Rachel Neumeier, but her "Tuyo" series is the first one that comes to mind. The protagonist is introduced to us offering himself as a willing (if not exactly ecstatic about it) sacrifice to his tribe's enemy, with full expectation that he will be tortured to death in order to expiate the issue between the two peoples and settle the immediate conflict.
As his role as protagonist suggests, things don't go as he expected. But duty and the need to resolve conflicting ones remains a strong throughline.
Any of John Le Carre's George Smiley novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy being the obvious starting point). Duty here to both country and organization, and what it means in a very gray operating environment.
The Chesscourt book series deals extensively with the burden of duty, as well as with coming to terms with the consequences of one's actions. A bit of a warning - though the series starts out pretty straightforward, it becomes really heavy in later installments (in more than one sense). Also, don't read the unpublished final installment.
I understood that reference.
Do you mean something specific by duty? Because don't many (most?) popular heroes fall into that category?
Harry Potter. James Holden. Ted Lasso. Superman/Spiderman/etc "With great power...". Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh most kids cartoons. Steven Universe. Avatar the Last Airbender. Anime too. Doctor/lawyer shows too often have characters with strong codes/duty. Scrubs. Most of Star Trek. Captain Picard and Captain Pike come to mind as the strongest examples.
All of Terry Pratchett is basically about sticking hard to your moral code. Dresden Files. Stormlight Archive.
Finch in Person of Interest.
Political shows. President Bartlett in the West Wing is over the top super duty focused.
I wouldn't say "all of Terry Pratchett". Rincewind, for example, does not seem to fit.
I'd say all of Terry Pratchett's Sam Vimes books. Of those, I'd say "Night Watch" is probably the best. (The book is Pratchett's take on "A Tale of Two Cities", if it helps.) My other favorite is "Thud!", but I understand this might be too fantastic if you're not that much into fantasy.
Pratchett's "Night Watch" is a really good read. If you are yet to read it, I envy you.
Dick Francis novels- Come to Grief (esp recommended) To the Hilt, And Proof are good examples.
CJ Cherryh - Downbelow Station and Rider at the Gate.
And there are the Horacio Hornblower novels, esp the Young Hornblower collection.
Many of C S Forester’s protagonists would qualify, Death to the French, Brown on Resolution for instance
Oh! CJ Cherryh short fiction The Scapegoat is this all over.
Cherryh's _The Paladin_ is my favorite and I think qualifies, at least after the male protagonist is dragged back into the world by the female protagonist.
His duty concept was apparent, too, in the flashbacks/reflection.
Urban fantasy protagonists tend to have a strong sense of duty-- it's an easy way to get them into trouble.
Seanan McGuire's October Daye has a strong sense of duty. The first book is _Rosemary and Rue_. I don't remember whether she develops a stronger sense of duty as the series goes on.
Corneille's Horace is the #1 I can think of. Other than that, Starship troopers is a good contender.
Worm (Parahumans, for disambiguation)
Movies: Serpico, Hot Fuzz.
I have not read it yet, but from what I've heard, Augustus by John Williams is an epistolary historical fiction novel that explores duty as a central theme.
I think Lord Jim fits that bill somehow.
I'm not sure it is exactly what you are looking for, but the protagonist of Naomi Novik's Scholomance series (three books) is a teenager whose behavior is very much constrained by what she thinks it is right to do. Also, they are very good books.
Speaking of Naomi Novik, her Temeraire series fits the "protagonist with a strong sense of duty" very well (classical An Officer And A Gentleman), although he gets challenged quite a lot.
More a sense of what she thinks is the *wrong* thing to do. She spends most of the story unclear about what the right thing to do is, but knowing perfectly well that the one solution clearly available to her (kill them all, let God sort them out, light off a volcano under what's left) is just plain wrong even if she can't see any other solution that ends with her alive.
Consider her seminar in saving freshmen. Judged not by what she says her principles are but by what she does, it is constrained by what she ought to do. So is her killing of the first Mawmouth.
Purchased. Thanks!
Throwaway account to comment on my ban, it's easy to guess which one of those banned was my main.
The reason I do this is *not* to go full troll and flagrantly disrespect your, Scott's, dominion. I have a lot of respect for you, which is precisely why I write this feedback. The issues of moderation and bannning seems to be "in the air" and on your mind recently with your recent posts and the twitter buyout playing out, so I sought to offer you the (as far as I know) unique perspective of someone you banned. No part of this should ever be construed as me bargaining or asking for an account unban.
1- The most puzzling thing about this for me is why now? 2 months is a really long time for me, is it not for everybody ?
This is relevant because fast enforcement of rules is good.
1-a- From the point of view of the banned, it feels unfair (an entirely different thing from actually being unfair) to come after me after I have cooled off. If you have banned me in the 5-10 days interval after posting that rant, I would still be pissed, but hey, I had it coming. While not exactly a pleasant analogy, imagine this a fist fight. I throw a punch and you come at me 6 hours later with a bunch of your friends and give me a piece of your mind, harsh but fair. But I throw a punch and you come at me 2 months later ? Hmmmmm.
1-b- If you don't give a flying heck about the banned, (some of) the rest of your community is probably latching on bannings as a useful signal. It's a bit like how programmers learn a new programming language : write what they think to be a valid program, throw it at a program responsible for saying what's a valid program, and recieve yelling in return about why this is not - in fact - a valid program. Rinse and repeat till no yelling. Back to the object level : the programmers here are the commenteriats. The programs are the comments. And you're the oracle responsible for saying which programs are valid and which are nonsense. A 2-month-long feedback cycle is degrading this useful signal by a whole amount of a lot. Is this intentional so people spend more time thinking about what to write instead of just hitting 'post' and seeing what happens ?
2- The particular comment you banned contains, right after downthread, a semi-apology to the person who reported me, which he semi-accepted by replying back in kind. I don't want a cookie for this, but it feels like it should count for something. Apologies are hard, they are costly, they contain tacit admissions of a lot of bad things about the one apologizing. To put that in the most transactional and entitled way possible : What did my softened tone later in that thread buy me ? Is the answer nothing ? *Should* the answer be nothing ? Gradients are lovely, they allow you to be mostly wrong but still make progress. 0/1 kindness may be hard for me towards a particular class of people, it would be cool if I can be mean then retract and make amends later.
3- This is simply a matter of perception, but I can't shake the feeling that you're biased in favor of you-know-who. This is probably wrong, but wrong perceptions still can and indeed does affect conversations. There is a very easy solution for this : pick the most anti-you-know-who person that have ever anti-you-know-who-ed in your close circle, and make them responsible for the final green light on a random 50% of the people you intend to ban.
4- There is something awefully school-principal-like and preachy about posting the names of the banned. What purpose does it serve ? The message "A lot of people were banned, tread carefully" can equally be sent by stating the number of bans, not the actual names. If the content of the comments serve as a useful signal (as in 1-b-), then maybe you can just copy paste it into a pastebin or a github repo without the name attached. I'm not "ashamed" of my comment, I just object to the forced-group-consensus aspect of highlighting the badness of my comment as if it was a fact or an uncontroversial example to be heeded.
To temper this very tame criticism, I reacted positively to you banning the comment that directly insulted an actual person, and not the comment that just said a bunch of very naughty words that a bunch of you-know-whos said shouldn't be said. It might be a minuscule thing, it might have been entirely a noise artifact that I'm reading weird things into, but it really proves for me that you take moderation seriously as a tool to make the prisoner's dilemma of internet conversations bend more towards cooperation, rather than merely a synonym for "a button I can use to efficiently shutdown people I don't want to speak". Moderation Is Different From Censorship indeed.
I like your moderation, Scott, and I like you in general, and I learn(t) a lot of things from reading you think about conflict-resolution, free speech, governance and whatnot. 1..4 are just "UX" issues that I think it would benefit you greatly and the community to think more about.
Here's the SQLite blessing :
> May you do good and not evil.
> May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
> May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Have a great (*Checks California time*) afternoon.
I remember your original... quite frankly, rant, and I want to respond to some of the things you said.
1a/b- On point. I know Scott is a busy person, but he should really place more weight on doing this more than bi-monthly, or otherwise set up some system whereby it happens more frequently. The signal value of bans is reduced by the long delay.
Then again, the "Challenge" threads seem to be an attempt to do just that, so maybe he already recognizes this?
2- Valid points. Apologies are costly, you should probably get some credit for them. That's probably the strongest argument for this to be a temp ban.
That said, you had a lot to apologize for in that thread, as Scott pointed your first comment alone was already toeing the line even before you posted the comment your were banned for.
(Also, not to put to fine a point on this, but that two months was enough time to cool down and delete or edit away any comment you *really* regretted, and escape the notice of the banhammer. That's somewhat of a contentious norm, though, so I can see why that wouldn't appeal to you, and obviously substack's UI sucks for finding old comments.)
3- This is what I really wanted to respond to, because I think you're wrong here. At least, maybe. I do not, in fact, "know who" you are referring to, or rather I am not sure, because you've directed ire at multiple groups. Wokesters? All progressives? Trans people? The new-world-order?
(Side note and observation: usually when the kind of people who throw slurs around start talking about a "you-know-who", they're talking about a specific ethnic group that Scott happens to belong to. I assume you are not referring to this group, so your vagueness really hurts you here)
If you meant "progressives", then... no, sorry. Lots of progressives go after Scott for being too biased *towards* anti-progressives and neoreactionaries in his comment sections. Scott is notably anti-woke. But beyond that, the replies you got should have told you that even the anti-progressives weren't on your side. Hell, a quick look suggests the *majority* of the people who replied to your post to offer criticism or caution were anti-progressives. One directly identified themselves as such and still explicitly told you your comment(s) didn't belong here. Even trebuchet disagreed with you, and having gotten into multiple, erm, friendly discussions with him, I can tell you *for certain* he is not biased toward progressives.
If you meant "trans people" (or whatever slur you want to use to describe them), or queer folks in general, then... maybe he's biased in the sense that he expects people to respect their basic dignity, and you arguing that it's actually correct to use slurs against them reveals a fairly substantial values dissonance in lowest bar for commenters that Scott sets. He would probably be right to ban you if you want the litmus test to be the "most anti-trans person he knows". I hope this is therefore not what you mean.
4- Scott's been pretty consistent about wanting to be transparent in his moderation. This is perfectly in line with that. Plus it's useful to see what crossed the line. As I said above, callbacks to point 1 are appropriate here though.
Opinion time: personally, I think that:
a) the amount of naked ire you put into your comments towards specific groups, and specifically
b) the priors that lead you to think you should be able to use any slurs without consequence (which, as far as I can tell, was one of the main things you were expressing the root comment complaining about being banned elsewhere)
c) (and, additionally) the assumption that this comment section is significantly biased *towards* progressives
...lead to you being a bad fit for contributing to this community unless you made some significant adjustments, and Scott was probably correct in his decision.
I didn't really intend to use this account for a back-and-forth thread to honor my claim that this isn't ban-challenging or trolling, but you assume a heck of a lot about me and I really can't resist setting you straight.
> I can see why that wouldn't appeal to you
Good sight, I hate deleting comments or controversial things in general. It will make replies meaningless and confusing, it's a cowardly way to conduct yourself as opposed to taking responsibility and leaving a record of what you once said and did, and it's generally a bad way to apologize (unless it's done at the specific request of the party that I wanted to apologize to).
>because you've directed ire at multiple groups
I did ? They are all really the same to me, people who desperately want to exert power and founded a religion to do just so. You would be surprised at how much this homogenizes a vast array of ideologies and people into one big melting pot that I intensely hate so much.
>Wokesters? All progressives? Trans people? The new-world-order?
That last one probably doesn't exist. From the other 3, select the subset that matches the melting-pot predicate, and that's your answer.
>usually when the kind of people who throw slurs around start talking about a "you-know-who", they're talking about a specific ethnic group that Scott happens to belong to. I assume you are not referring to this group
You don't really have to assume, do you now :) ? you think an anti-jew ("anti-semite" is inaccurate, plenty of people other than jews are semites) would begin and end his comment by declaring his respect for and sharing a beautiful blessing for the jewish blogger he's commenting at ? you hurt my feelings, I can hate much better than this.
In truth, I used "you-know-who" *just* because I think it's irrelevant who AHG hates or was railing against before he was banned. I didn't want the mental RAM of a comment reader to be occupied with AHG's prejudices, AHG's prejudices are irrelevant and uninteresting in this particular context PHG is talking in. I promised to comment neutrally about the ban in general and why it could have been done better, and that's why I tried to do just that.
The 2 paragraphs after that has a lot of claims and assumptions about me that I would absolutely love to challenge and contradict, but as PHG I can't let myself descend into reiterating AHG's worldview yet another time, so maybe I can satisfy you and myself with some bullet points that I think to be true :
a- I don't hate anybody who doesn't hate me or a value I deeply cherish
b- If anything, I'm biased in favor of underdogs and outcasts, which *sometimes* intersects with groups you mentioned
c- Dominant religions love to claim victimhood and persecution because it justifies how they do exactly this to disbelievers
d- Sometimes performatively being outrageous is good to normalize disrespect and open challenge for a totalitarian ideology BUT
e- It's wrong and ill-thought to do this at ACX
e-1- Because Scott doesn't like it
e-2- Because this way of speech and argumentation heavily mirrors those who do it while actually meaning it, and it's difficult to get across that my motives are different
> transparent in his moderation
Copying the contents of the comments without the name would still achieve that, but points 3..4 are somewhat subjective and it's okay for me if people differ.
>the amount of naked ire you put into your comments towards specific groups
Is it bad because it's ire or because it's naked ? and is there such a thing as an upper limit on hate if we grant that the target of hate deserve it ? (those questions are not rhetorical)
> the priors that lead you to think you should be able to use any slurs without consequence (which, as far as I can tell, was one of the main things you were expressing the root comment complaining about being banned elsewhere)
This is wrong on several levels. I wasn't complaining about being banned from HackerNews, I was using it as an anecdote to open a discussion about how a modern religion that loves claiming persecution so much is actually a fairly powerful and invading force. I wasn't banned from HN because I used slurs, I was banned because I lost my temper at a commenter gloating about a really really bad thing (in a way that doesn't involve using slurs). I'm fairly rule-abiding in general and I don't value the ability to use slurs (and I'm not comfortable when I do it unironically), but - like I said above - I believe one ideology has gained so much undeserved power and a say over who says and does what over the internet that it's sometimes acceptable to say whatever vile words necessary *just* to spite them, 0 other reasons, just that.
Was I thoughtless and too anger-drunk to realize that ACX is not a good place for this ? Yes. But am I wrong ? of course I can be, but nobody has ever convinced me that I am.
>the assumption that this comment section is significantly biased *towards* progressives
I don't hold this assumption as true. Heck, AHG got away with unironically saying sheer raw 21st century heresy and he wouldn't be allowed to finish his sentence anywhere else on the vast majority of the internet (including this community's discord channel, which is still heretic). No, this place is as heretic and heretic-welcoming as it can ever be given the various constraints, and I love it, like I love all heretics and those who support them. I just said I have a slight feeling that Scott is *juuuust a tiny bit* biased in favor of a group he once used to call home, an understandable perception, and I said in the same breath that I suspect I'm mostly wrong, but I still can't help the feeling.
> you being a bad fit for contributing to this community unless you made some significant adjustments, and Scott was probably correct in his decision.
I hate 'bad fit' because it reminds me of HR speak so much, but that conclusion is fair. Just say I suck :D. Remember "No part of this should ever be construed as me bargaining or asking for an account unban."? not empty filler or tactical cover, genuinely what I think. Scott was generous and gracious, and I *was* aggressive, for no good reason, anger can break me like that sometimes. Maybe a time out can reset that. And I'm working on that. Like James S.A. Corey put it (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10120236-the-magic-word-is-oops), the magic word is "oops", so oopsie daisey, it looks like I hecked up.
I just want to say, hang in there. I've got anger problems too, and I sympathize. Some people say that anger motivates them or helps them focus, and I wish I knew what they were talking about, whether it's even the same feeling. For me, it just gets in the way, and prevents me from doing anything productive about the causes.
But what about this, AHG?: You sound like someone who really craves for people to get you. You sound deeply angry, hurt and pained when people do not understand what you are trying to get across. Instead, they misunderstand and argue and ban you! I'm the same way. It *really* bothers me when people don't hear what I am trying to say. It's especially painful and infuriating if they think the point I was making is silly and stupid. I want to write and write and write until it's very clear and there's no way for them to misunderstand. Sometimes I do that. I want to do something to make them feel like shit, the way they made me feel -- I hardly ever to that these days.
But here's what you are not taking into account: How clearly you write is only one determinant of whether people understand your points. The other determinant is whether something is interfering with them giving your ideas their full attention. And in the case of your communications here, YOU are doing something that interferes with people's listening: You are implying, or actually saying, that you are smart and independent and they are dumber than you and and not independent and in fact sort of hypnotized into believing various stupid culty ideas. And you are saying that you HATE the ideas and the cult, and that you do not feel bad about hating it, in fact you think that's the proper attitude to have. Once people grasp that you are basically calling them stupid conformist assholes, their ability to take in the rest of what you have to say is going to be severely limited. Maybe it should not be that way, and maybe if they were saints or zen masters it would not be. But with regular people, in real life, you are not going to get a good hearing if you tell the audience you are smart and right and they are assholes and wrong. They are all going to be sitting there feeling angry and misunderstood and thinking of rebuttals to what you are saying.
So you have to choose: Do you want to pour out your angry thoughts, and your certainty you are right and everyone else is wrong? Or do you want to be listened to? You can't have both.
Ok, AHG can sound like a Richard Dawkins (this is a bad thing) sometimes, it's the risk of denouncing any kind of conformity. Totalitarians hijack the agreebleness and rule-following subroutines of humans (normally good and necessary things with thousands of benign everyday uses), so that those against them have to fight the double whammy of both the material consequences they conjure and the psychological hurdle of calling lots of people wrong and imply all kinds of nasty things in the process (and the *material consequences* of that when\if people get pissed). In my case I thankfully don't have to fight any material consequences, but I still have to overcome the psychological hurdle, because - I will swear by whatever gods you happen to believe in or all of them - I don't like upsetting people.
How to solve this ? Needless to say, I myself mostly manage to not fall into the trap of thinking I'm more smart and independent than my religious peers or other people who believe differently from me. I offer this comment where I defend christians (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242/comment/9148010) and this one (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-244/comment/9460877) where I defend muslims as evidence. I *was* a conformist many many times in the past, I was once a muslim. I had a progressive phase, if you can believe that. I make no effort to keep these things a secret too. How to better signal that when I rail against conformity I don't want you to hate the people doing it (as much as humanly possible) but rather hate the ugliness and unfairness of conformity itself ?
Kindness can't always be the answer, right ? All human languages evolved curse words and harsh ways of speech (citation needed, I don't actually know for sure if this is correct but sounds like it must be true). And neither is unkindness free or easy, people who choose it like AHG has to bear the cost of being disliked, being eye-rolled at, being mistaken for various people he doesn't share beliefs with (only words), and bad things like that. Oh, he's not a martyr, those are very minor nuisances he willingly chooses to bear, even the ban is not that much of a problem. I'm not defending AHG and I'm likely to never repeat his ways with the same aggressiveness again, but there is a very legitimate problem that he imagined himself solving.
I think you're sort of talking past what people are saying, PHG, and despite your protests I think you're still defending AHG's impulses, if not his methods.
You're certainly correct, kindness isn't always the correct answer, but AHG's methods weren't just anti-kind, Eremolalos effectively pointed out why they were actively ineffective - anti-winning (and therefore antirationalist). People are correct to associate that sort of thing anti-intellectualism and faux-intellectualism, because that's who they appeal to - they're good for getting retweets from the worst quintile of twitter who already agree with them, and not much else.
This is frustrating, because there *are* valid criticisms adjacent to what you're saying, you're just failing to express them. If you want to change people's minds, be clear on what you actually mean, give more substance to your criticism. Don't say "progressivism is a religion", be specific; here's some examples I think would be more effective while expressing what I think you meant:
- When you mean "woke", say woke. Don't tar all of progressives with the same brush (remember, the people who opposed slavery, segregation, sodomy laws, etc were progressives. They're right about some things). If you can make a distinction, you can get even members of the enemy faction to agree with you. "I disagree with progressives as a whole, but it's wokeism I really think is dangerous, and your should be worried too, for <reasons below>". *Especially* avoid automatically including people (trans, queer) in a group you hate just because of something (they're telling you) they can't change, that's textbook bigotry and renders your opinion worthless more quickly than anything else.
- Instead of calling it a religion, make comparisons, like I did, *between* Christian Morality and the movement, and then you can say, "you don't want to be a religion, you hate fundamentalists, you should be worried". If you think "religion" is an insult, don't use it as a slur, use it as a threat.
- Worried about how conformist it is, how authoritarian it is? ...Well, you're not going to get any friends by calling progressives that directly. In general, the left trends anti-authoritarian compared to the right, you'll never convince them otherwise. And everyone is conformist to their ingroup. But point out where conformism is getting in the way of their stated goals, point out real abuses of authority, and not just ones where it hurts your ingroup. "Actual progress on the things you claim to care about is taking a backseat to language policing" You'll get pushback, but as more power accrues people will start to notice you have a point.
I'm kind of rambling here, but I endorse each of these because *I know they work* because I've seen them work on me and other progressives. Hell, I'm even be comfortable with having the label "woke" applied to me, and I've still picked up a bunch of criticisms from Scott and others adjacent to him, as well as others in my tribe.
> They are all really the same to me, people who desperately want to exert power and founded a religion to do just so. You would be surprised at how much this homogenizes a vast array of ideologies and people into one big melting pot
I think this is a deeply reductive and antisocial view (god help me, I almost typed "problematic" here), and is probably a source of why you've had trouble interacting civilly with people. Calling people who are just asking you to respect their basic humanity and not call them slurs "a religion" is... well, to put it the way you requested, it sucks, and you suck for it :P
I also really dislike when people use the term "religion" when they mean "popular thing I disagree with". (It's the same as the people who say "all religion is a cult", it minimizes the harm done by *actual cults*). Just say "authoritarians", it's quicker, more accurate, and you don't sound like a conspiracy theorist.
(Also, any accusations of wokeism being a religion apply just as strongly for the alt-right/anti-wokeism, and if you don't recognize that you're being myopic and exposing your own bias)
That said, and since I love tangents, there is *some* truth to what you're saying, and it's that there's a troubling trend of wokesters that are directly importing purity tests from Christian Morality, because the US culture they grew up in is Christian By Default, even for atheists. To be clear, it's not because they're a religion, it's because they're
To take one of your own examples:
>Dominant religions love to claim victimhood and persecution because it justifies how they do exactly this to disbelievers
This is mostly a Christian Morality thing. (And to a lesser extent, the other Semitic religions). Sunday school does its best to instill a deep persecution complex into the most dominant religion out there, so this filters out as a realpolitikally useful tactic.
Maybe it is just convergent social evolution, but the coincidences are too strong there.
John McWhorter keeps calling SJ a religion, which seems very wrong to me. Or ineffective, since he seems to assume religions are necessarily wrong.
My problem is that when he talks about it, he seems reasonable, but I can never remember his arguments for calling SJ a religion. Can anyone do a summary of his argument?
I don't know whether McWhorter mentions this, but something I notice is that young people in a setting where it is highly desirable to be "woke" suffer a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. They are aware that many of their private thoughts and feelings do not pass the woke test, struggle mightily to have only politically correct inner reactions, and worry that they are bad people because they can't succeed at this. They remind me of people exposed to old-style Catholicism who are horrified by having secret sexual desires that if gratified would be sins, and fear going to hell because they cannot make themselves refrain from masturbating.
(Is "do pass" missing a "not"?)
I'm not up for a real summary, but this might be a good place to start:
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-posing-as-antiracists
From what I can tell, he's mostly focused on aspects of SJ that resemble the worst aspects of early-to-medieval Catholicism and modern American evangelical Christianity. He focuses on belief vs. facts, on embracing contradictory thoughts instead of rational dialogue, and on the focus on ideological purity (heresy, apostasy, schisms, creeds, etc.). I haven't read it all, and my memory these days is unreliable, so that's not a complete list. I expect that he also gets into the SJ versions of original sin, and the extent to which SJ adds a moral valence to virtually every aspect of life.
I personally tend to agree with the overall point, using the extremely-vague theory that human behavior and human minds seem to have a "niche" that the thing we call "religion" slots into very nicely. (Memetic adaption, probably.) It's a thing that provides community, morality, a sense of the structure of the universe and one's place in it, helpful bits of wisdom, and various rituals that, besides whatever practical use they might have, serve to set the community apart and keep it together. Or maybe just some of those things (does the Rocky Horror Picture Show count?). And evangelism is a trait of many of the most successful religions. (This "definition" makes no claim to how useful or true any given "religion" is, or whether those are correlated with each other or with the overall success of the religion.) And I think that people who reject "traditional" religions without understanding this niche, end up vulnerable to "non-traditional" religions, which fill the niche without any mention of "sky fathers" or "nature spirits" or what have you. (Please forgive my overuse of quotation marks.)
For what it's worth, I'd classify some strains of communism as falling into this category, too. Some people's relationship to sexual kinks fits, too. And, frankly, I've seen it in the rationalist community, which is part of why I've held myself apart from it for years. Looking at some of Eliezer's writing, I think he was intentionally exploiting this niche. (And again, this is not meant to imply anything about how true or useful any of this stuff is.)
Thanks for the thorough explanation. For whatever reason, "fills the niche of religion" sits better with me than "is a religion".
"The Moon Moth" is an excellent story.
Wait what? Sunday school instills a persecution complex? That is...strange. I wonder what kind of Sunday school you went to? That which I went to in my youth had two goals 180 degrees from creating a persecution complex: (1) to teach you that you were lucky, blessed, a person who was about to receive the gift of understanding and the beeline to eternal salvation, The Good News, so to speak, and (2) to teach you that because of this fabulous good luck you should feel a sense of obligation to those less fortunate -- it was incumbent on you to spread the love you were receiving, to do good works, help those who were still stuck in some dark night of the soul.
I mean, most churches that run Sunday schools also run substantial charity operations, and if you participate in the church as much as going to Sunday school, you'll certainly feel the social pressure to contribute to the charity missions. How this is consistent with fostering a persecution complex I cannot see.
I'm overselling it a little; I was raised episcopalian, which is definitely on the liberal side of traditionalist protestantism.
That being said, there's a *lot* of bible stories about Jews and Christians being persecuted for their faith, and Jesus's persecution is kind of a huge overarching theme of the gospels that definitely gets a lot of focus - "they hated him because he spoke the truth" and all. Even if they don't *specifically* call attention to it, biblical teachings tend to subconsciously form a solid basis for a persecution complex through vibes alone, to say nothing of sermons that often reinforce that.
The church I grew up in (evangelical) heavily focused on the "in the world but not of it" and "take up your cross and follow me" aspects of the thing--the idea that if you are doing Christianity *right* you will inevitably be persecuted by the "world". This is an insidious thing to expose children to because it can make the feeling of being persecuted a pillar of self-worth and lead to either pointlessly oppositional behavior or delusions of persecution (or both) as a way to shore up this pillar.
Well, but that's just the A->B, B does not imply A fallacy, right? Do what's right where it's needed, and persecution follows, but persecution by itself doesn't say anything about the merits of what you were doing.
"... start talking about a "you-know-who"
Oh, whatever you say, say nothing, when you speak about you know what:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pns4Aq-RNs
Speaking in defense of #4 I think "I banned X and here is the post so that the community can see my decision-making and evaluate my conduct" is a better approach than "I banned X and will not be sharing the basis for that decision because this is my website and it can be a star chamber if I want."
Neither approach is perfect, but between 2 imperfect options I think the former is better, and I imagine Scott thought it over and reached a similar conclusion.
Agreed. I think it provides the rest of us an indication of where Scott draws his lines, which in turn gives us a sense of when we're safe and when we're pushing the limits. Emergent boundary setting. If we never combine meat and dairy, we're safe, but if we do happen to feel the need, it's on our own heads to make sure that we're not accidentally boiling a calf in its mother's milk.
Concur with this. I feel like if anything the banning record is too opaque – no central permanent list like there was on SSC for example.
I believe the 2 month delay was Scott being busy, not on purpose. It would be really weird to decide to ban someone, wait for 2 months, and then actually do it. I agree that it is not optimal, but what can be done about it? Scott is going to be busy in random moments in future, that cannot be prevented.
Perhaps the capacity to give bans should be extended to other people? (Not sure if Substack allows that.) Perhaps the other moderators would ban for an unspecified period of time, and when Scott is available again, he decides whether the bad is permanent or temporary.
Posting the names is useful from my perspective. The comment threads are very long here; I do not want to scroll twenty pages again just to see who exactly was banned. There is a chance that I remember the name, so when Scott writes "XY is banned", I know. (And if I do not remember, that's what the links are for.)
Unfortunately, moderation does not scale well. If you do not delegate, it can become another full-time job. If you delegate, other people do not make the same subjective judgments you would, making the whole process more arbitrary.
I actually think a lot of moderation does scale pretty well if you do it carefully. I think a lot of the moderation could be done by an assistant -- maybe some grad student who'd prefer the job to being a TA (in my town they call themselves TF's, Totally Fuckeds). There are many situations in my field, psychology, where 2 peoples have to attain a high level of agreement about categorizing something. Agreement is measured by the correlation of their scores across a bunch of subjects. For instance in choosing subjects for a study, you might want people who are very depressed, but are not drug or alcohol abusers or psychotic. The proper way to do this assessment is to write out detailed criteria for judging degree of depression, and presence/absence of substance abuse and psychosis, and then have 2 or more raters interview people, rate them following the guidelines, then compare answers, & discuss disagreements with each other and with the person who wrote the guide until they are able to categorize subjects with scores that correlate .85 or better. I have been trained to do that in a couple settings. It is hard work, but definitely do-able.
And Scott's criteria are pretty clearly spelled out. I doubt it would take him long to train a grad student to follow them pretty well. Or what if some of us, as a group, compiled for Scott the beginnings of a manual for judging posts? The ideal manual would have clear-cut, stellar examples of each category of acceptable or unacceptable posts, as well as some commentary about edge cases of each. We could use posts banned so far as examples of various kinds of unacceptable posts.
It’s hard for me to imagine Scott turning the moderation decisions entirely over to an assistant, but, Scott, if you’re listening, what about having an assistant make a first pass — identify the low hanging fruit, i.e. comments that pretty clearly pass, and those that pretty clearly don’t. They could also mark comments they think are on the border of some category and hard to call balls or strike on.
"Or what if some of us, as a group, compiled for Scott the beginnings of a manual for judging posts?"
Nope. Not unless you to start a real hair-pulling, knock-down, drag-out fight. For every person going "X is definitely a bannable offence", there will be another person going "X is harmless". And no three people will agree on the exact definition of X itself. Then we'll have the accusations of "You only want to ban X to get rid of your outgroup/political enemies/that guy you had a row with about what wine goes with which cheese" and *some* of those accusations will even be true.
I much prefer the solitary decision-making power of the Reign of Terror to rule by committee.
You know, I agree that there's something not right about banning someone for a post they put up 2 mos. ago. It's a bit unfair. There's much less chance they will learn from being banned, because they're so far out from the state of mind that led them to write the offending post that they're not going to be able to tag that state of mind as one indicating it's maybe not a good time to post. Also, in the succeeding 2 months, they may have changed their ways. And if they have not changed their ways, waiting 2 mos. to take action means all of us get subjected to 2 more months, probably 20 or more helpings, of whatever they're dishing out.
Just for the record, I was not the person who reported you. I wish you well.
Here's an interesting video about the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and their status as an earnestly agreed-upon framework for peace in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdKmOGMrzuM
But all of that went away with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Whatever replaces the Helsinki Accords, formally or de facto, Europe is in a new world now.
After watching the video... yeah, it's interesting how not long ago the military superpowers seemed like: #1 USA, #2 Russia, #3 China (or maybe #2 China and #3 Russia), #4 etc. not that important...
and suddenly it seems like #1 USA, #2 China, #3 Europe (including Ukraine), #4 etc. not that important; Russia probably still among the top 10, but who cares...
and Europe is mostly like "how the fuck did I get here? do I even want to be here?" :D
The joke version: Russia seemed to be the second strongest military power in the world. Now it's the second strongest power in Ukraine.
Conventional military power yes, but Russia still has that huge nuclear arsenal.
It seems like military power is largely downstream of economic productivity. The US' dominant position in the world for so long was largely based on our being extremely wealthy. China seems to be following that path. (Europe and Japan, for historical reasons, didn't follow that path so much post-WW2, but may do that more in the future.) Russia is a poor, badly run country; it doesn't have a huge economy to pump into its military, and the level of corruption in the military and whole society seems to have meant that even the wealth it did pump into its military was mostly spent on dachas and fancy cars and mistresses and such, rather than on actually having an effective military.
What's interesting is that the USSR was also a pretty poor country, and in many ways even worse-run than Russia. But it was apparently able to keep its military from being eaten from the inside by corruption--I'm not quite sure why.
It seems like the really critical question w.r.t. Russia is about whether they're capable of fixing the rot in their military. Clearly this is possible to do, but will Russian government and society as they are now/will be after they finish losing the war be capable of doing it?
Just guessing...
I am not sure how functional actually was the Red Army during Stalin. They basically defeated Nazi Germany by throwing millions of bodies at them, seemingly not too different from what Russia is currently trying in Ukraine. (The difference is that modern weapons can shred the cannon fodder much faster.)
After Stalin, the power in USSR was less concentrated. More competition meant people kept each other vigilant. Cold War included a lot of actual fighting, and there was always the possibility of escalating to nuclear war. (Maybe the more ambitious generals also prepared for a possibility of a coup?)
Putin started with fewer external threats, so he could focus on concentrating the power in his hands, and possibly in certain aspects surpassed Stalin. He eliminated competent people, because they also posed a threat to himself. Russian army, until recently, was only used for bullying much smaller countries. The resistance of Ukraine was unexpected. The countries next in line (Belarus, Moldova) would also be weak opponents.
I suppose the Russian long-term plan (if there was any) involved collecting the remaining pieces of Soviet Union, and dissolving the West using propaganda. Maybe using Trump to disband NATO, or convincing the remaining NATO states that defending their members in Eastern Europe is not worth it. Using nukes as a threat, but never actually using them. Creating puppet states in Africa; accusing the West of colonialism if they try to do something about it. -- If this plan worked, Russia actually would not need a strong army. Maybe much later, but that would already be a problem of Putin's successor.
> But [the USSR] was apparently able to keep its military from being eaten from the inside by corruption
I don't think we should assume that at all. The full scale of the corruption and incompetence in contemporary Russia's military only came to light once they directly attacked a nation with serious military and financial backing by Western nations, right from the start. When was the last time the USSR tried this?
It's also well known that the political system of the USSR was deeply corrupt, from the top right down to the bottom. Why would their military have been spared from this corruption?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords
Wikipedia mentions that since the beginning there was a disagreement about radio jamming. USA argued that foreign radio contributes to the declared purpose of "mutual understanding". Soviet union said nope, criticism of socialism is a weapon that sovereign countries are allowed to defend against.
That was the concern in 1975, makes me think how the logic extends to internet communication today. At the end, USA did their radio broadcast anyway, and Soviet Union did their jamming; and recently Russia is doing their information warfare, and the West starts to respond by banning some sources.
Here's an additional reason to make some effort to trim back the number of post: This page, which currently has 930 posts, is virtually impossible to use on mobile. Takes more than 60 secs to load. Glitches in weird ways. Would not let me put up a brief post -- just kept telling me, in red type, that "something went wrong." Mmm, thanks, I'd figured that out actually.
Wrote the above on the computer. Approx. 1 minute later page froze for 30 secs or so. Got a notice that "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." There's also a notable lag when I type into the comment box -- text takes a few seconds to appear. These huge pages seem to be too much for Substack's system.
My page loaded in a couple seconds on a phone over two years old and regular home wifi. Maybe there is data bottlenecking occurring on your device or processor deterioration?
It seems way worse to me on these huge open threads with up to 1000 posts. I can't remember noticing it on hidden threads, which tend to have around 200 posts. But I'm not sure of that. Do you think it's true?
I was in an Uber and not on Wifi. But I was not having trouble accessing other sites. Also, I just added to the post you're responding to: this page froze, while loaded on a computer in a building with good wifi, and I got a notice that page was using significant energy and Mac would perform better if I closed it. I don't know how fast the wifi is where I am now, but we tested it a while ago and upgraded to the fastest offered in our area, since multiple people in the building are using it for Zoom sessions, often at the same time. I never have any trouble with the wifi here, and I'm on the computer a lot. This page is the only one I can think of that I have trouble with. I have gotten the Mac "this page is using significant energy" notice multiple times on one of these huge comment pages -- I'd say at least half a dozen times in the last few months.
Does anyone have any good advice on buying cars around the $8k-$10k price point?
I know the used car market is kind of crazy right now, and I'm thankful I won't need to buy a car for 4-6 months, but I've been driving 15 year old Honda Civics for the past 10 years until they literally die on the side of the road. These typically cost $3-$4k. I've saved up ~$10k for a new car and it's hard to see anything worth the effort. In general, for an extra $5-$7k I feel like the options are to buy 10 year old boring Japanese sedan instead of a 15 year old boring Japanese sedan which...doesn't seem right for almost tripling the amount of money I'm willing to spend. I'm seeing something around the $15-$20k mark that look like a significant step up, and I'm capable of buying that, but that's a lot of money to spend on single item I use for mostly practical reasons. Is this just part of being the only weirdo who only pays cash and never takes auto loans?
Am I missing something? Are there makes and models that are fun or...just feel like a step up from a beater Honda around $10k?
Try Carfax. Gives a degree of transparency that I find useful.
Are you sure you can still buy a 15 year old Honda Civic (without major issues) for $3-4K? The whole used car market is a mess right now.
While old Toyotas and Hondas are good cars, I feel like "just buy an old Corolla/Civic" has become such a meme at this point that those cars are probably overpriced compared to some almost-as-reliable competitors. Consider a Ford/Hyundai/Kia/Mazda/Buick.
Back when I bought used cars, I had excellent luck buying them from high-end luxury car dealerships. The people who trade in cars on new Mercedes, BMWs, etc. tend to have taken good care of their cars, even if old and with high miles. Like virtually all new-car dealers, they sell the lemons wholesale and offer only the best trade-ins on their own lot - to keep up up their own reputation.
Check out your local top-end new car dealerships and consider the cheapest used cars they have on offer. And haggle.
Huh, I've never heard of them wholeselling lemons but it makes a certain amount of sense.
I've seen some fantastic looking deals on old Jaguars but I'm leery because I've also heard that the cars can be moneypits.
Old Jaguars tend to be moneypits even if not lemons. They're designed that way.
I bought mostly Mazdas and Hondas from the Mercedes/BMW/Rolls Royce dealers.
I just bought a 2012 Honda Fit for 6.7k. This is private party. And overpaid for it too, because I'm not great at negotiating. For what it's worth, Fits are known to be fun to drive. People race them! I liked how well it cornered. It doesn't accelerate well but it does handle well.
My perception is that dealers are taking advantage of market craziness to buy very low "well look how many miles it has!" and sell high "all used car prices are up." Similarly, everything on Craigslist is overpriced 30-40%. It's annoying, but you can get much better deals than list price if you hold your ground in negotiations.
Huh, I'll look into that.
Yes, lots of scammers on Craigslist - if you see a too-good-to-be-true deal, beware.
Also for some reason most CL sellers seem to overprice things by like 2x. Many of them will sell for much less if you show up in person and haggle. But unless you're a "car guy" (or gal), you won't know what you're buying.
Better to buy from someone with a reputation to lose. The "lemon" tradeins wholesaled by new-car dealerships end up on independent used car dealer lots. Often those dealers buy wholesale, fix up any problems, then resell. Some of them are actually honest, but you have to be careful. Check out their reputations online. (High-end luxury new car dealers are basically all honest - they wouldn't last in that business if they weren't. Their wealthy customers have zero tolerance for that and related BS - high pressure, etc.)
Also - don't pay "dealer fees" added on after you agree on a price. Shame works on mostly-honest people - "hey - a deal is a deal". If shame doesn't work, you probably don't want to buy from them.
Be careful if you use Craigslist for car shopping. Lots of scams.
I'm not a driver myself, but the impression I get from car reviews is that boring Japanese sedans are reliable, don't break down often, and last well.
The primary reason to buy a 10 year old Civic instead of a 15 year old one (in my opionion) is if you drive for long periods of time, >1 hour. Cars have improved their comfort a lot over the last 20 years.
Also, newer cars tend to have better gas mileage, which may save you money in the long run and reduces the frequency of the inconvenience of stopping at a gas station.
Older cars have better gas mileage... imho. Newer cars have more zip... horse power, with about the same gas mileage.
Hmm, a random spot check doesn't show that: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/23502.shtml vs. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/31186.shtml
Car companies lie about fuel mpg. There was a 1980's honda civic that got ~60 mpg. very light and small engine.
From here; https://www.mpgomatic.com/2007/10/16/honda-civic-gas-mileage-1978-2007/
1984 Honda Civic Coupe 4 cylinder (M5) Manual 51 67
Hmm can't post this?
Those are EPA measurements, not self-reported numbers from the car company.
Also, OP isn't comparing a 1980 Civic to today's Civic, they're comparing the 10 year vs. 15 year Civic.
I'm driving a Honda civic into the ground, that or a Toyota corolla. The honda v-tech engine is more fun... but I don't care that much.
WoollyAEye, after a project I worked on for awhile.
The more I look into it, the more Mazda looks like fun sensible cars. Has it held up alright while you've had it?
Some of the comments about easy jhana make me suspect that some things described as "jhana" are just people pausing to think for the first time in their life.
Ethics question: how evil would it be to develop a payload for a mechanically suitable off-the-shelf remote-control multirotor drone that would enable a remote user to pierce a car or truck tire and render it irreparably leaky?
For numbers, let's say:
* the drone is viably controllable up to a quarter-mile from an off-the-shelf controller station (read: phone or lap, maybe with a radio dongle)
* the drone is not autonomous outside basic flight stability and safety features to other humans, so it has to be guided to a tire and the knife triggered by the user
* the knife can be triggered 4 times per flight
* the drone's battery and knife can be replenished within a minute by the user
* the knife is captive, so it can't hurt anything the drone isn't immediately adjacent to, and magically can't be modified to do otherwise by end users.
* the drone and ground station are readily replaceable for <$10K, so accessible for a small organization or an org with donors, but not a typical individual.
This is prompted by my trying to inhabit the viewpoint of modern dirtbag left activists, such as those who protest by gluing themselves to roads and suchlike.
Factors I can think of offhand:
* This enables grassroots enforcement of no-car, no-truck zones for the anarchistically-inclined
* This makes destruction of property safer for the perpetrator
* This enables wider-scale destruction of property viable for a single user
* The payload designer isn't hard to replace, since the payload is easy to design, but the payload only needs to be designed once and then plans distributed
* Obviously, this makes hit-and-run violence easier and safer, but that rate is already low and dropping, but maybe someone out there is only held back from a spree by having to be present for the attacks in person? If so, why aren't they a sniper on a spree already?
* Once the payload is built, how much harder is making the entire thing autonomous? To the degree of "here's a car-shaped thing, slice the tires"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all car-shaped things in it"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all cars without a badge"?
For your last question, making it fully autonomous would be extremely difficult, because SLAM is hard, and the best current approaches require a lot of power hungry computation (although there is interesting research on bio inspired algorithms for this which radically reduce the power consumption, they're not really in production and also very proprietary). This is not the kind of thing where you can just download a model from HuggingFace and press go. You would probably need quite a hefty drone (think the kind of hexacopters that're currently dropping AT munitions on Russian armor) to be able to support the power budget necessary for the various modeling tasks, which probably pushes the per unit cost over $10k. This would be a large, dedicated engineering effort, probably involving dozens of high skill engineers, and possibly novel research.
Couldn't you have a land based system do the computations and then send commands to the drone? It adds a layer, but that sounds much easier than putting it all on the drone itself.
Then it's not truly autonomous, it's remotely piloted by an automated system. That makes it vulnerable to jamming, signal loss, etc.
>how evil would it be
Fully. Might as well just make the thing explode and kill the driver. It's clearly what you want to do in the long run.
We don't get lots of snipers because sniping is actually quite hard and requires pretty obvious equipment.
This sounds like a lot of effort to automate vandalism. The only people I can think of who would be interested are this bunch:
https://www.tyreextinguishers.com/
Maybe if you're using it for guerrilla warfare in urban conflict, but I can't think of 'not very evil' uses for it outside of that.
Dirtbag left hat firmly in place: sure, the device can only be used for destruction of tires, but the cause is noble: forcing the creation and/or expansion of ICE-free zones is actually a good thing because it forces transition away from greenhouse-gas-producing technologies in some of the regions where they most impact densely-packed human lungs, and act as a proof of concept for other urban cores. It democratizes and accelerates the deployment of urgently needed policies without the overhead of de-facto captured political processes, and it doesn't even get anyone hurt, since it's just destruction of insured and replaceable property.
Whoever developed this would be intensely naive to think it would only be deployed against people they dislike or in favor of causes they support. If this were used at the kind of scale you seem to anticipate, it would be for so many reasons and cause so much general chaos that any environmental message is lost in the fog: "drunk teenagers slash all the tires in neighborhood," "pro-life activists slash all the tires at the abortion clinic, pro-choice activists retaliate by slashing tires in church parking lots," "laid off factory worker slashes all the tires at Earth Day rally," "feuding neighbors slash tires of guests at each others' house parties," "local gang slashes tires of local police force," etc, etc, etc.
So the public response wouldn't be to demand that government "stop X environmental or other policy problem" it would be a demand to "end the tire-slashing machine menace."
So the response it would prompt wouldn't be "reducing use of cars," it would just prompt officials to waste a bunch of resources developing some kind of drone disabling field or something to counter the drones, while simultaneously raising everybody's general distaste for whatever advocacy interest group they blame for having created this thing... and all the while, the tire industry would probably be making record profits, cranking out more and sturdier tires (expending *more* resources, and emitting *more* CO2 and pollutants along the way).
Indiscriminate punishment don't have a great track record at creating willing compliance. At best you get reluctant-to-malignant compliance, and create a lot of resentment, backlash and hardening the opposition. How do you think "rolling coal" trucks came to existence?
"It democratizes and accelerates the deployment of urgently needed policies"
What it is most likely to do is not turn people away from buying Chelsea tractors, it will result in a lot of pissed-off people demanding that whoever does this be thrown in jail for a long stretch, and the authorities acting to give them that.
So you're reinforcing harsh criminal punishment and making your cause even more unpopular at the same time. Plus, there will always be the edge cases where someone needs that big car for mobility issues, or you burst the tyres on a car that was trying to bring someone to hospital, and the like. Dead granny because some activist group punctured the tyres of the car taking her to dialysis or urgent medical treatment is not going to "force the creation and/or expansion of ICE-free zones", whatever those may be.
When you find yourself thinking thoughts like this, it's when you really should start taking the Efficient Market Hypothesis of Morality seriously.
If you find yourself saying "Well, this is a morally terrible thing to do according to 99% of people, but my own personal value system says it's perfectly justified", your next thought shouldn't be "Hoo boy it's marvellous how much more enlightened I am than everybody else", it's "I should really take the views of those other 99% seriously and consider the fact that I might be wrong".
You might also like to consider all the other occasions in history in which someone has managed to convince themselves that a universally-frowned-on action would actually be the right thing to do. Have people like that been a net benefit? Or have they been history's greatest monsters?
The efficient-market hypothesis relies on the idea that if stock X is undervalued, smart people can notice this and buy stock X until it's no longer undervalued.
There's no analogous feedback mechanism in morality - if of smart people "notice" that action X is good when most people think it's bad, there is no reliable way for them to change public opinion.
"I should really take the views of those other 99% seriously and consider the fact that I might be wrong"
Or, if you're still certain you're right, "I should really take the views of those other 99% seriously and consider that they outnumber me hugely and some of them have bigger guns than I do". And more lethal drones. Because Deiseach is definitely right.
If it doesn't get anyone hurt, why do it?
Re: Jhāna skepticism
I just wrote up some of my thoughts here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/can-we-trust-self-reported-mystical
I've spent a lot of time reading and trying to reproduce different experiences, so I've tried to put together a list of heuristics for evaluating reports. I think our default attitude should be skepticism, but that shouldn't keep us from experimenting.
> there are huge social and psychological rewards for believing you’ve reached a special level of spiritual attainment. Enlightenment is the ultimate status symbol. There are an absurd number of Redditors out there doing AMAs about how enlightened they are.
I have read some of those Reddit AMAs, and their descriptions of "enlightenment" do not seem very different from my "normal" (before I had kids). There is nothing wrong with having a huge ego, as long as you do not believe it literally.
I'd be curious to hear how having kids changed your "normal".
Having a huge ego can be devastatingly bad--IMO it's the force behind every great atrocity. Ego (especially ego driven by religion) is what allows people to do evil things while believing it's OK or even good (e.g. Naziism, Catholic sex abuse, 9/11)
I've written about the relationship between religious belief and narcissism in the past: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/religion-as-an-ego-modulator
> I'd be curious to hear how having kids changed your "normal".
Less time to relax and stop worrying about things to do.
The Reddit!enlightened mood easily comes when I can relax on the couch, or take a long walk, with nothing urgent to do. The kids are small, they need something all the time, or they make a lot of noise, or I am too tired to relax properly (get too sleepy instead). Right now one of them entered my room and wants something to eat, haha.
> Having a huge ego can be devastatingly bad
If you believe it. You need to understand that it is not real, and just enjoy the emotions privately.
Hah! I worry about having the same issue if and when I have kids. Hope you manage to find some space for yourself eventually.
> If you believe it. You need to understand that it is not real, and just enjoy the emotions privately.
So I actually thought I could do this. I had a manic ego-inflation episode (LSD-induced), and it felt *so good*. I thought maybe I could indulge in that feeling privately.
Maybe I'm just weak, but it turned me into an asshole. It also made me borderline psychotic. I literally wouldn't hear when people criticized me--my attention would just drift elsewhere. It took years to undo the damage.
The worst part, so far, is when kids are 3-4 years old. Old enough to have strong ideas about what they want, too young for self-control.
Kids 2 and younger are cute, when they are not crying. When they are crying, you go through the usual checklist (diaper? thirsty? need to burp? too warm? too cold? tired?), that usually solves the problem; otherwise, rocking them for some time and then going through the checklist again usually solves the problem. If they want to play with something you cannot give them, they are super easily distracted. They sleep a lot.
Kids 5 and older can be negotiated with. You can set rewards and punishments. You can explain: "We need to do X now, but I promise we will do Y afterwards." They want to be helpful (when they are in the right mood). They can spend an hour playing by themselves, or reading a book, leaving you alone.
But between 3 and 4, that's exactly the "Masha and the Bear" scenario. :D
My younger is currently 4, so I hope it gets much better soon.
Oof! So much to look forward to. You sound like a great dad.
The individual priests who perpetrated the abuse seem to have been in a weird headspace. There's a scene in Spotlight that touches on this (the only one to feature an accused priest)...he says something like "You don't understand, we were helping those boys!"
There's a 60 minutes episode that goes into this more deeply as well--will see if I can dig it up.
Having read a report by a Dublin diocese on sexual abuse in the early days of it becoming known here in Ireland, a lot of the abusers genuinely did not realise that they were doing something wrong. They were paedophiles, or Minor Attracted Persons as I am now supposed to call them, because "paedophile" is a stigmatising term, and they had that same blindness about what they were doing and what the consequences were.
Maybe it was ego, but some of them, for example, did downplay "I only had children sit on my lap, that's harmless" and other instances (they forgot to mention that the lap-sitting involved them getting erections). And a lot of it was in the 60s and 70s where therapists *did* downplay it, that such behaviour could be cured by therapy, so offenders were often sent for a course of treatment, certified that they were 'cured', and then put back into service because the church authorities 'believed the science'.
It's messy and complicated, and heart-breaking and horrible, and I would not recommend you to get your facts from movies, even from a docu-drama, because they go for the 'drama' too and if something makes a good plot point for movie purposes, that is what they will go for over dry boring facts.
I'd be very interested in reading that report! I've been looking for any kind of factual material on the psychological state of pedophile priests. The best I've found is Robert Moore's "Facing the Dragon," which is pretty speculative and very much attempting to defend his own pet theory.
I reviewed Facing the Dragon here if you're interested: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-dragon
Complicated deletion methods with 33% threshholds have the major effect of avoiding transparency. They let you delete anything you want for any reason you want, nobody can understand exactly why their comments were deleted, nobody can meaningfully dispute it, and whether their comments were deleted can depend on circumstances outside their control (for instance, it means that it is now bad for someone if other people post good comments).
If you want to be able to arbitrarily delete comments, it's your blog, so why not just arbitrarily delete comments? (Note that I'm not saying it's necessarily *good* to do so, just that arbitrary+honest is better than arbitrary+dishonest.)
The same goes for "50% bans". All you're doing is pretending that your arbitrary decisiuon is based on numbers. If your policy is to arbitrarily ban people, at least admit it.
I think you're the person who was asking me for standards when I was a moderator at Less Wrong. I actually wanted to give you (if it was you) what you were asking for, but I hadn't figured standards out.
Is there any venue you've found with what you'd consider to be satisfactory explicit standards?
Is there a difference between Scott's deleting posts he thinks are low quality and Scott's arbitrarily deleting posts? I think the latter is just the former dressed up in ugly clothes. Did you decide to write your post objecting to the plan, or did you just arbitrarily put up a post objecting to it?
Or by arbitrary do you mean "random" -- so, for instance, Scott might use coin flips to select the 33% he deletes? Why the hell would he do that when he has the more satisfying option of deleting posts he thinks are low-content, or that don't meet the 2 outta 3 criterion?
Or by arbitrary do you mean that Scott will maybe *feel* like he's applying actual standards, but in fact his choices have nothing to do with standards -- a month from now he would choose an entirely different set of posts to delete? I don't think that's true. I think he'd demonstrate good test-retest reliability. It's not that hard. There are 2 rubrics: 2 outta 3; high content to word ratio. Apply them. Teachers grading things do it all the time.
"50% of a ban" seems non-arbitrary, assuming Scott does in fact ban people when they collect enough fraction-of-a-ban warnings to add up to 100%.
On the other hand, pretending you are banning people arbitrarily when you actually have rules would also be dishonest.
Perhaps he meant 33% on an absolute, and not relative scale, in which case your concern that the rest of us might sadistically start writing original sonnets that compete with Shakespeare so that fewer can get a word in edgewise might be unnecessary.
...although...just in case, maybe I better get out my copy of Wheelock's and make sure I can toss off a learned Cicero quote if I need to.
You're missing the point, which is game theory.
Scott has always had the explicitly stated power to arbitrarily remove comments.
The purpose of the "numbers", however arbitrary, is to get people to consider what they think Scott thinks of as bad posting, and solve for the equilibrium. It matters literally not at all what exact criteria this actually solves for, that the number was arbitrary, or that Scott is the ultimate arbiter. If it makes people change their posting habits, in a good direction, it's a success.
The experiment is to find out, empirically, whether it does actually change the equilibrium at all.
It's the blog equivalent of stack ranking. You throw out the lowest X percent of your employees. Even if that works once, now that you've gotten rid of the bad ones, the next time "lowest X%" may be good employees, and you start throwing out good ones. Furthermore, you create a system where it's in every employee's interest that other employees do poorly.
I suggest that Scott and everyone supporting this idea look up stack ranking.
Also, you're going to end up Goodharting "being in the lowest X percent".
No it aint the blog equiv of stack ranking because (1) Scott's not getting rid of (i.e. banning) people, he's getting rid of posts. (2) Even if this system makes it in our interest that other users put up poor posts, (a) it's also not in our interest, because we want to enjoy reading this open theads & (b) I doubt there's a way we could influence each other to put up poor posts. (3) there's no reason to expect it's going to happen over and over til we're down to a handful of users.
Yeah iterative stack ranking is destructive unless there really are fewer and fewer slots, say in a contracting business, or you are using it to evaluate who move up the ladder into rungs where there are fewer employees.
Or if the quality is just lacking and you need to ditch a bunch of people in the current crop.
Or, which is more common I think, you are continuously hiring and you pretty much need to get rid of a certain number of people every year in order to make room for the new blood. This is kind of typical in sales, I believe. And it doesn't imply that the average quality goes up (and number of employees goes down) every year. The number might be static, growing, or shrinking. For that matter, the average quality might be growing or shrinking, too, depending on whether the incoming people are better or worse than what you've already got.
Yeah when there is a lot of hiring it works well. I was on a project recently where we staffed up from ~100 to ~2000 for a year or two, and we would bring in classes of 20-50 people a week, and a couple weeks later ditch a third of them. And maybe half a year later ditch another third.
Always culling out the chaff and keeping the wheat.
As long as most of what comes in the front door is actually wheat, and not just more chaff!
I think this misunderstands, I don't think it's a curved ranking it's mastery:
"delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be."
In other words, it's comparative to another base, not to itself. It's entirely possible that 0 posts get deleted in the challenge thread if people meet the challenge, which is the entire point.
I was just typing effectively this, although less smart sounding :)
It seems quite obvious to me that this is what is meant, and not committing to throw out a certain number or percentage of posts.
It just sets the quality bar higher, rather than at some minimum viable politeness and content.
Example: If this was a challenge mode open thread, I would be neither offended or particularly surprised if this comment was deleted, as it doesn't really add much.
Aruba: Who has been there recently?
I never have, though I considered going there a year ago, but dropped the idea because flights were hotels were so expensive.
I just checked again today, and prices are much lower: $400 round trip flights from the DC area where I live, and as low as $80/night for a decent hotel. This is for a February trip.
What happened? Was Aruba abnormally expensive a year ago, or is it abnormally cheap now?
Is February the off-season? This site says the high season is December to April:
https://www.frommers.com/destinations/aruba/planning-a-trip/when-to-go
"Roughly speaking, the island's high season runs from mid-December to mid-April. During this period, hotels charge their highest prices, and you'll need to reserve a room well in advance -- months in advance if you want to bask on the beach over Christmas or in the depths of February."
But this site says cheap flights are in February:
https://www.kayak.com/flight-routes/United-States-US0/Aruba-AW0
"What month is the cheapest to go to Aruba?
High season is considered to be July and August. The cheapest month to fly to Aruba is February."
So maybe the flights are cheap in February 2023 if you are booking now? Another site seems to suggest that, although it's talking about booking flights to Europe:
"The sweet spot for the best deals, according to the data, is about four months in advance."
Does anyone have the link to Deiseach's Rings of Power season finale review?
It's on the October Open Thread 245 (October 9th)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-245/comment/9731208
Thank you!
I am now intrigued as to whether you want to agree or vehemently disagree with my views on that 😀
I gave up watching after episode 4 or 5 so I agree with your views on this & I'm using your reviews as a more entertaining way to keep track of the show.
I find this reviewer very entertaining and I agree with most of his points, but I should warn for a lot of swearing and harsh language. He's done a set of reviews on Rings of Power and he's not a fan, to put it mildly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYgcSEW6nPc
Steven's awareness recursion method reminds me of the start of Tolle's book The Power of Now:
<<“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with.“ ”Maybe,“ I thought, ”only one of them is real." I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.>>
I've seen people argue that the "necessary" in true, kind, necessary isn't necessary, but I've got a meaning for it.
Necessary can be interpreted to mean not redundant. If the commenter is saying the same thing a lot of times (an ill-defined standard), the new comment isn't contributing to the discussion.
Scott has explained the meaning of all three gates in more detail here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
I would tend to interpret "necessary" as meaning the conversation is otherwise going off the rails, and you happen to have the information that can save it, because of some specialized background et cetera. But then I would add a fourth category, "interesting," for stuff that isn't "necessary" but which is worth the sharing. To preserve the rule exactly, instead of going to the onerous 3 out of 4, or the decadent slacker grade-inflation 2 out of 4, you would need to hit 2-2/3 of the 4 categories, raising the interesting possibility of hitting a 2/3 in some category ("mostly but not entirely kind"), or even partial-crediting your way through by getting solid 1s in two categories and a weasely 1/3 in the other two ("not really very kind, but not quite vicious" plus "a distortion of truth, but not an outright lie").
It would have been better for me to say "Necessary can be interpreted to include not redundant".
"Interesting" is always welcome, sort of by definition in this crowd, but perhaps it should be a top-level comment if it's not connected to previous discussion.
I don't know whether someone could or should get into trouble if they kept dropping interesting but irrelevant things into existing discussions.
Did you know that bees play with balls?
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-have-the-first-evidence-of-bumble-bees-playing-with-toys-and-its-utterly-adorable
Interesting but tangential is about three parts of why I read comments at all. Most of the time, the on-point argument is too predictable and insufficiently novel to be worth it.
I take "necessary" to be like a visit to the dentist. Nobody is going to enjoy this, but it has to be done or else worse outcomes will be the result if the decay is left unattended.
If someone is stating something that is incorrect, then the correct information is both true and necessary. Sometimes there may not be a kind way to phrase it, especially in more subjective matters like "I feel" or "I believe" such and such a thing, particularly when it's "I am convinced Those Guys are all moustache-twirling villains".
Scott has managed to more or less corral us into not responding with "You effin' idiot, what a moron, I can't believe someone so cretinous even has the spare brain capacity for breathing", so the Reign of Terror clearly is a success there 😀
But sometimes it has to be said that "You're wrong" and sometimes there is no soft way of doing it. Now lie back in the chair while I stick all these metal implements in your mouth.
I think it's at least possible to be polite when you're telling someone they're wrong.
Or entertaining:
https://youtu.be/nFiLIsMieiQ
Oh indeed, but sometimes there's no way to be soft when telling someone "no, this is incorrect".
That's why it's a minimum two out of three of "true, kind, necessary": sometimes it is true and necessary but you can't be kind (you should *try* to be, I'm not excusing just tearing into someone without any effort to be understanding or charitable, but sometimes it is "this is flat-out wrong, I can demonstrate that it's wrong, and if you continue to insist it is correct then there is a problem there").
I would probably list the facts, possibly starting with "no", but nothing stronger.
I wouldn't make claims about my ability, and I absolutely wouldn't talk about the person possibly continuing to disagree with me.
On the one hand, I've hardly ever been banned from anything. On the other, I don't think there'd be a campaign in my favor to bring me back if I were banned.
To be fair, you are very likely a much nicer and more agreeable person than me (sometimes when I get going, Genghis Khan would be nicer and more agreeable).
How well does the colloquial usage of things being 'meant to be' (e.g. "my partner and I were just meant to be") square with the deterministic view of the universe? For some reason they feel like two different things, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why. Is it just that the former usually presents as a non-scientific folk belief, while the latter is espoused by very smart people who've spent years thinking about it?
I think tons of language we use every day makes little sense if you view it through such a strict deterministic lens. But FWIW 'meant to be' to me is a description of a quality, not so much the outcome. It's like, these things are so well matched in their nature, or this outcome was so over-determined, that even if we ran this universe simulation a million times with different seeds we would keep getting this result.
I would guess that the most common actual usage of that kind of phrasing is meant to express that there was some reason for what happened that passeth the understanding of the participants. For example, in the case of the partner, perhaps the intellectual judgment was that this potential mate was unsuitable ("Can't stand his politics!" "I don't like blondes, too shallow!")....but some other nonconscious factor -- unconscious drives, sensory impressions, pressure from friends or family, et cetera -- intervened to impel the association until the conscious reasoning "caught up," realized its error, and became in harmony with the non-conscious.
In that particular arena, it doesn't seem hard to credit. Nature has hardly been relying on bulgy prefrontal cortex ratiocination for mate selection these past 40,000 years -- she has an armory of tools to get it done, including wired-in or early-learned preferences for certain physical forms, movement, behavior and speech patterns, probably pheromones as well. There are probably plent of instincts and drives below the level of conscious reasoning that can carry away our initial conscious reasoning in other areas, and which we think (later) turn out to be superior to it.
But this is indeed quite different from a feeling that the universe is deterministic, because there is still the impression that a choice is being made -- it's just not being made by the conscious logical deliberataion of the chooser, at least initially. It's more the kind of choice a dog might (at least seem to) make when torn between a tasty morsel of food and a thrown frisbee, which we don't attribute to a logical assessment (by the dog) of the utility gained either way. It's what people mean by "listening to your gut," more a form of to what interior agent do you trust the decision, then what is the decision in detail.
Part of the reason people may feel they are highly distinct is that I think a colloquial understanding of determinism would not include a lot of interior conflict. I mean, why would there be the sensation of interior conflict, if everything is predetermined from 13 billion years ago? What would be the point of such weird useless and wasteful epiphenomena? Why would it ever evolve? So I think people associate the interior feeling of conflict and a difficult decision with a non-deterministic view. Since a "meant to be" decision is sort of by definition on that is initially difficult (the implication, if my interpretation of the usage is correct, is that at least initially heart and head are in disagreement), then a "meant to be" decision is in conflict with phiosophical determinism.
Yes. You are comparing comforting stories about the world people generally use, with considered attempts to actually understand the world.
I think "meant to be" generally connotes some kind of benevolent intelligence causing the meant-to-be thing, whereas "pre-determined" is compatible with a non-benevolent, unintelligent cause.
Not well at all, but then again I don't believe in things like soulmates or the one true love or Mr/Ms Right.
You find someone who matches well with you and you with them, and you forget all the others that didn't match as well. But mostly I think it's just a commonplace saying about how you feel that things worked out really well.
"Meant to be" in that case has a connation of a benevolent universe.
A disastrous relationship could be just as fated one way and another, but wouldn't normally be described as meant to be.
I notice that "computers" tend to be associated with "math"...but many of the most common pitfalls for the tech-illiterate stem from, well, illiteracy rather than innumeracy. If you can't spell well, search won't work well*; if you're sloppy at composing consistent strings, that just compounds the problem. I suppose it's true that in many regards, the architecture of "how computers think" is math-based, and so that's a more useful lens through which to conceptualize them...the sort of way that I get frustrated by so-called natural language model search algorithms, because I'm used to phrasing queries in bit-comprehensibe ways, regex, etc. (C.f. search apps searching for what it assumes you *really* meant to search for, rather than the actual term as entered.)
But I wonder if it'd be more efficaceous for raising the tech savviness waterline to focus on wordcelling rather than shaperotating. At least, for the median user who doesn't want to think about how computers work, they just want them __to work__. (Sometimes I wonder if this is the real secret behind Apple's historical success, realizing sooner than others who the actual median user was/could be.)
*a particular bother for me working in grocery - it's sometimes embarrassing seeing a no-hits search left open, and boggling at how coworkers or customers think <mildly ethnic food> is spelled...but they can identify the package on sight, no problem.
"But I wonder if it'd be more efficaceous for raising the tech savviness waterline to focus on wordcelling rather than shaperotating."
No, that would only be dodging the issue, essentially by definition. Tech savviness *is the same thing as* skill at shape rotating.
I think the problem most people have with computers is not so much about "math" but symbolic logic and logic generally. They are bad at if-then statements and parsing them in natural, or unnatural language.
And get more complicated than that and they totally lose it unless they have past experience with programming, symbolic logic, or say reading board game rules or legal documetns or other logically heavy things.
So many errors and problems with computers are just about nested basic logic. If x then y, but not if z. If z instead do if x then y', unless q pertains, then instead do if x then y''.
Give that in written or in schematic form to most people and they have little idea how to parse it.
It's very, very rare for anybody to actually read anything, especially people whose job depends on reading. Where "reading" means (1) "looking at the letters shown and correctly matching them up to a word in a language you know" but not (2) "pointing your eyes at some letters and getting a feeling about what they probably mean".
This is why it's so hard to proofread your own work. Once your brain knows what a sentence is supposed to say, you switch from (1) to (2) and it's very hard to switch back. Once somebody knows what's in a package of food, they're in mode (2) and the actual spelling of the words on the package doesn't exist for them. It's just shapes.
I'm also convinced that the more literate somebody is, the more time they spend in mode (2). It's just a brain hack that makes you a more efficient reader. And very literate people need to be the most efficient readers.
Intuitively (from my knowledge/understanding of it as well as my personal experience of the inside view), I feel like people with ASD, of otherwise equal intelligence, might be better at 1, and possibly have a harder time with 2?
I tend to be very good at spelling (in principle, not counting incidents of butterfingers on phone screen) and don't find it as difficult as others seem to proofread my own work (borne out by results).
Otoh, I am a relatively slow reader by default - if I want to read quickly, I to some extent need to force myself to "ignore the details" and only take in larger units of meaning. It takes a lot more effort; the difference is spent on ignoring the lower levels, not perceiving the higher ones.
So "the actual spelling of the words on the package" always noticeably exists for me.
(Btw, when I think of words - not the concept the words point towards, although the word is linked up to the concept - they generally appear as big letters correctly spelt out in my mind)
The efficient thing is to solve the problem on the technology side, rather than the user side. Id est, stop requiring people to get their search terms correct on the first shot. This is silly, and not how humans communicate at all. The computer should be capable of having a short "conversation" (printed or spoken) with the human user:
Search Engine: "Here's what your search produced. Does this look right?"
Human: "Um...no...I was expecting an image somewhere in the results of a package of food I would recognize."
SE: "OK, would you rather search by describing the image of that package?"
Hum: "Sure! That sounds like a good idea. Let's see....I think it's white and the seaweed stuff on the cover is green."
SE: "Is the package bigger than a breadbox?"
Hum: "No, smaller."
SE: "Is there lettering on top of the picture?"
Hum: "Yeah, but I can't read it."
SE: "Does it look something like this?" [shows example of hiragana]
Hum: "Yes!"
SE: "Here are some images of Japanese seaweed salads that come in a white box. Do any of these look close to what you want?"
...and so on. Humans describe a search object to other humans in a conversation, in which questions and answers go back and forth until the meaning is clear. Nobody would dream of giving complex directions to another human being in one long perfectly formed paragraph, with zero questions needing to be answered.
I'm a damn retired software engineer, and I would walk away after the first failed search.
Google does approximate searches. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't.
It should be very feasible to have a search on a category of product and a description of the package, but harder to keep the information about where it used to be in the store.
The idea is successive approximation, which arrives at a precise result by iteration, and the iteration is crucial to the accuracy of the result. It's the verbal equivalent to Newton's root-finding method.
My God, that's a totally accurate portrayal of most of my customer-question interactions. They're looking for the thing, you know, the little chocolate about yea big, with the stripes on the package, squarish, sort of like a Kit-Kat, and it used to be kept right here...what's it called, what ingredients does it have besides chocolate? Fuck if they know, so impossible to search for algorithmically. But refining-via-dialogue usually jogs one or both people's memories eventually.
I would absolutely give up a chunk of my paycheck to automate this process away to a 2022 version of Ask Jeeves. Pretty sure the company would pay seven figures if someone came up with "Grocery Google", too. (We're pretty opposed to efficiency-through-technology improvements, because the company believes customers value interacting with a human over actual results, but that principle doesn't extend to infinity...if your actual workers can't look up products either, then it's A Problem Worth Solving.)
From my fleeting time working in a shop, I'm still proud of being able to identify that a child was asking for a particular new seasonal bar of chocolate, only due to the serendipity that I had seen the new branding TV ad featuring Mr Cadbury's Parrot 😁
Yes. I have actually used this slightly in an application and it seems a strong approach, one which I am always surprised I don't see more often. People take very naturally to any kind of dialogue much better than a stringent requirement that they formulate a query or command precisely in one shot. It's just not the way we think.
Certainly controlling the "spread" of the conversation can be a challenge, for a robot, as is having the robot ask productive questions that vary with context. You have to have a good way to represent states of partial knowledge, too, and figure out how to evolve from one to the other. But I'm still guessing it's easier to make headway on those problems than it is to retrain the human species to think like a calculator, in precise 32-bit FLOPs.
"Nobody would dream of giving complex directions to another human being in one long perfectly formed paragraph, with zero questions needing to be answered."
...they would, in at least one situation I can imagine. And that situation happens a lot. It happens whenever someone gives an order and expects that order executed the same way, many times (anywhere from three times to several million). It might even happen so routinely that you don't even notice. Any time you go to a fast food joint and order a "number one combo", you're typically not going to enter into a heavy interactive session with the provider; you just press the button and wait.
Which is to say that that "place an order, press the go button, then forget about it" mentality is probably getting into things like searches (which could indeed use more interactivity) because search is being implemented by a programmer who started as a run-and-forget problem solver.
It might even be that college training by and large stresses this, which is why *any* programmer you assign a task is likely to produce something you could operate with a non-interactive command; it's just how we're trained to approach programming. Any problem worth solving, is worth solving millions of times, automatically, the same way.
I've watched just that kind of interaction, because this has always been a bit of an interesting of mine, and I don't think that's right. Even ordering a fast food meal, there's a ton of slight variation that goes on to clarify things. Unless you are exceedingly experienced, go to the same place at the same time, and order exactly the same thing from the same servatrix, there's usually a bunch of rapid back and forth. "What would you like? Oh, you order here, pick up there? OK. Uh...I think I'll have the #1. Excuse me? I said, the #1. OK, do you want to make a meal of it? What's in a meal? Fries and a drink. What size drink? Medium. How big is a medium? [shows cup] Yeah OK." I've seen very few people just rap out an order precisely and have it received without the slightest comment or question.
And that is, indeed, one of the most stereotyped of possible interactions, with a very restricted choice set and very clear (by design) ways to specify the choice. In almost any other human interaction, it usually takes 10-90 seconds of rapid back and forth to transfer the information adequately. I mean, just try telling your spouse you want anything more complicated than a jug of milk[1] from the store without at least one back-and-forth. It's amazing how frequently we do this, how exceedingly rare it is for information to pass in person without an exchange.
We can guess this is way more efficient for humans, because we prefer it so strongly when the stakes for a clear comunication rise. For really important decision, we always want to all be in the same room, facing each other, and having a conversation. An e-mail memo is never considered adequate.
------------------------
[1] Whole or skim? I think also the organic might be on sale, do you want me to get that if they have it? Now I think of it, it's always more expensive at that store, just get a quart and I'll pick up a gallon on Thursday from Costco.
In fact, I've had this conversation countless times:
ME: I'd like a FastBurger, small fries, and a small diet coke, to go.
THEM: OK, FastBurger. Fries with that?
Me: Yes, small fries.
THEM: Soda:
ME: Yes, small diet coke.
THEM: For here or to go?
ME: TO FUCKING GO LIKE I SAID [I don't actually do this]
Sometime scripts gonna script.
It is true that scripts like that are annoying, but on the other hand you will get customers who argue about "I ordered the large fries!" (they didn't) or "This is the wrong soda!" (but you asked for regular not diet Coke) or "I specifically asked for the McGigaTriple burger, not the GiantDoublePatty!" (no, you said GiantDoublePatty).
So you have to check every step of the way or else someone is going to hold up the line arguing and yelling about how you screwed up their order.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other: for every mindless drone on the other side of the counter, there's an idiot customer who will have a screaming match about 'I expressly asked for *six* sugars and you only put *five* into my quadruple espresso".
I've had this kind of training when doing the course for receptionist/admin assistant work; when you take a call, you repeat everything back to the person on the other end of the line to be sure you are getting it down accurately and so they can correct any mistake you or they made. So it's "Just let me get this clear: you are Mr. Brown calling for Ms. Green about the 11:30 a.m. meeting on Wednesday 25th and you want to change from the large conference room on the third floor to the small meeting room on the ground floor, is that right?".
Yes, it makes you sound like an idiot, but it would be even worse if Mr. Brown turns up on Wednesday and is waiting in the first floor room while Ms. Green is waiting in the third floor room, and you *will* get it in the ear from the aggrieved parties.
Ha ha yes I've had that experience myself. I think of it as an impedance mismatch which generates a massive SWR.
I can't really find much to disagree with here. (Just the fast food interaction/non ratio - I think that's just our respective experiences.) I also think the above is consistent with my comment. I agree there are a lot of high-interaction requests, and I'll also agree that I think that needs to be a feature in various apps, including search. All I wanted to say above is that I think there's a "order and forget" mentality we're up against.
I'm not a military guy, but I imagine there are ops in there where you want it a certain way, every time, don't sit there and ask for clarification, or else the enemy will get inside your OODA loop. The catch is that such orders are low-level and simple, like "fire a shell at $grid". Higher-level commands like a mission briefing will naturally involve a lot of questions.
So, two classes of technical requests.
I'm thinking this happens mostly with procedures and checklists, like when you start up an airplane, which are weird in the sense that the checklist itself is mindless and precise, something you have to memorize until you have it cold, but what you do if something doesn't go right on the checklist is much more free-form and undetermined -- it's a "stop and think" moment -- which is presumably why the whole shebang isn't turned over to the computer. I wonder if anyone has added a "checklist minder" program, which would just read off the checklist and ask the operator to say "yeah OK next/ whoopsis need a moment here" to each step? That seems like low-hanging fruit for a critical application.
There's two separate problems to be solved here.
One is for casual users of ubiquitous tech to be more proficient at basic use cases. You're probably right that an improved baseline of functional literacy would help here, but you can also make progress through improved interface design (c.f. your mention of Apple's success) and just by generational turnover as today's kids who grew up with smartphones and tablets grow up into tomorrow's adults.
The other problem is enabling more people to progress further along the spectrum from casual users to power users. This is where math and logic becomes a big deal, as you need to be able to reason about what the computer is doing (at least at a very high level) in order to do stuff like nontrivial Excel formulas or basic scripting.
What defines a power user?
A power user is someone who has a fit when the user interface changes, because their use of the tool is suddenly slowed down to the speed of a brand new user, and their favorite (but arcane) options are no longer available.
I'm skeptical of the generational change narrative, just because it clashes so frequently with actual lived experience...hard to properly quantify, I suppose (is there a standardized exam of compsci skill, outside of academia?). But the actual young people I interact with on the regular, the so-called "Digital Natives" that supposedly grew up on smartphones and tablets and stuff...they're basically just as helpless as Boomers or whoever, when it comes to doing stuff on a Real Computer. Strip away even a little of the Apple-type streamlining, and they have no clue what's going on. It keeps ending up on me, self-admitted luddite Millennial, to "fix" people's computers, compose coherent word documents, make basic spreadsheets, etc.
(Paradoxically, of course, me being totally helpless with smartphones, tablets, and touchscreens makes it look like I'm less handy with computers than my younger cohorts...since that's increasingly what the definition of "computer" means to more and more people.)
So there's certainly an argument for "improving" interface design to make everything that customer-oriented...after all, as long as things Actually work, does it matter what goes on under the hood? I think it does though...there are tradeoffs to that sort of design, which I think start to impose design limitations that hobble possibility-space. Used to have a great article about this - it also referenced the casual-vs-poweruser divide...I can picture the infographics in my head, but don't know any appropriate search keywords, how ironic. The elitist phrasing would be that "dumbing down" UIs trades off against utility for powerusers, which is maybe not made up for by increased use at the other end of spectrum. I think the Big Solution was to attempt design which incorporates both sets of needs, and give people the option of effectively toggling Advanced Mode or whatever. Instead of the sorta paternalistic design choice of making such toggles extremely difficult to find/access, so that the children can't accidentally hurt themselves.
Regarding needing to understand computer thinking - I feel like there was a road not taken somewhere in the tech tree, where we coulda doubled down more on stylus and visual-language type stuff. Kids might be useless with Word/Excel, but they're perfectly capable of __drawing a spreadsheet on paper__, or otherwise illustrating ideas that are harder to put into just-words. Streamlining towards that vision woulda produced different tech than we see today. I wonder why it didn't happen.
My impression of the biggest generational shift is that younger programmers are more used to constructing applications by putting together much more high-level blocks. There's a library that does this, or a class someone else wrote, or I could send the output from this app to this other one. An older generation would be dissatisfied with the inefficiency and build stuff at a lower level. On the one hand, the kids get big complex tasks done much faster. ("Look! I can build a web server in about 2 minutes! Takes 10 Gb when it loads and is as fast as Apache on a Pentium 90, but it took very little human time.") There's defiitely something to be said for this, particularly when programmer time is expensive.
On the other it probably contributes to the fantastic resource demands of modern software (e.g. the ridiculous slowness of the Substack comment code, which is doing something pretty trivial, but probably with 15,000 lines of script because of how it was built out of large high level blocks).
At some point you probably do miss some of the core insight you get from knowing how to do stuff at a lower level -- but now I start to sound like the fossils around when I was young who sniffed that if you didn't know how to write your I/O routine in assembly you were just a poser.
"is as fast as Apache on a Pentium 90"
Oh Carl, you really know how to hit 'em where it hurts 😁
I don't think generational change will help as much as you think, because the digital interface designs don't remain static. They are constantly being "improved" in ways that make them impenetrable to the oldest and least adept users. Twenty or more years ago, when my mother, who'd done fine with DOS, couldn't adapt to Windows beyond 3.1, let alone to a Mac - too different to what she'd learned - I was annoyed with some changes, but could easily figure out anything.
Now I dread every update to my phone. Each user interface change functions as a denial of service attack, with a sometimes major research effort required to discover how to do things I was able to do on the previous day. This is in spite of working as a software developer until the day I retired. Updates to my computers are generally less disabling, but essentially never make the computer easier or more pleasant to use.
My prediction is that some of the cute young digital natives who regard cell phone UIs as easy and obvious today, will one day be confused, baffled, and angry at software changes their grandchildren will find trivial. And if I'm still around to see it, I'll probably express my schadenfreude in unkind ways, at least to any who had, in youth, personally insisted to me that things I found difficult were easy and obvious.
Well, I learned to use terminal (more correctly, the command line, aka the shell) to do many tasks before anyone coded up slower ways to do them requiring multiple mouse clicks.
If *I* am launching the console or terminal to do a standard task then it's a design *success*. I haven't had to learn a new way to do whatever-it-is every 2 to 5 years. I can almost certainly do the task much faster from the command line. And if I want to do it from a script, I don't have to learn an entirely different way to do a task I already know how to do by hand.
This is even more true in the modern era, when macs, at least, display most user interface elements _only_ when you hover the mouse in the location where those elements will appear.
Yeah I'm kind of amused by the idea that nobody needs scripting. I would completely sink if I couldn't fire off a little pipe or, if it gets a little hairier (or I want to reuse it later) a Perl script. And it is indeed a God-send that the basic tools here -- e.g. grep, sed, awk, find -- haven't really changed in 40 years.
Does anyone know /
have recommendations for private prediction markets software? Looking for something I can trial with internal teams at the office.
Almost all modern TV series I can think of do parallel plot threads, i.e. Two Lines, No Waiting or more https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting. Is there a modern, popular TV series where we just follow one single protagonist the entire series?
Dr Who mostly does this, unless the party gets split
I suspect you'd find any recurring TV show with a Lone Ranger-style premise (main character goes from town to town solving problems) would avoid the A-story / B-story trope: Quantum Leap, the old Incredible Hulk live-action show, The Fugitive, etc.
I know these are old shows. I don't really watch broadcast TV, so I'm unfamiliar with current offerings. My impression is that this style of show has fallen out of vogue.
Even those shows had multiple plot lines, even if they were light. Quantum leap usually had a few threads in each episode, maybe a bit in the future with Al, and bits of longer plots like the Evil Leaper. The Mandalorian would be a modern example.
I think there are two things at work:
1) It allows you to boarden your audience which is generally the name of the game in TV. If you have an A story and B story each week, there is more chance there are plot elements and characters a viewer likes, and you just want to be good enough for them to come back.
2) It allows for lower quality writing because a little bit of tension and suspense and drama is built in from the bare structure of skipping back and forth. So you want to know what happens in A? Well we got to B now, and then once you want to know what happens in B we go back to A. This way you can keep people very engaged.
Writing something that is enaging throughout on just a single story and character through rises and falls in tension is a lot harder, and so rarer.
As for 2:
I think it was while watching an episode of Rings of Power the other day that I noticed myself noticing how unnecessarily & distractingly often they cut between the various plot strands. It was mildly infuriating, and while I didn't have these exact thoughts, it seemed clearly designed to squeeze some extra tensiom from otherwise fairly bland scenes.
(Note: I haven't finished it yet, and would say that I went into the series with largely suspended judgment, and it largely remains suspended - I just noticed this one particular thing.)
It's not just judgement that should be suspended, it's the entire thing - by its thumbs.
I do think they thought that jumping around all over the place would lend suspense. What it meant in practice was that just as something looked like it might be going to happen with plotline A, they jumped to B (quite often nothing but the Harfoots prancing around) and then off to C and then away to D.
So you had an entire hour or so of "nothing much happened, because it happened all over the map". That saying about "too many cooks spoil the broth" comes to mind, because it had two producers, thirteen executive producers and only seven writers, five of whom were also executive producers (I'm counting the two showrunners here as well). Three directors, one of whom was also an executive producer.
Do you *need* thirteen executive producers, or is this just a Hollywood way of giving status?
Fleabag, maybe? It's been a while since I watched it but I suspect that every scene featured the protagonist.
The Queen's Gambit was pretty focused on the main character.
Anyone know a great model of flip phone? I'd like to de-smartphone for attention and time management reasons, but ideally retain decent photo and emoji texting abilities, maybe navigation too.
It's surprisingly hard to find a decent dumb phone.
Have you tried putting your smart phone into grayscale mode? I did this and it made a big difference in how interesting I found my phone while still being useable.
While people are thinking about this - my housemate would love to have a real dumb cell phone. No Android OS. No software updates (= UIs that change). A real manual describing how to use it, for things like text messages (if it supports them) rather than a guessing game relying on memories of previous similar phones. Her 3G phone became unusable due to standards change, and there was no similar/compatible replacement. She's stuck with a 4G "flip phone" that's basically a crippled Android smartphone, and we've only managed to decode a subset of its quite limited functions.
I'm in the same position as your housemate. I am getting a Kyocera DuraXA, since that was the closest to what I was looking for of everything available. I don't yet know if it will work out for me.
I get the impression that there really are no good options like that left anymore.
I find it strange no one asked it before (or at least I missed it if someone did) but isn't jhana basiclly just extreme mastubration?
You have found the true meaning of the one hand "clapping".
When I tried Steven's technique it did feel that way, at least for the few seconds I could hold the feeling without losing focus.
My friend is developing a new predictions market platform that's more point and shoot than the usual. His first product is basically a March Madness bracket for the Senate elections on Tuesday. He's looking for early users and I figure this might be a good group. Feel free to join my league or better yet, make your own! It's still in beta so it's a little buggy but it should work.
https://clickandpredict.com/my-leagues/9aa0044f-1aa3-45bd-93b1-e4e69887e1ec
Is it possible to be fine for years and then suddenly have ADHD?
I really don't remember having problems as a kid into high school but now find it absolutely impossible to focus as a college sophomore.
Nobody actually knows, but I think not.
As other commenters pointed out, ADHD is not that bad in a supporting environment that someone organized for you and doesn't let you forget about things.
There are some surprisingly specific signs of ADHD, like losing track of what you were supposed to do in a room* or having a constant urge to interrupt people and finish their sentences for them, because they're talking too slowly. Consider if you had those in childhood.
* - there was once a twitter thread where some guy insisted that "finding yourself in the kitchen, not knowing what you are doing" is not an ADHD thing, just normal human experience, and people should stop pathologizing everything. Turns out he parsed that in some kind of existential melancholy way, instead of literally going to the kitchen then forgetting why.
I'm on team twitter guy - sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect which as far as I know is a normal human experience
As others have noted you may have just shredded your attention span. If so, You can get it back.
There’s a nice (and free!) coursera course called Learning How to Learn which can give you some practical techniques
Of course if you do have a disorder this may be less helpful
I doubt it's possible to be totally fine, but it's possible that your environment/circumstances were masking ADHD symptoms to some extent. Nobody ever suspected I had ADHD because I was fairly quiet (inattentive type), but basically smart enough to coast through school with minimal amounts of studying. Sometimes I got in minor trouble for not doing homework or whatever, but then I aced the class, so it didn't matter. My parents knew I wouldn't do chores, or do them badly, so eventually they stopped asking. It wasn't until I'd struggled with adulthood for years that I finally put the pieces of the puzzle together in the right order.
Do you wake up tired often? Have you ever gotten a sleep lab? If you have sleep apnea, that can cause very similar symptoms as ADHD (some believe there can even be causality between the two).
You have likely shredded your attention span through the consumption of social media and short form content. Try abstaining for one month.
Has the environment changed? Can you do the things you love when your phone is off and you are in a library or something?
Do you have trouble concentrating when you are doing things you enjoy?
For those who are interested in prediction markets this year, the PredictIt market for Nevada was an absolutely brain melting 80/20 for Adam Laxalt. Until Jon Ralston posted his Nevada predictions roughly 30 minutes ago after which point there was a swing of 25% to 67/33. This swing is ongoing. And anyone who actually followed the ballot updates for Nevada saw this coming a mile away. But when you want something to be a specific way you interpret the ambiguous data in your favor. Motivated reasoning.
It looks like a huge update, but it corresponds to a change in the result slightly more often than one in every ten cases, which doesn't seem like such a big deal.
Does anyone know if there are guidelines for what is meant by low quality posts/can provide a good summary of what “high quality” posts have? ls the metric strictly insightful thoughts here, or is there some level of clarity/grammar, logic, ethos, or demonstration of knowledge that is being accounted for? Do expressions of sheer goodwill or enthusiasm for a topic make the cut?
Presumably the highest quality comments include the comments that show up as Highlights from the comments. So, new information with at least decent prose.
If you look at the comments that have got people banned, it is generally obnoxiousness that is the relevant variable. Dumb, confusing, boring, illogical? People just skip over things that appear that way to them.
Normal comment standard is "at least 2 of True, Kind, and Necessary". If you want to be "high quality", try and hit all three - even criticisms can usually be phrased kindly.
There's a somewhat hidden comment policy here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
> I feel like these standards are pretty lax. In fact, they probably permit most spam – this spambot saying “this is a wonderful piece of writing” is both true and kind – so I’ll inelegantly add a kludge that spam is also unacceptable (I have it on good authority that this was in the original Sufi saying used by the Buddha as well). Remember that before you worry this is too unduly restrictive.
So sheer expressions of goodwill and enthusiasm are accepted as long as you don't spam it.
I recently started started re-reading Gödel-Escher-Bach after about 3 years. I never finished it though, I only read approx. 3/4 of the book. The reason being that, to my experience, the book has an immense amount of content to the point that I really start to get lost. I mean you get to a point in which you wonder what the book is even about, but in a beautiful way. Has anyone here had a similar experience? Is there another way to approach this book?
I've read it two or three times. I'm torn between the material being a really important metaphor for... something and that it's good technical stuff which is just about mathematics.
I'm very fond of the chapter about the SubjuncTV.
Would it be annoying ton point out that I read it all the way through when I was 17?
I read it in three legs (with a lot of rereading each time), in 2011, 2014 and 2019. The first two times, my interest in reading the book fizzled out because I felt I'm not getting enough from it, and when I continued later I felt like I have more of the needed background knowledge.
This book is about intelligence. It's generally said to be about artificial intelligence, but I don't see the point in making the distinction - the book is more useful as a mathematical/philosophical examination of the concepts that make intelligence work, whether human, animal, artificial, alien or purely platonic, than as a roadmap for future development of AI.
I believe it's written the way it is, in a convoluted, expansive, self-referential manner, for two reasons:
1. It's fun. (It's weird laud this way a book it took me 8 years to finish, but... it really is.)
2. It allows you to read it more actively - to examine the workings of your own mind while you're reading about them, to feel the book's lessons intuitively. I realized it when I reached the middle, where there was a semantic map of the entire book, and thought, "this is my head right now. This is a diagram of my attempt to keep track of all of the disparate concepts, references and thought experiments, and to understand the underlying theme."
I got to the point where I wondered what the book was about, but I just embraced the feeling and kept going. It was a satisfying experience.
I got about halfway the first time, before finishing it five years later. I liked the incompleteness theorem and the playing around with recursion, but I can't even remember what the rest of the book was about.
It's a long time since I read it, but I thought it was interesting to start with but drifted into "recursion is the theory of everything". Maybe I am misjudging it.
I wound up reading it very slowly - over the course of several years, I think. Pick it up, read until he blew my mind after a few paragraphs, wait a bit, repeat. I suspect that was far from optimal, but it did seem to work pretty well.
This book is the axis of Hofstadter's career as a cognitive scientist. Nearly all of his subsequent academic work (and some of his non-academic too) is an extension of concepts he first explored in GEB. It's not a textbook, but it's one of the most frequently recommended popsci books regarding cognitive science, and MIT once had an online course built around it.
It's an overview of certain results and fields of logic, together with analogies to music and drawings. (IIRC it also teaches a bit about music with analogies to the other two, but I think the main part is the logic one.) IMO, it's not meant as research or as a textbook, but as a popularization of those logic results.
Nah. That's a recipe for wasted time and frustration.
If reading it three times weren't enough, just skip it. Maybe the passage immediately after that can clarify it. If it's your copy, you may highlight it and return to it later.
Or just give up on this particular phrase. Like, there needs to be a balance between how much time you invest in reading and how much you retain, and always insisting on 100% completion seems off-balance.
I would very much love to be able to enter a jhana state, preferably without spending months and years of my life on it. I suspect that this should be possible, given that, as an amateur hypnotist, I was able to get more than one willing and receptive subject into a very similar state of absolute bliss/continuous full body orgasm (not sure if there is a difference for AFABs) within a very short time. Sadly, I do not seem to have the ability of being easily hypnotized, at least not from what I have tried, so that route is not promising for me. I wonder if there are other shortcuts that can be explored.
Like you, I'm pretty good at hypnotizing people, but thought I myself was not very hypnotizable. But later I discovered that the problem for me with being hypnotized by friends and fellow students in my hypnosis seminar was that I found the situation of having someone try to hypnotize me awkward. I'd get preoccupied with whether I was hypnotized enough, and worried about the point where they would do something to test my level of hypnosis, like telling me my arm was going to float upwards -- and there's that gray zone where you sort of feel hypnotized, but not really hypnotized enough for your arm to feel like it's rising of its own volition -- and if I was in the gray zone should I just half-voluntarily raise my arm? And if I didn't, how awkward would that be for my hypnotist?.
But one day a friend and I were running a group, and he was going to hypnotize the group thay day, and so I just sat with everyone else and experienced the hypnosis. And it worked really really well. It was very pleasant, and I was just -- *gone*. I'm pretty sure even some pretty far-out suggestions would have worked well on me. Unfortunately I never got to experience the next phase because at that point something came up that I needed to help with so I reluctantly dragged myself out of hypnotized bliss. Anyhow, might be worth a try -- getting hypnotized as part of a group, where you don't have to be concerned with your personal impact on the hypnotist.
As for other shortcuts -- well, there's the drug route: mescaline, MDMA, candy-flipping (LSD followed several hours later by MDMA), even ketamine, though I personally hated the stuff.
Wouldn’t using drugs to achieve a bliss state run completely counter to the original discussion idea of exploring therapeutic usages of jhana/other meditation to help curb addiction or risk seeking behaviors?
I don't believe that's the context in which jhana was first discussed on here -- I believe someone asked put up apost asking in general about jhana. In any case, Sergei is asking about ways to achieve a bliss state -- is willing to use hypnosis to get there. Sounds like he's interested in the bliss state and is not particular about how he gets there.
I was relating back to the discussion questions from Scott and quotes from Cammarata as the original context, though I suppose not everyone in the thread here necessarily read it. For context:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana
A lot of literature associates hypnosis with meditation under the umbrella of "altered mental states achieved through instructions and thought", and Sergei was asking about methodology so it seemed like an important part of the answer, though if not, that's fine too! Have your experiences with hypnosis led you to associate it more closely with psychedelics than meditation?
No, in my experience hypnosis is much more like meditation. However, he was asking about achieving bliss states, which probably come in many flavors, the psychedelic variety being one.
Mescaline and LSD are not addictive in the least, and using them is not a risk seeking behavior unless you have really weird ideas about your set and setting.
MDMA should be handled with care, but is also not habit forming if you don't go overboard.
Both are explored for the purposes of psychoterapy, with MDMA explicitly developed for that purpose before rave culture took it and ran.
Experience+literature has given me a pretty strong prior to 'addictive' and 'risky' but I would love to see new literature providing evidence against--- though as a note, I only ask out of interest and I likely won't update my current views unless I see compelling stats addressing the aspects of 1) chemical addiction 2) emotional dependency 3) accidents or violence caused by usage 4) risk of drug reactions 5) risk of lacing (and lacing related drug reactions). As that's a long list, I would never expect any single commenter to address all these priors, no worries :) I only clarify since I think they should all be taken into account by individuals when making a good ol' cost-benefit analysis before usage, potentially with personalized weights based on individual risks. (I enjoy analyses in general, as I'm sure many folks here do, so they're a standard for me before engaging in anything risky.)
Therapists don't give out prescriptions where I live, though every drug I have tried from my psychiatrist has had addictive or dependency-developing properties. Presuming there are non-addictive low-risk drugs that can meet the same needs, I am incredibly curious what reasons there are for blocking them if you know?
> Presuming there are non-addictive low-risk drugs that can meet the same needs, I am incredibly curious what reasons there are for blocking them if you know?
I mean, if you look into the entire history of the "war on drugs" you'll quickly realize that it's mostly about governments banning things they don't understand, often against the expert consensus.
Case in point, MDMA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA#History
Psilocybin, for instance, has a very good safety profile. You can probably find the page I saw by googling something like "safety profile recreational drugs." In assessing safety, the factors considered in chart I saw were addictiveness, harm to health, and likelihood of causing psychiatric problems. Psilocybin is low on all 3. I don't believe there were any other drugs that were low on all 3, except possibly some other psychedelics. Weed is mildly addictive, and not infrequently sends people to the ER with panic attacks. Alcohol we all know about. As for lacing, psilocybin mushrooms are fairly easy to grow, so you do not have to worry about the mushrooms's being laced with other drugs if you grow them yourself or get them from a trusted acquaintance who does.
I didn’t know psilocybin is easy to grow; that’s SUPER useful for a cost analysis, especially in such heavy contrast with the other options discussed above. Preliminary lit. has suggested healthiest usage from it is bi-annual, so I’m not sure where that would put it in the limbo between “healthy” and “looking for an interesting experience (as described with meditation)”. I imagine the lower time investment is a big draw for folks (though of course since I’ve already developed meditation skills, the investment there is a zero for me personally).
If I understand the concepts correctly, then looking for a shortcut is the best way to guarantee meditation will have the least results/take even longer. Instead of something easy, think of something hard you’ve already spent a lot of time building your concentration with (for me this would be math problems, reading novels, and wildlife observation) and go from there as a springboard maybe? What is your focus state like doing those activities/challenges? How easily do other thoughts interrupt you? What is your awareness like?
(As a note, this is somewhat novice advice, albeit I would consider my own meditations highly successful for my personal goals.)
Hmm, I definitely can enter a flow state when reading/coding/walking, if that is what you mean. Though it is harder now being conditioned by all the interruptions from mobile sources. But even if successful, how do you get from there to bliss?
Ahhhh, pardon, I do also have to put my phone in another room or a box to maintain focus. The notif conditioning is absolutely malicious.
I don’t know how widely applicable my experience is, but I would say: observe what it is like to be in your flow state- what your concentration and awareness feel like- & work towards redirecting that focus to physical or pleasurable sensations you are feeling. I imagine chasing the idea of a bliss state will distract you, so starting with a neutral sensation may help?
As this is probably the last open thread before the midterms in the US, anyone have good (or bad, we'll know pretty soon) predictions?
I do not have any major insight. I guess I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters, which suggests a disaster of Democrats.
However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.
An interesting link that was posted on the subreddit a little while ago: Ann Seltzer's polls of Iowa have historically avoided some of the challenges that have plagued other state and national polls. Heavily weighting FiveThirtyEight and The Economist's models based on Iowa polling data has done very well in backtests at predicting election results. A similar weighting this year gives Democrats a 45% chance of holding the senate and a 15% chance of holding the house.
https://secondhandcartography.com/2022/10/15/ann-selzer/
This is weird because most election forecasters believe that Selzer suggests a *better* result for Dems than 538 or Economist. The main issue I see is looking at the Senate race. Grassley is actually way below what you'd expect due to local reasons. Her previous poll actually had him even lower, +3, which shocked the polling world. But even the +12 poll suggests something like a D+2 environment.
We'll see what happens I guess.
I predict a surprise victory for Elvis Presley in at least three races. He will give all the victory dances simultaneously in the respective districts; people will know most of them are performed by impersonators but won't be willing to call him out on it.
I'm expecting an epic Democratic wipeout. People are really, really pissed off about the price of things, and almost nobody likes Joe Biden. Simple as that. History tells us that's a recipe for disaster for the governing party, and for me the brute facts of history make a stronger case than any amount of rationalization or complex theory.
So about that...
I think that, as with any party in government world-wide midway through their term of office, there will be a swing away from the Democrats.
I don't know about a Red Wave anymore than the Blue Wave. From what I'm reading, there's a good chance the Republicans will take the House but it's much closer for the Senate, so it could end up Democratic president, Democratic Senate by a very slim margin, and Republican House or Democratic president, Republican Senate by a very slim margin, and Republican House. Plainly, if option two happens, that's not good for the rest of Biden's term but in a way it would serve the Democratic candidate for 2024 - 'we were gonna do all this wonderful stuff, honest, but the nasty Republicans blocked us in Congress'.
I don't think it's close in the Senate. But we'll see next week.
I'd say 53-54 Senate seats for Dems. I have a whole framework behind this but you only asked for predictions.
The House is 60-40 and I expect the majority for either side to be like 10 tops.
If events prove you correct, do you intend to write up that framework anywhere?
I expect it to become mostly useless after this election. Certain pollsters key to the idea would probably change their practice. In fact I am suspicious of one pollster already since I had told him about the theory a few months ago. I guess we will see.
You, specifically, have already seen my framework many times. Or key parts of it.
A friend of mine that studies polling methodology suggested the issue isn’t polls being fixed but rather the classic issue of sampling bias. The type of people willing to participate in a voluntary polls about elections heavily lean one way.
Sorry, to be clear, my claim wasn't that the polls are 'fixed' as in 'rigged' but that they aren't 'fixed' as in 'repaired' given their accuracy issues the last couple of elections, which indeed does appear to be consistent undersampling of Republican voters.
From what I've seen (ok, one friend and some stuff online) this might not only be sampling bias. At least some Republican voters are strategically not answering polls so the Democrats have less information to work with.
I agree with your second prediction.
Also agree with a 60% chance that the polls are still undercounting Republican voters, which if true would on its own certainly imply the GOP crushing the Dems in the House and in state-level races. But....that factor isn't on its own. Some things that seem to be happening may be pointing the other direction. E.g. I'd say the GOP has around a 2 in 3 chance of gaining a House majority but most likely a narrow one. (As the Dems have right now.) And the Dems seem to be doing a bit better than that in state governor races.
My general summary of the current electioneering by the two parties is that the Democrats are worse at campaigning while the Republicans are picking shittier candidates. (Overall I mean; obviously there are plenty of individual exceptions to each generalization.)
If either the GOP stopped picking absurdly-unqualified clowns like Herschel Walker, or the Democrats stopped behaving as if voters who don't already agree with them must be dupes or racists, while the other party continued as-is, then this election could have become a blowout. The actual reality though will have the effect of holding down the degree to which either party dominates.
Ah come on, the guy is named after the discoverer of Uranus, that's worth a vote from any fans of astronomy 😀
He is a former sports star? Reagan was an actor, that didn't hurt his career in politics. I see that his rival is a Baptist pastor, so that should be just as disqualifying or not.
As someone who isn't a Baptist but is very familiar with them, being a Baptist pastor seems way more relevant experience for a political leader than being on a sports team.
It amuses me that with all the fuss over theocracies (Mormon last time round, when Romney was running, and just general 'Christian Nationalist theocracy they are plotting to do away with gay marriage, contraception, and everything else, abortion was just the first step' this time round) that electing an actual clergyman to your national government is not remarked upon.
I guess theocrats are okay once they're the right sort of theocrat? 😁 (I note the gentleman has the correct views on abortion etc. according to his Wikipedia page).
It is very funny that laymen running for office can be accused of wanting to impose their religion, and that the church should be kept out of politics, but electing actual clergy is just fine! The Catholic Church position is that no, priests should not run for political office (which was one of the reasons for conflict with a former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in the 90s; he was a priest but left the priesthood and was elected as president because of this ban on getting involved in politics if you're a cleric).
When Reagan first ran for office in our national government he'd been governor of our largest state for terms. When he was first elected to that governorship he'd been doing national policy speeches (which later were proven to have been composed by him personally) for a decade, and had led a prominent labor union.
Warnock, before running for the Senate seat, had spent a decade publicly working on health care policy and campaigning for candidates for local and state offices.
Walker has a toy badge from a local police department.
Being a Senator isn't (or shouldn't be) rocket science. We're not looking for brilliant philosopher-aristocrats who can reason their way to a super genius bit of legislation, the Special Relativity of Federal Law.
I mean, if we *did* have such ambitions a popular election would be about the dumbest way imaginable to do the selection. You don't pick brilliance by a popular vote. Might as well have a committee gathered from the street outside the hospital vote on who should be a brain surgeon and who should be a janitor inside.
The junior senator from Georgia is supposed to (1) be even-tempered, courteous, and patient in the public spotlight, not often say weird things, (2) be good at working with people, especially those who don't see eye to eye with him, and over whom he has no power other than persuasion and negotiation, and (3) represent his constituents well, meaning he kind of instinctually and by experience has a good idea of what they want.
None of this has squat to do with having a brilliant CV as far as I can see, it's all character stuff, and by me a decade hobnobbing with politicos and pundits is probably a slight negative if anything in terms of being close to what the average schmuck in Atlanta thinks about. I have no idea if Walker in particular is any good at (1), (2), and (3), but I don't see any obvious reason why being a pro football player would make the proposition laughable. I mean, he probably does have to know how to get along with people and work with a team, so that's something, and he probably needed some serious level of grit and self-discipline to make it to the NFL in the first place.
Walker may be absurdly unqualified to be a senator but it is not obvious that he is absurdly unqualified to win a senatorial election. He is a sports star in the most popular sport, and while that isn't much qualification for office it is probably worth a fair number of votes.
"The court got taken over by Dems in the 2018 Trump backlash election and proceeded to gerrymander all the districts to try to lock in an effective one party state for the county"
But surely not! This never happens except when it's the bad naughty wicked Republicans doing it! Democrats are pure and virtuous and care only about maximising the voter turnout!
(Yeah, the sarcasm is heavy-handed there, but at this stage I'm sick to the back teeth of the phrase "election denialist" and the implication, if it's not outright stated, that only Republicans engage in election fraud, vote rigging, or gerrymandering).
(P.P.S. No, I'm not saying the Dems engaged in vote fraud in the last election, untwist your knickers ladies, gentlemen and others. But just that the party line seems to be 'Republicans in power will gerrymander so vote Democrat').
My prediction for any US election is that either we'll have a prevailing narrative from at least one of the two sides that's either:
Democrats won because of fake/invalid ballots
Republicans won because of voter suppression.
It's no longer about policies, character, or views. It's just about whether the dems can forge more ballots than the republicans can suppress.
Yeah, if Tweedledee wins a seat, Tweedledum will call foul and the other way round as well.
Just all part of modern politics, I suppose.
And it's hard to tell if it's fiddling or natural movement.
I remember there was a lot of fuss about Maricopa County, so I went and looked at it, and on the *face* of it, it did look odd: last election Maricopa and surrounding counties all ended red, this time only Maricopa turned blue.
But going deeper, it was simply a matter of 3,000 votes going one way not the other. That was enough to flip from red to blue.
Now, you could say "Someone in Maricopa County fiddled around to flip those 3,000 votes" or you could say "3,000 people changed their minds this time round".
Saying "This looks fishy" wasn't conspiracy theory or irrational, so we have to accept either that election fraud/fiddling by the Democrats did happen (so the 'election denialist' isn't that strong an excuse) or that margins do change naturally. Either way, if the Republicans are to be suspected Because Reasons, there were also Because Reasons to be suspicious of the Democrats.
Like you say, tight margins can give rise to suspicions.
I agree that Republicans "should" have picked up 3-4 seats. Sadly Trump foisted off a bunch of terrible candidates on them and screwed them over. On the upside for them Fetterman had a stroke but on the downside the Trump endorsed candidate is so widely hated he is still gonna lose.
Also maybe the Trump Supreme Court isn't as partisan as I thought cause those fools really dropped a bomb on Republican Senate candidates in June.
It looks as though Trump sabotaged his party's chances in the midterms in the process of maintaining his control over the party. But it also looked, in 2016, as though Trump's nomination meant his party was going to lose the presidential election. It's possible we are again underestimating the popularity of what he is selling.
The interesting question, which I hope someone with no axe to grind will look into after the midterms, will be whether Trump's "terrible candidates" do better or worse than other Republican candidates relative to how well one would expect a candidate running in that state or district to do on the basis of past elections, demographics, and the like.
Walker has no been leading in the polls since the debate. I suppose if you only look at RCP, which cherry picks polls you might think that. Maybe he ends up with a surprise win, though I doubt it, but RCP being correct will only be incidental. He achieved his current 0.1% lead in 538 only on the 4th although that is still impacted by a flood of partisan polls.
You have the opinions of an RCP believer so the rest of your post isn't a shock. Fetterman is ahead on every aggregator that actually looks at all the polls, though like Walker the flood of partisan polls has pushed his number down. The same for Laxalt. There's barely any non-partisan polls this year because of the cost. Whereas the partisan R polls are cheap to conduct in relative terms and there's several wealthy right wingers supporting them.
In any case anyone following the data knew that Ralston was going to put Laxalt behind. He's been talking the whole time about how Laxalt is an Oz/Walker level candidate in NV, and the recent mail drops, now that in person is over, have heavily boosted the Demcrats and their chances.
Do you have an objective criteria for a "partisan poll" and why they would be less accurate that a non-partisan poll?
A partisan poll is a poll from a Republican polling firm, typically but not always commission by a right-wing group. Trafalgar did a series of polls for The Daily Wire for instance. Or Insider Advantage doing some polls for American Greatness.
Nate is constrained by the polls that exist. That's why people are talking about flooding the zone. He also has the issue that his house effects are out of date. For instance Data For Progress has historically been friendly to Dems in a significant way, which makes sense because they are run by Sean McElwee. This year they radically redid their methodology and sample choices causing them to get results functionally idential to Trafalgar. This means that they'll have something like 45-46 Warnock-Walker and that would then be weighted to something like 43-48.
I don't have a ton of respect for conventional wisdom. I had Trump to win in 2016 after he started leading in the R primaries.
I think the conventional wisdom is only useful in a dull generic election. And I think we haven't really had one of those lately.
A few questions I have to the regular commenters here, especially the "EA types":
1 - How come that Betting Markets (at least PredictIt) are favoring the GOP to take both the Senate and the House quite heavily, while polls and early voting data so far paint a much better picture for the Democrats? Which one should the "layperson" trust more? Or is it, as I think, that PredictIt overstates the GOP's chances because of self-selection of the bettors (I.e. Thiel-Style Libertarian/Alt-Righters?)
2 - Would people here consider Robin Hanson to be alt-right? Because recently he seems to be posting quite a few opinion pieces that are very sympathetic to the alt-right...is he on the "libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline like Herr Thiel?
What is the alt right?
Well, I've got an ALT key both to the left and right of the spacebar, so maybe that has something to do with it.
PredictIt specifically is tainted, as you suggested, by the self-selection of the user base as well as by the structure of the system due to their attempt to avoid legal challenges from the US. The other markets are only tainted by the self-selection so they are slightly better.
Laypeople shouldn't trust anyone, though, I would argue. They should just live their lives, vote for the people they like, and see what happens on Tuesday.
Wait, shouldn’t price discovery still work when there is participant bias? Insofar as the price is skewed Republican, an opportunity is created for unbiased participants to make a profit. Only a small number of actors should be required to bet the other way to remove any bias.
Or do I have this wrong and efficiency is easily perturbed by market participant bias? (I’m judging from intuition, not mathematics, though a toy mathematical model would be appreciated!)
You'd need like 100 people able to invest at least $17000, the $850 max on 20 trades, to counter the existing bias, if not more. There's just not that many people who know about the markets or care enough to do that that aren't irrational Trumper Pumpers.
Although now is an excellent time to be since you are incredibly close to the resolution so you aren't letting the money sit for months like some of the Trumper Pumpers did.
You got me. I just placed a modest but personally meaningful bet against republicans taking both houses. Funny how I care 100x more now than I did yesterday. Skin in the game changes how we think about it?
I think the greatest inefficiency comes from the fact that PredictIt limits trading volume per user. A rich, unbiased user can still only bet $850 on a particular trade.
1. PredictIt probably slightly overstates the GOP's chances because it has mostly Republicans. But the narrative I hear most often is that overall prediction markets are righter than polls, mainly because Republicans are more paranoid anti-establishment and refuse to cooperate with pollsters, and Democrats are super-fired up about this election and *love* talking to pollsters. See eg this New Yorker article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/why-republican-insiders-think-the-gop-is-poised-for-a-blowout
2. Robin's first commitment is to economics and his second commitment is to being an annoying controversial contrarian. I think the first commitment pushes him away from the Trumpist right and his second commitment pushes him towards them, but overall he is way too independent to fit into any movement. I assume he has unwoke positions on race and gender because I assume he's seen most of the same arguments I have. I assume he's anti-Trump for the same reason, and also because Trump has a lot of economically disastrous ideas. I don't think "alt-right" has a definition much beyond "Republican who I don't like and am about to accuse of racism" so I don't think there's a fact of the matter who belongs to it, but I doubt Robin would self-identify that way.
Could you explain what you mean by unwoke position on gender and what are the arguments in favour of it?
As far as I understand, the ideas from "categories were made for men" are pretty woke even by modern standards. Have you changed your opinion on the matter since then? Or are we using different definitions of "wokeness"?
Yeah, sorry, I meant feminism rather than transgender. I don't know Robin's position on that.
Thanks for the clarification!
My own model of Robin Hanson is based on my reactions from reading his allegedly top blog posts varying from "that's an interesting and clever idea we should think more in this direction" to "that's something I thought when I was doing primitive pattern matching in my teens and am cringing right now about". So with moderately low confidence I expect his position on transgenders being closer to thinking them stupid and following social contamination.
Now, after I made this public postdiction, does anyone have a link to some of his thoughts on the matter?
I'm guessing Scott is referring to the opinions expressed in "Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences". Maybe also the things he said in "Untitled", though that was more about feminism as a movement than "gender" as such.
> I‘ll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.
Wouldn't it be less labor-intensive just to enable sorting comments by likes? I would love this mode.
I don't like likes. Starts off well-intentioned, devolves into "I hate you but since I can't get you kicked off here, all I can do is hit the 'like' button for the guy you are arguing with".
I think sorting by likes make things too much like fuckin high school.
My impression is that this would be a bit more like deleting the top 66% of comments. Sorta tongue in cheek/
But at least, all of the other times we've had this argument over whether likes should even be visible, it seemed to be the consensus that they were toxic and encouraged partisanship and such
probably closer to a slight majority than a consensus
Is it really the consensus or just a vocal minority? I'm interested to see if there was any poll on this.
The question was asked on one of the blog annual polls, shortly after it moved form SSC to here at ACX, IIRC.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/03/the-witching-hour/
Given the day, is it ok to link to this excellent old story from SSC?
Ty for reminding me of this, i'd forgotten and probably never would have remembered to reread it, and boy is it good (and appropriate)
I am not an American, but watching the upcoming midterm elections from the sidelines feels like a buildup to a calamity, were this a TV show. With the most sane Republican being Liz Cheney, and most of the rest being 2020 election denialists and proponents of a nationwide abortion ban, the Dems' progressives (AOC, Warren, Sanders etc.) sliding ever further into commie think ("Billionaires bad!") and anti-tech, and the center either non-existent or extremely uninspiring on ether side, the odds of a post-election conflict worse than Jan 6 seem unnervingly high. And yet, I don't see much in terms of alarm bells going off, so maybe I am missing something here.
Don't believe too much of what you see in the news.
Don't forget that the most prominent election deniers are Stacy Abrams, Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore.
The talking-heads with shrinking audiences are the shrill voices calling for violence.
Hillary Clinton: "Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country."
Al Gore: "Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States. "
Donald Trump, with a two month delay: "a new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th."
Don't believe too much of what you see about American politics on ACX. It is way more right wing that at first seems evident. The election arguably *was* stolen from Gore, but not by votes as much as friendly court fiat. Regardless he let it go and America was plunged into a decades long hell and giant money pit.
I actually don't like Stacey Abrams due to her politics and I think she has overplayed her hand on the 2018 election. There's some level of voter suppression in GA but it isn't "the new Jim Crow" as she and many of her allies like to portray it. She lost because she sucks as a candidate. Maybe we can give her credit for voter turnout, although I'm skeptical of her votes above replacement and think a lot of it was structural. But as a campaigner she is terrible.
I don't think there is any level of voter suppression in GA. Don't they have extremely liberal voting rules, like far more liberal than New York for example, and black votes are way up?
I'd say it's pretty easy to vote here (we have lots of early voting, they mail you a registration form when you move here), but I do think it would be a bit hard to vote if you were homeless, since you do need proof of residency and the like (which can be done with a letter from a shelter/halfway house, but I know those aren't always easy to get into)
I honestly want to start a “fuck both these parties party” and make yard signs and run candidates and everything. But I am not a good person to start a movement because I am too tactless and care to little for what “normies” think about things.
Being tactless doesn't seem to have hurt Trump. Maybe tact is overrated.
What would be your platform?
Markets are great and amazing and one of our most effective economic tools, and we should use them where-ever we can and stay out of their way, but then intervene when/where they fail and do things we find unacceptable. Collective action problems (a change that costs individuals $1,000, but benefits everyone on earth $0.01, where you need the government to step in and make people participate), natural monopolies, places where consumers are irrational in incapable of getting good info, etc. All those are places where the market needs intervention.
A bigger focus on incentives and human action and motivation in terms of social safety net. While also being in touch with the fact that sometimes bribing people with social support is cheaper than oppressing/policing an underclass. It is a balance.
But the biggest part of the platform would be the systematic dismantling of the current parties and their sinecures, and replacing that with a new system. I am not sure ours is a terrible design, but it has gone WAY WAY too long without a "reset" and the players are too entrenched and too "efficient" at the game, and their strategies too orthagonal to running the country well.
Wait...what about free Internet for everyone? And steak. Every other Friday, maybe. Professional grilled.
Also...differences between the parties that can't be settled in 30 minutes private face-to-face conversation must be resolved in weekly gladiatorial combat between the oldest Senator from each party. Each combatant is armed with a gladius, or trident and net (his/her/xer/xor choice), first blood wins except in the case of Supreme Court nominations in which case it's to the death, and the games are available on pay for view with 1/2 the proceeds benefiting orphans and widows.
A CHICKEN in every pot!
Twio chickens, I say! We need to sway the masses. No...wait....clearly it has to be 𝜋 chickens ha ha ha
Hey, I'd join. And I like The Tactless Party as a nickname.
Well all I can say is you should have been around for the election of 1980, when Ronnie Raygun was going to send the world to nuclear hellfire January 22 fer sure, or the election of 1972 when McGovern was going to sell out to the commies, the election of 1968 in which RFK (the presumptive Democratic nominee) was shot and killed after winning the California primary and there was rioting and tear gas at the Democratic Convention.
Politics ain't beanbag, as Tip O'Neill used to observe. On the broad scale of American elections, this one is on the mild side. A bit worse than some, better than many. It may not seem that way if one is glued to social media (which naturally encourages hysteria) or media sites, which encourage also hysteria and obsession for those sweet, sweet page clicks that advertisers reward so well. It's also the case that the party currently in power (the Democrats) are bracing themselves for heavy losses, and of course that means a lot of highly visible people, starting with the President, are going to be predicting The End Of Things if that comes to pass, to encourage any slackers among theirs base to bestir themselves to the polls. You saw the same heavy breathing from Team MAGA once it became clear in 2016 that Trump was headed for the dumpster.
This seemed like an interesting enough question that I started a Manifold market about it - Will At Least One Congressional Candidate Contest The Results Of The 2022 Midterm Elections: https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/will-at-least-one-congressional-can
I'm less worried (though not zero worried) about a post-election conflict, mostly because Americans don't care about midterms the same way they care about presidents. I could imagine something bad happening if some party wins or loses by exactly one seat, otherwise everyone with an agenda will wait until 2024.
Also, this election the most likely scenario is that the Republicans gain (or at least don't lose anything), and I think the Democrats are less likely to protest, partly because of who they are and partly because they've been saying that protesting an election result is always evil fascism for the past two years, and it will take them more than one week to pivot.
"partly because they've been saying that protesting an election result is always evil fascism for the past two years"
Ah but you see, it's only evil fascism when the *other* side do it. See cancel culture or whatever we're calling it; when They do it, it is censorship and suppression which is bad and wrong but when We do it, it is fighting hate speech and not tolerating the intolerant.
>>>mostly because Americans don't care about midterms the way they care about Presidents.
I think this is...incomplete.
The level of obsession that the Democrat party has with national politics, and especially with the executive branch, is far in excess of their interest in non presidential, non national positions.
Not to say that Republicans don't care more about Presidential races as well, but local *contested* (ie not CA) politics tend strongly to be more conservative on off years, because conservative voters still vote to some degree in off years.
I have actually read some research data on this but it has been a few years, and Trump broke many things, so I am not sure if the trend is currently holding.
My personal expectation is that Dems gain in the Senate and are 60/40 to hold the House so I expect a lot of furor even if there are no riots in the streets. I'd give riots in the streets, pending Democrats holding both chambers, 60/40.
For what it's worth, I don't think there will be post-election conflict as I think the Republicans will likely win both the House and Senate. Democrats won't challenge this. '24 might be more chaotic if Trump wins the primary and loses the general election again.
Also, I appreciate Liz Cheney's stance on Trump and extremism within the Republican party, but I think it's worth noting that she and other prominent anti-Trump Republicans like the Bush family, Bill Kristol, and Adam Kinzinger are neoconservatives who strongly support military interventionism abroad. These are people that liberals would have absolutely hated 20 years ago, some of whom have blood on their hands, and whose policies would likely lead to further bloodshed abroad if they were elected to office. I really don't know whether I would classify them as "sane" Republicans for prioritizing election integrity at home while often condoning regime change efforts and deaths abroad. (Not talking about Ukraine, where US aid is merited in my opinion).
Centrism could refer to multiple things. There are proposals that the vast majority of the public agree on, which could form the basis of a reasonable centrist platform (largely, fiscally liberal and socially somewhat moderate). But centrism for others refers to social liberalism, fiscal conservatism, and neoconservatism in foreign policy, which is mostly only appealing to certain elites. So I guess it really depends on the implementation.
>I really don't know whether I would classify them as "sane" Republicans for prioritizing election integrity at home while often condoning regime change efforts and deaths abroad.
For my entire adult lifetime, the moderate bipartisan consensus has been endless war, unlimited spending, the expansion of arbitrary executive power, and an ever-escalating and increasingly flagrant surveillance state. When that's the moderate position, denouncing people as radical is unlikely to turn me against them in and of itself. The only problem with the ejection of Liz Cheney from the republican party is that it didn't happen 15 years ago.
>Democrats won't challenge this.
Weak disagree. While I doubt there will be large scale violence, I strongly suspect it's about to become cool to question election results again.
I think there could be a handful of notable Democratic politicians (I would guess < 5) who claim something like voter suppression, as Stacey Abrams did in 2018. There also might be claims of Russian misinformation, etc. as in 2016. But I doubt it will be anywhere near the the scale of Republican election denial claims of 2020.
>There also might be claims of Russian misinformation, etc. as in 2016
>But I doubt it will be anywhere near the the scale of Republican election denial claims of 2020
You do realize that the efforts to overturn the 2016 election were both of a larger scale and came far closer to succeeding than the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Efforts to overturn the 2020 election were pretty bad but they had virtually no institutional support.
Do you have examples? I did not follow politics very closely back in 2016, but all I remember were some recounts that Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein asked for in certain states. And then something like 6 Democratic congresspeople who objected to elector certification but were overruled by Biden, who was presiding over the vote count.
I don't think the first qualifies as election denial as Clinton accepted the results (she called Trump to concede the day of the election) and then afterwards accepted the recount results. The second incident was unfortunate but I don't believe it was seriously entertained by Democratic leadership.
I liked the appeal to the Faithless Electors, because it blew up in the faces of those faintly hoping that Democracy could be saved by annulling the results of the Slaveholder's Electoral College by asking people to vote not as their state directed but by the burning in their bosom.
And some of them did, and they took slaveholder votes *away* from Hillary 😁
(Why mention "slaveholder"? Because that is what all the squawking about the Electoral College that I saw online harped on. The Electoral College is bad because it was set up to allow slaveholding states to continue being part of the system, so it should be abolished because slavery bad).
What was the institutional effort to overturn the result of the 2016 election? As opposed to the effort (well, really just the talk) to reform the election process. I recall Dems being stunned, not questioning the outcome, just grumbling about how electoral college is undemocratic and outdated. What "came close to succeeding"?
There is no change of the executive this year, so something worse than Jan 6 seems unlikely, whatever else the results portend.
I think you're basing your views of both sides too much on hit pieces written by their opponents. I think there's rather a lot of people who are going to be elected who are neither Nationwide Abortion Ban supporters nor Outright Commies.
There are an unfortunate number of politicians that try to suggest they will support the few folks that actually would push a nationwide change to bodily/fiscal autonomy, though they tend to be testing the waters to see what will get them votes and wouldn’t actually support said policies unless a clear path reveals itself for the above types of policies to directly benefit them (ie. if they happen to be a politician from a family that owns a business that will gain a natural monopoly through the legislature, or maybe a high chance of improving their platform for the next voting round.)
I share some of your concerns. I'd never have imagined that one party would be trying to overthrow the govt, in America of all places.
She was not challenging election results demanding recounts and calling up electors, like Trump did.
Re Intelligence II: I am of a logical bent so this question drawn from R.J. Sternberg, a very big name in intelligence studies, appeals to me:
"You are at a party of truth-tellers and liars. The truth-tellers always tell the truth, and the liars always lie. You meet someone new. He tells you that he just heard a conversation in which a girl said she was a liar. Is the person you met a liar or a truth-teller?
Well logically the answer should come swiftly, but there's a problem with the question and the higher your Intelligence the more likely you will answer "incorrectly"
At another such party, a man approached a woman and asked her whether she was a rich truth-teller. She answered yes or no. Some time later, a second man independently asked her whether she was a rich liar. She answered yes or no. Finally, a third man, acting independently of the other two, asked her whether she was a poor truth-teller. She answered yes or no.
None of the three men had enough information to deduce whether she was rich or poor, or whether she was a liar or a truth-teller.
So what was she?
(Of course, everybody knows that all partygoers are either rich or poor.)
If she answered the first question with "no," the man would deduce that she is a poor truth-teller. A rich truth-teller would say yes, as would a liar. Therefore she said "yes" and she is either a rich truth-teller or a liar.
If she answered the second question with "yes," the man would be able to deduce that she is a poor liar. A truth-teller or a rich liar would not be able to say yes. Therefore she said "no" to the second question, which implies either she is a truth-teller, or she is a rich liar.
If she answered the last question with "no", the man could deduce that she is a rich truth-teller - same logic as the first man. Therefore she said "yes" and she is either a poor truth-teller or a liar.
Combine all the information we have, and she can only be a rich liar.
Correct!
https://dmackinnon1.github.io/knaves/
What a fun puzzle. My second attempt:
We first ask, do the people at the party know the truth of everything? That's crazy. For example if I ask X "if I asked a liar whether they were a liar, would would they say"? This tells me if X is a liar. Next I ask "Is P=NP"? (Or anything else). So since now I know whether X is a liar, I learn whether P=NP (or any other yes/no question.)
So next, perhaps they people are not super knowledgable - but truth-tellers can't attest something that is actually wrong (nor liars state the truth). But that also doesn't quite work, assuming there is at least one liar:
"Is P=NP?". Truth-tellers have to say 'I don't know', presumably. Liars can't say that (assuming they don't actually know), but also can't say the actual truth (since that wouldn't be a lie), so they must say the opposite of the truth. With a couple of details omitted, this lets you find out anything that has a truth value so long as there is at least one liar.
So what is left? Truth-tellers can say 'I don't know' but liars can't do that (unless they actually do); so t faced with a "yes/no/I-don't-know' question they can say *either* 'yes' or 'no' even though one of them might be true (so long as they don't know it's true). They can't say 'I don't know'.
The girl at the bars is a liar. She doesn't know it. When asked 'what are you?' she has to answer 'yes' or 'no' and is not restricted by what is actually the case (since she doesn't know it). So she can say 'yes'. The man you are talking to heard this; he is honest.
In the first two cases, you can find the truth of anything out. Indeed, things sort of fall apart if there are meaningful assertions without a truth value. I think that means the very situation being described cannot exist, i.e. it is logically impossible (probably some citation to Godel might fit about here) so there's no sensible answer?
If the third case, you might be talking to a truth-teller.
I would think how you should (in fact, must) answer this depends on where you yourself are a liar or a truth-teller (unnatural though either may be, you are at the party, so you must be one or the other).
Without checking, I think the answer is that the person you met must be a liar, because neither a truth-teller nor a liar can refer to themselves as a liar. I don't see what the problem is, or why a smarter person would be more likely to answer incorrectly. What am I missing?
One trick I saw; people at the party ARE truth-tellers or liars. This does not require them to have ALWAYS BEEN that way. So if the girl said she WAS a liar, that might still be truth; she may have changed from liar to truth-teller at some point in the past.
And I think someone already pointed out the puzzle doesn't actually say everyone at the party is exclusively a liar or truth-teller; the girl could be some other group entirely.
But the puzzle isn't asking, "What would you say is the answer?" The question and its answer exist outside the context of the party.
Point taken (assuming you are replying to me), but there's got to be some 'trick' here and it's not entirely clear that my interpretation is wrong. 'You' are *AT* a party. You ARE one of these two types of people. Someone is asking 'you; a question (the entire puzzle could have been phrased entirely third-person (i.e. you aren't a party participant, just being told a report of something that went on - but it wasn't: it's all about 'you').
Why shouldn't it be read as 'tell me your answer to this question?' The option of 'forget about what type of person you are, tell me what is really true?' presumably doesn't exist in this world; and the question could have been rephrased if that was what was wanted.
I am stretching, for sure, but I don't think entirely unreasonably.
The only other answers I can see with the 'why isn't the obvious answer right' issue involve far more serious breaks with interpretation pragmatics than this. (So I guess that means I'll be embarrassed to learn the answer.)
> but there's got to be some 'trick' here
Maybe there is no trick and this is why intelligent people are more likely to get it wrong.
But was I WRONG or just pedantic (/careful) and annoying?
It's not as if I said 'yes/no' - 'liar or truth-teller' - I was suggesting an clarification (perhaps far-fetched) might be in order.
Why do intelligent people get it WRONG'? I don't think that's the right word for my answer, at all - so I'm still at a loss. Why do you get it WRONG?
I think you meant to reply to a different comment.
Yes, I meant to reply to aleh.
Okay, I just looked it up and I'm correct. I still have no clue why someone with high intelligence would be more likely to answer incorrectly.
My immediate response was he was a liar. Rereading the question for gotchas
1. Can just heard cover a longer time period - he could have heard the conversation before the party in which case you can’t determine whether he is a truth teller or liar
2. The girl might be a waitress and need not always lie or tell the truth
I guess I'm a dummy, because the answer came swiftly and I don't see the problem with the question.
Well you are all correct. The man is a liar because the woman couldn't reply as she did..
But if you overthink this one as an intelligent person might do, not accepting the correct prima facie answer, then you might look at it this way (among others) Alter the story slightly and make it "A woman at the party was asked by her friend, "Are you a liar?" She replied, "I'm a liar."
But she could easily see (as any speaker could) that this assertion led to paradox. So really it asserted nothing. If this was a court of law, rather than a cocktail party, it would have been the equivalent of taking the Fifth. She threw up, like a shield, a paradox to avoid incriminating herself. So she actually did not answer the question. She evaded it by invoking her right to make self-contradictory remarks.
All of this implying the person hearing the conversation, reported truthfully and is a truth-teller. Now I might take that overly analytic line and reply to the test "a truth-teller" And be docked credit.
That's bizarre. The premise of a logic puzzle is that statements in it are either true or false, and which it is can be discovered by deduction. Most people wouldn't even consider the possibility that a key statement is neither true nor false, since that defies the premise.
(More intelligent people are probably *more* likely to dismiss this possibility, because they've heard logic puzzles before and know the unstated assumptions.)
But even if you do admit the possibility that liars and truth-tellers can make paradoxical statements, that just changes the question to "A man says he heard a woman give an answer to a question that was neither true nor false. Is he telling the truth?" When you state it that way, it's clear that you can't conclude the man is telling the truth - both a liar and a truth-teller can report a paradoxical statement, depending on if the paradoxical statement actually happened.
You are completely correct. My example doesn't convince even me. But that's the way my mind works sometimes, automatically looking for "none of the above" type answers. In the setup, no one can say, " I am a liar" ; the statement as self ascription leads to paradox. No problem exists with describing others however. "He is a liar" can be used by both groups with no paradoxes raising their ugly heads. How can we use logical machinery to make an equivalency between the two types of statements? Even if we can, it still would be changing the rules of the setup question. So, you are right the answer is very easy as logic puzzles go. I subscribe to Graham Priest and his form of dialetheism and paraconsistent logic as a promising way to get a handle on the Liar. But globally, there are problems with dialetheism as well.
This all seems crazy. If you give this question to an intelligent person *but do not tell them that there is a trick here and intelligent people tend to get it wrong* does anyone, really, get it wrong? If in a book of brain-teasers, the smarter people would surely say 'he is a liar'. Your introduction, particularly citing 'a big name in intelligence' suggest that they do.
Let me go out on a limb here and say: no, I think that is utterly false. In fact, I think you just made it up. I would bet A LOT, *A LOT*, that this is false and that intelligence is positively correlated with saying is he is a liar. How much you would like to bet on this? I will take the other side for a large amount.
"...that this assertion led to paradox. So really it asserted nothing"
It is not a TRUE statement under any commonly understood notions of truth. Maybe it's meaning-less? The girl is not a TRUTH-teller. We are told: Truth tellers only tell the truth. (I am _not_ saying it's a lie; but it's not true, so the girl is not a truth teller.)
(Also, by the rules of the game, these four words ('I' 'am' 'a' 'liar') CANNOT be since sincerely uttered by anyone at the party (i.e. without excuplatory context). They metaphysically cannot. You don't need to ask what it might mean if they did; their larynx would seize - or something. The question might as well be: 'You are at a party. No one there can fly. You hear a man who says he can fly. Is he telling the truth? Or, you might as well ask: "Assume that 1+1=3; is 1+1=4?".
The assertion that 'intelligent' people get trapped into this type of introspection, unless told to try to find a catch, is just obviously false and wrong and just made up out of the blue for god knows only what silly reasons.
"R.J. Sternberg, a very big name in intelligence studies". Big name? As a laughing stock? Or are you misrepresenting him?
Wow, this was diasappointing. I didn't expect anything this empty.
You might also assert a distinction between legal and illegal propositions. Kind of like dividing by zero is an illegal operation, propositions that imply their own converse like if A then not A. A, would be ruled out. You could deny the validity of two valued logic and assert three valued logic or a paraconsistent logic and dialetheism. You might take the line that in essence the proposition is meaningless, just a collection of words that taken together are nonsense. You could take the view that the story conflates lying with saying something you genuinely believe to be true (but later turns out to be false.). Anyway certain minds might be inclined to overthink this problem and get lower grades for their efforts.
If this is conjecture, this is surely wrong and (as stated above) I'd take a large bet against it.
I think you've made a mistake, but maybe I have. However I really want to know: is the above idea (that more intelligent people tend to be trapped down such pathways [*]) real to the extent that 'that the higher your intelligence, the more likely you are to answer correctly' yours or is it from "the a very big name in intelligence studies" you cite? Whatever 'intelligence studies' even is (is there really such a thing?)
[*] Which, I should point out, you don't actually show are wrong.
I think you're right in the main and I confused intelligence with a tendency to over analyze things. You probably have demonstrated more intelligence than I in this topic.
IMO the remaining interesting aspect of this is that you are suggesting that someone notable in 'intelligence studies' (?!? - that's a weird, unusual, term) thinks there's something here. I think this seems rather unlikely, and if not you are mispreresenting this person unfairly (perhaps a clarification/apology is in order?) and if you you do think this is true then perhaps clear citation to this person would be in order? Please?
Whatever happened to transhumanism?
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, many of the sorts of people who would nowadays be Internet Rationalists (indeed, many of the exact same people) were instead Transhumanists, or even Extropians. They would talk optimistically about how technologies like AI, uploading, cryonics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and so forth would lead to a wonderful singularity, and they would boo-hiss against luddites like Bill Joy who wanted to shut down nanotechnology research for fear of gray goo. I lurked on those sorts of mailing lists back in the day, and I imagine some other people here did too.
What happened to all of that? Many of the same people are still kicking around, but the optimism is all gone. Most of the technologies that used to be discussed on those lists are now dismissed by the same sorts of people as pipe dreams, except for AI which is now more feared than celebrated. The Singularity is no longer celebrated as some kind of Rapture For Nerds in which we all get to live forever, but is feared as a world-ending kaboom where everything becomes paperclips. I just checked and extropy.org is still up (but advertising a conference in 2007) and https://www.aleph.se/Trans/ is still up but doesn't seem to have changed either.
What happened to all of that? I miss the techno-utopianism of those days, even if a lot of it was a bit crazy.
We're still here, just hard to spot under a pile of doomers.
I think part of it was the shift generally from the sunny optimism of the 90s about how we had solved a lot of problems, to the mid-2000s onwards when those 'solved' problems starting causing trouble again.
Part of it was, again, time passing and the expectations that "By such a date, this will have happened!" didn't come true, and the real scale of how difficult a project transhumanism is sank in. You can have a lot of rosy expectations about how fast tech is advancing when you're 20 because see how fast things have changed since I was a kid and that is not that long ago, and then you hit 30 and the advances keep happening, sure, but somehow not in the fields or not in the way you were hoping.
I think what happened to the Transhumanists and Extropians was that Eliezer Yudkowsky argued the smartest ones around to a more pessimistic position. (And it wasn't just him, but he was certainly the most visible "advocate from the inside".) And it was enough to basically collapse the movements as such. Or from a more historical-materialist sort of perspective, the whole thing collapsed from the internal contradiction that people inclined to see the promise of such technology were also unusually likely to be *able*, if reluctant, to see its dangers, and to have cultivated enough mental flexibility to eventually overcome their reluctance.
Mostly agree.
But I think the whole framework of transhumanism collapsing is confused. It changed, evolved from more naive and optimistic to more aware and cautious form. I believe EY and lots of other rationalists keep identifying as transhumanists, and didn't change their values from "simplified humanism", myself included. We would still want to live in a techno-utopia, it just turned out that the road there is more complicated than we thought it might be.
Maybe better than saying transhumanism "collapsed" is it "changed from a movement to a belief", because it became current that "we won't be ready for transhumanism-as-clearly-distinct-from-ordinary-humanism until we've cleared some more hurdles as a civilization" ...
Well it mostly about AI capabilities gains.
All the other technologies such as life extension, genetic engeneering e.t.c are still endorsed.
I personally would rather have some limits on human genetic engineering lest it speed up the rate at which future humans become misaligned from present humans. Life extension/cryonics, yes, would be less controversial.
I can empathise with "some limit", but I think a reasonable one is much less strict than a current status quo.
Well, that is literally false. But yeah, these topics are much less popular than AI alignment and rightly so.
If all the retoric about AI Alignment had been incoherent and wrong EY would have deserved some blame for fearmongering and slowing the progress towards techno-utopia, indeed.
Well, considering the eagerness to ignore or even count in your own favour the evidence and reasoning, supporting positions you disagree with, that you've shown regarding other matters, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised.
So yeah, if you ignore all the reasons that we have, we have no particular reason indeed.
Yeah IDK either and fully agree with you...the last (interesting?) book on Transhumanism was probably Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus...but yeah, mainstream conversation seems to see Transhumanists as either some kind of "Alt-Right weirdos" (Mencius?), or just as a pipe dream by people like Kurzweil etc.
Also, I don't understand why Transhumanism became associated with the alt-right...is it because of Thiel and Mencius? I mean, Transhumanism is a very revolutionary and futuristic idea, kind of the opposite of conservatism...I guess the fact that the current right-wing portrays itself as "revolutionary" might have some influence on this in the popular discussion...
Because the access to transhumanism-enabling technology would not be equal (and neither would be those receiving the improvements).
This is why we can't have nice things. Or why we can't have the modern left. The choice is kind of obvious.
Might also be because of Nick Land.
I'd speculate it's related to the general decline in plausibility of radical egalitarianism, combined with growing skepticism in the downstream benefits of capitalism-driven technological progress.
There's less of the old naive SF-adjacent sense of wonder and hope that tech like genetic engineering and exocortical augmentations might improve humanity as a whole. It's probably going to uplift an elite and its servant class. It follows, then, that the people still excited by transhumanist possibilities in the current sociopolitical context are those who already believe it's natural and just that we be divided into über- and untermenschen.
When I think of "extropian", I tend to think more of direct biological interventions (nanotechnology, genetical engineering, artificial body parts etc.) … A Smartphone certainly is a great and transformative invention, but it's mainly used for communication, entertainment and education...not sure if that qualifies as "Extropian"...
Poor example, even aside from reference class quibbles. Internet access stats in Africa, particularly south of the Sahara where subsistence farmers subsist, are dismal. Further infer urban vs rural, and no, it's not available.
Unless you mean available in the sense that the technology is not explicitly embargoed, which of course it doesn't have to be. It's legal and technologically feasible for me to take a walk on the moon, too.
I'm more at a loss as to why there was a surge of optimism in the '90s and '00s, but I suppose one could provisionally credit the general end-of-history atmosphere: liberal-democratic ascendancy, peace dividend, relative prosperity, somewhat receded threat of nuclear war (at least in the popular view insulated from the scramble to control Soviet stockpiles).
Though, as against that, Fukuyama himself wrote a book on the need for global institutional control of transhumanist technologies (similar to arms control regimes) and was allegedly mildly obsessed with Gattaca, so who knows.
I don't think that's true. I've seen a surprising number of transgender people online who support transhumanism as part of a belief in morphological freedom. Transgenderism is the first step to a broader program of "allow everyone to have the body that they want."
And conversely, there are a lot of conspiracy-minded people on the right who argue against transgenderism on the grounds that it's the first step towards transhumanism - the NWO wants to convince us to give up our attachment to our natural bodies, so they can get us to install the 5G nanomachines and turn us into cyborg slaves. Or something like that.
Yes, but I'm disagreeing that transhumanism is right-coded.
I mean, yeah it has...interestingly "high tech" has become to be right-coded in the mainstream discourse, or I am wrong in that?
Has anyone here successfully studied themselves as a data point of ONE, to lose weight or improve on some health measure, by trying different things, keeping intelligent notes, and seeing what works for you?
If so, how did you do it?
I'm looking for guidance. Thanks.
I study my HRV data. Insights, so far: Alcohol consumption is a stressor, except when its not. And the COVID vaccinations were heavy stressors with weeks of recovery, worse than dental surgeries. And I should live in the woods.
How do you define a stressor? Makes the body do extra work, so, for instance, a long run would be a stressor? Damages the body in a way the body cannot repair? Damages the body in a way thee body has to work hard to repair?
In this context, I consider anything I perceive as reducing my parasympathic activity because it correlates to lower rmssd as a stressor. A long run may have such an effect. The app I use was intended for endurance training so the example fits well. I have to contact the developer because he only has three stages of drinking (nothing, a little and too much) while I document mg of alcohol and my subjective level of "too much" varies.
No particular insight, but my weight dropped fairly significantly while I was on invisalign, which limited me to being able to eat ~3 times a day for ~30 minutes at a time. I'm a bit concerned this might encourage some form of binge eating and starvation, but not being able to snack in between apparently had enough of an effect that I dropped ~20 pounds in ~3 months without changing much else about my diet.
I have tracked my productivity over the last few years. Basically a spreadsheet where I record, at the end of the day, how many effective hours I got done in the day. (In my job as in many others, it is distressingly easy to spend hours in front of the computer and not get anything done). It's been revealing. For example, after I started running last hour, my productivity shot up dramatically. I knew that already, in an intuitive sense, but having the actual numbers was really helpful for convincing myself to keep up with the exercise routine.
Are you looking for success with the studying part, or with the losing-weight-or-healthing-upwards part?
The former I have no clue about, not one for note-keeping and spreadsheets. The latter...frustratingly, most of the Everybody Knows stuff works just fine on me, so it'd mostly be a rehash of the usual canards. If you'd like a recap of working common knowledge from someone who's maintained ~20% lower weight vs last decade's setpoint, I'd be happy to retell that story.
If you've written it up, I'd love to read. Is there such a "best practices" that applies to everyone? Yes, losing some weight and keep it off is a key goal. Strength, flexibility, better health parameters overall...
Thanks to you and other commenters here for responding to me here!
I guess I want the "quantified self" approach to understand what works and what doesn't *for me* because the recommendations out there seem contradictory.
And my memory is not reliable for these details over a period of several months. I need to be super disciplined for recording all this, and I am not great at that either.
I do intermittent fasting. I eat minimally processed food. And I don't seem to exercise much (too boring).
Check out Quantified Self website. That's what they're all into doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet
Well, if I had the conscientiousness to systematically analyze health interventions, I would probably also have the the conscientiousness to count energy intake or whatever. :-/
I can thus only offer trivial (and not very rigorous) observations about myself:
- The half-life of candy within my flat seems to be measured in days, so it is likely not a good idea to have any around. By contrast, frozen things which have to be thawed in advance last much longer. Why I would probably be unprincipled enough to eat a piece of cake right now if I could, I have little impulse to to start thawing one so that future me can enjoy it. Let that bastard eat bread.
- Sports work better for me when I am distracted from the fact that I am doing sports. Running is terrible in that way (unless you are running from big cats or something, which generally does not lead to beneficial health outcomes {{citation needed}}). Team sports (given that they are conceptually far away from anything I was subjected to in PE class) would probably work better for me.
> Sports work better for me when I am distracted from the fact that I am doing sports.
Have you tried Dance Dance Revolution? It is a sport that is also a computer game, kind of. You need to buy a dancing pad, the software is free (StepMania).
> I’m limited to Substack’s features
I imagine Scott could ask Substack to implement such an option and also recommend to other people to do the same. One person asking probably won't do much, but after several people asking it might actually get onto the roadmap.
Personally I do not think that Scott getting martyred for free speech would be the best possible use of his time. We already had a similar situation when the SSC reddit became unable to host the the culture war discussion thread (from what I recall), leading to themotte, whose primary point is that it is not run by Scott, so he does not get blamed for it.
While the culture war threads are not restricted to opinions within the general overton window, there are still rules in place. The unmoderated content in his thought experiment would have fewer rules (e.g. "No CSAM, no bomb manuals" or whatever).
I predict that within hours, an army of trolls would probe how serious his commitment to free speech was. Expect crude holocaust denial, name calling, racist jokes, possibly crime-related communication, and all other sorts of garbage.
Another hour behind that (unless they happen to also be a troll) would be the outraged mob. "How can you host a comment saying X?" They will try to cancel/deplatform ACX. Complaining to substack, figuring out how principled they (and their ISPs) are on free speech. Perhaps DDoS. Or affecting the offline life of their victim. I would not wish that on anyone, let alone on Scott.
Or perhaps everyone would just shrug, think "well, that is about the same as /b/ was" (not that I could comment on that, having never visited it) and get on with their lives and find something more worthwhile to be outraged about. I don't know.
I guess it's the good point that the trolls would abuse this capacity to attack the platform. But that's true for any platform, be it Scott or any other. And any platform that allows witches to communicate (or visibly exist) will be attacked by witch hunters - so doesn't that invalidate the whole idea Scott was proposing, or at least make it useless?
I have recently watched this 30 minute video with John Oliver where, according to the YouTube description, he "explains what critical race theory is, what it isn’t, and why we can expect to hear more about it in the coming months". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EICp1vGlh_U
Now maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I do not remember any part where he explained what CRT actually *is*. It seemed to me like he just spent all that time making fun of people who oppose the idea. I am being unfair here? If you think so, could you please give me the timestamp of the actual explanation in that video?
I have previously watched his explanation of the dialysis industry, which in my opinion was well done. Not sure how fair it was, but at least it felt like someone was *explaining* nontrivial things to me, and making a few jokes along the way. So I clicked to another recommended video, expecting a comparable quality... and was disappointed.
See also: Gell-Mann amnesia effect
Regarding CRT, in my experience, the leftish media I consume (e.g. the guardian) seem to only mention CRT as the bogeyman republicans are fear. They generally treat these concerns about as serious as the claim that Obama is secretly a Muslim.
I have observed comedy shows to be very partisan. I think this is less of a problem for issues already widely discussed -- whatever views on abortion they may broadcast, the average viewer was likely already exposed to a ton of other takes on the topic and so being "fair and balanced" is not required.
I remember watching an episode of one of these shows (can't recall which) about Venezuela and remember wondering if it was sponsored by the US government. I am not well informed on that topic (and do not have a horse in the race), so for all I know it could be all true that Maduro is Stalin reborn and in the process of dismantling a formerly thriving democracy. However, given the history of the US interventions in the Americas -- which were not always strictly driven by human rights concerns, but sometimes tainted by economic self-interest I think being concerned about something similar happening right now is not totally absurd.
Unlike abortion, Venezuela does not seem to be a much-debated topic in US media, so I feel that for a significant part of the viewers, the contents of that episode will basically form their view on that matter. In that case, I would indeed like some form of journalistic neutrality in that episode.
Maduro can't really dismantle a formerly thriving democracy, due to the total absence of any thriving democracy in Venezuela. You can find many words to describe Chavez' regime, but "thriving democracy" is not the ones you should reach for.
Venezuela has been mentioned a few times in the US media when it experienced a short-lived boom due to oil revenues, and some extremely gullible pundits thought it's finally would be the instance of socialism working. When it turned out, inexplicably, that socialism and toilet paper shortages are inseparable, and you can actually have fuel shortages in a major oil-producing country (the old Soviet joke: "What happens if they build socialism in the middle of Sahara desert? - They'd run out of sand."), the interest somehow waned. True socialism is still yet to be tried.
I think part of the the problem is that there are two CRTs: an actual epistomological framework that you won't encounter outside of graduate school/more advanced academics, and the term thrown around by conservative republicans to describe a wide range of behaviors. The first one is relatively easily defined but isn't really relevant to the political discourse; the latter is thrown around too much to have an agreed-upon definition.
They are different things and yet the same thing. Classic motte/bailey. The wide range of behaviors - like DIE policies, voluntary and sometimes mandatory corporate trainings, same training in government and military, "diversity" covenants that academics are required to sign, ESG policies in finances, etc. - all that are diverse behaviors that are not directly controlled by any single source, and yet they are all relying on the CRT framework (not only of course) that is provided by the academics, and ultimately reach to them for support and justification if challenged. And yes, there are layers - there would be some dense and jargon-laden academic paper, and then more popular rehash of the same, and then policy article in a specialized journal, and then a summary in training materials sold by a DIE consultancy, and then the implementation of this training by a particular consultant in a particular SP500 company. And all those would diverge a little and allow each layer, if necessary, to tell "no, this particular controversial stance is not my fault" and to disclaim any responsibility for what layers above and below are doing. But it's all part of the same structure. Arguing which layers should and should not accept label "CRT" is ultimately pointless - when we talk about it, we should talk about the whole structure and how it appears in real life, not argue about "if this true <s>socialism</s>CRT or was it still never tried?"
The reason that CRT was seized on by opponents as a metonym for the entire structure of DEI even though it is, as you noted, hardly the only source of intellectual support/justification/terminology for DEI, is because they scoured the overall structure for its least sympathetic-sounding part. It's only one step removed from the "anti-choice"/"anti-life" epithets in the abortion debate.
So you point is it's not fair to criticize the least sympathetic part of the system? Like, when we talking about USSR, it's unfair to mention the gulags, and only fair to discuss the ballet and the Sputnik (which was also made by people imprisoned in gulags, but it's unfair to mention that). Or if you make a religion which promotes universal peace and love, but also involving priests kidnapping 12 virgins each solstice and sacrificing them to the gods by cutting out their hearts and devouring them, then it's fair to discuss the peace and love part, but mentioning the heart devouring part is unfair?
Nope, it doesn't work this way. Of course it would be criticized by its worst parts - because they are the freaking worst parts! If you don't like that - get rid of the worst parts. If CRT/DIE adepts don't like to be criticized for the parts where they proclaim white people are racist from birth - maybe don't have CRT/DIE practitioners that proclaim white people are racist from birth! If they do, it's entirely fair to find this unsympathetic part and expose it. If CRT/DIE adepts regularly proclaim that math is racist and black people can't make appointment on time because being on time is a white supremacist concept - it's entirely fair to discuss it. If they publish a document where they say hard work and rational thought is part of "white culture" - then it's entirely fair to discuss that document. Yes, these are the worst examples. That's the whole point. If you want to be better, get rid of the worst parts.
It's fine to criticize the gulags, it's fine to criticize *actual* Critical Race Theory. It's not fine to call the USSR "the gulag", pretend that everybody in the USSR is in the gulag, pretend that the gulag is conceptually inseparable from the USSR as such, and claim that anybody who doesn't want to eliminate the USSR entirely is merely looking for excuses to throw more people in the gulag.
There's plenty to legitimately criticize about the USSR. While less, there's still plenty to legitimately criticize about DEI! Matt Yglesias recently criticized the fabled "document where they say hard work and rational though is part of "white culture"" [1]. That was a great article! What you don't need to and shouldn't do is make things up and straw man the entire movement.
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[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/tema-okun
I think it's completely fine to say if you support USSR - at least without making it very explicit that you are against the gulags and are on record for criticizing them, and explaining why your support for the USSR does not include that particular part - then it's fair to assume you are at least OK with the gulags. Experience shows it to be not a bad heuristics.
> pretend that the gulag is conceptually inseparable from the USSR as such
That is not a "pretend" but entirely correct statement - gulags ARE conceptually inseparable from the USSR. The only way USSR was possible is by gulags being part of it.
> claim that anybody who doesn't want to eliminate the USSR entirely is merely looking for excuses to throw more people in the gulag
That is not entirely correct, but correct with good accuracy - most of people that wouldn't want to eliminate the USSR (meaning not the people living there, but the state that created the gulags, of course) would end up supporting throwing more people in the gulag. That's how that thing works, and it can't work any other way. You can *imagine* that could be other way and delude yourself - but only for a bit, you'd end up pretty soon either with "we'll have to do some changes", after which it won't be USSR anymore, or "actually, gulags aren't that bad and in general worth it, ballet and Sputnik considered". Depends on your mental agility and compartmentalization skills, you could try to balance between them for some time, but it's not a stable state.
It doesn't mean your ultimate goal is to put more people in the gulag. Your goal may be to optimize human happiness, or production of paperclips per capita, or any other goal you would have - but if your means include the USSR, then your means are also the gulags, and there's no other way. You may internally be very sad about it, but that doesn't change the outcome.
> What you don't need to and shouldn't do is make things up and straw man the entire movement.
I didn't make up the single thing. And neither do most prominent of CRT critics - the bulk of their work is literally quoting various DIE materials and statements by various DIE/CRT activists. If you look at works of, say, Chris Rufo - you will see very extensive quotes and links, which refer to statements made by DIE/CRT theoreticians and practitioners. If you go to https://criticalrace.org/ - it has extensive links to the sources of all policies and statements mentioned. Which part is "made up"?
If we can argue about "fair/unfair" aspect - which argument, as I explained above, is wrong, there's nothing unfair in criticizing the worst part of movement's theory and practice, in fact, this is the only criticism that is worth anything, if you avoid criticizing the worst, you're not doing anything - but at least this is argument-worthy. The charge of "making things up" is plain falsity.
Of course the movement is composed of different people, and not all of them have the same thoughts and the same goals. But as long as they are part of the movement that contains the worst parts, and are embracing, supporting and advancing those part, instead of denouncing and eliminating them from the movement - these parts are as much part of the movement as they are, and are a fair target for criticism as the part of the movement.
I would agree with this: in graduate school for library science, where we actually went into all this stuff, CRT was by *far* the most obnoxiously-presented framework, even though it wasn't actually ridiculous and had it use cases. But there's a reason that the Republican strategists decided to go with "critical race theory" and not "post-structuralism" even though a lot of the time they're essentially attacking equally (while employing post-structuralism themselves!)
more precisely its the use of the first definition to invalidate questions about those behaviors that use the second definition, rather than engaging in the defense of those behaviors.
Isn't the burden of labour here on the conservatives to establish that second definition, though? If there are specific behaviours that are a problem, then refer to them clearly instead of confusing them with an old piece of legal esoterica.
Of course, this might require giving up a term that really is a delightful linguistic concoction for the purpose of riling up the conservative audience: Critical (evocation of crisis AND academic chicanery in one), Race (self-explanatory), and Theory (something dreamt up in academia and crammed down normal people's gullets like it's a real thing). I can see why it's a piece of rhetorical real estate worth fighting for.
Well then, let's take the educators at their word (any thing I looked up about Critical Race Theory rooted it in legal theory and kept attributing it to Kimberlé Crenshaw).
So if it's in schools, it's not CRT (Critical Race Theory), it's CRT (Culturally Responsive Teaching). There we go - that preserves the acronym and is the chosen descriptor by those engaging in it, so surely there won't be any objections if conservatives use that term?
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05
"Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
...Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.
Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.
Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.
As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment."
So there you go. And what is Culturally Responsive Teaching?
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/culturally-responsive-teaching-culturally-responsive-pedagogy/2022/04
"For decades, researchers have found that teachers in public schools have undervalued the potential for academic success among students of color, setting low expectations for them and thinking of cultural differences as barriers rather than assets to learning.
In response, scholars developed teaching methods and practices—broadly known as asset-based pedagogies—that incorporate students’ cultural identities and lived experiences into the classroom as tools for effective instruction. The terms for these approaches to teaching vary, from culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy to the more foundational culturally relevant pedagogy. Though each term has its own components defined by different researchers over time, all these approaches to teaching center the knowledge of traditionally marginalized communities in classroom instruction. As a result, all students, and in particular students of color, are empowered to become lifelong learners and critical thinkers.
...Culturally responsive teaching means using students’ customs, characteristics, experience, and perspectives as tools for better classroom instruction.
...What is culturally sustaining pedagogy, and how is it different than culturally relevant teaching?
Schools are still places where white norms are considered the default standard in the curricula, behavioral expectations, linguistic practices, and more. Culturally sustaining pedagogy says that students of color should not be expected to adhere to white middle-class norms, but their own cultural ways of being should be explored, honored, and nurtured by educators.
...Culturally responsive teaching also must have an element of critical consciousness, where students are empowered to critique and analyze societal inequities. For example, Teddi Beam-Conroy, an associate teaching professor at the University of Washington, was teaching the Declaration of Independence to a class of 5th graders. When they got to the line that said, “All men are created equal,” Beam-Conroy asked her students, “Who were the men who were considered equal at that point?” To illustrate the point, she asked everyone to stand up—and then told them to sit down if they didn’t identify as male, if they didn’t identify as white, or if their parents rented instead of owned a home. "
I feel like the Left, though, is happy to play the definitions game all day long.
If the Right comes up with another label to describe the class of thing they're objecting to, then the Left will object to that label too -- either it's "too vague, I don't know what you're talking about" (like "woke") or it's "too specific, it actually means something different" (like "critical race theory").
See also Freddie's excellent essay "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand " https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
Yeah, I've read that essay (and agreed with the spirit of it; I'm usually appreciative when Freddie calls for the US left to have more balls). Personally, I come down firmly on the side of specificity, but CRT, by referring wrongly to something specific and being obscure jargon to boot, goes back around to being another Rorschach test, no better than "woke."
Specificity would sharpen the argument on both sides, too. If the right objects to a class of proposals such as that there be more Black-sounding names in math problems or greater acknowledgement of the contributions of al-Andalus to the field, that's one thing. If they object to a class of proposals of the form that since socioeconomics (and therefore race) play a role in access to advanced classes that lead to calculus, we should remove calculus as an admissions litmus test for some university programmes that might not need it, that's slightly different. But it's convenient to conflate and convenient not to articulate precisely what the problem is.
I was less than impressed with that essay. The people in question use terms like "anti-racis(t/m)", "feminis(t/m)", "LGBTQ activis(t/m)" to describe themselves and the positions they support, and this is not so hard to find out, so his not even mentioning such terms as possibilities makes the essay seem disingenuous.
maybe in an academic setting, but if conservatives gain support among voters by confusing the two, that will continue. to win voters back you need to adress their concerns not tell them they are invalid by definition.
My point is not that the left has no possible responses, my point is that we can't "switch the definition" to what the conservatives use, because there is not a single thing the conservatives are referring to; CRT is used to refer to everything from "teaching literal critical race theory" to "looking at American history through a balanced lens, inviting both praise and criticism" to "even mentioning that US slavery was race-based." It's sort of designed to be impossible to really respond to or defend against, because the arguments are not specific enough to really counter: you just say "they're forcing critical race theory down our children's throats" and the only way to *really* address that substantially is to spend a bunch of time trying to break down all possible things they might be trying to talk about, at which point you've now dominated your discourse towards this one specific issue, which is precisely what the Republicans want. I think this is the main reason the left is dismissive (sometimes to a tone-deaf degree); it might not be "winning" to refuse to play, but it's losing to engage.
Yep.
John Oliver is not so much an educational program as a series of talking points presented in fairly formulaic fashion with comedic interludes. If you want to know the basic progressive/elite left consensus on an issue he's pretty good. But even on stuff like dialysis he's pretty bad at actually educating people on the issues on something more than a surface level. I expect his overview of CRT is less suffering from purposeful obfuscation and more that he rarely actually explains ll that much.
I never watched his show, only saw him on TDS...how does Oliver compare to Trevor Noah?
Oliver is certainly a talented comedian. Though his political stances are usually quite nonsensical to me, I can appreciate his considerable capabilities it the comedy arena. Didn't watch Trevor Noah much, but from what I saw Oliver is well above him, comedian-wise. Maybe it's just roles they are playing, but that's my feeling.
Oliver's the more talented comedian to be sure. Last Week tonight tends to have a few small leads and summaries but focuses on a "deep dive" (~20-30 minutes) on a specific topic. Usually something of interest to his audience which, as far as I can tell, is well off coastal liberals.
I put deep dive in quotes because, while deeper than a seven minute Daily Show segment, they're still pretty shallow. They're also more openly willing to advocate for their preferred solution and will directly endorse plans or condemn candidates and the like. In contrast Trevor Noah's got the same three-ish segments that are humorous takes on current events and is more reactive to what's currently in the news.
I'll second this. I find him quite funny, even if the political take is sometimes groan worthy.
Haven't watched the video, but seen many other John Oliver videos. If I make a guess that his point is "people opposing CRT just oppose the idea that black people are people/have rights/suffered from injustices/that there's racism/that there was slavery in history/that we need to avoid discriminating minorities", and similar motte/bailey arrangements, and he is mocking people for it, while not advancing a positive argument of what CRT is about, would I be very far from the goal?
You have guessed correctly, but even the way you described it here sounds more explicit than the actual video, if I remember it correctly.
It was more of a "people opposing CRT are... uhm, silly, let's laugh at them".
Thank you, the books sound interesting! And thanks for covering both sides.
What I am specifically interested in here, is that it seems that some people propose -- and other people oppose -- teaching something specific at schools. Or rather, training teachers to do something specific. I would really like to figure out *what* exactly both sides are referring to.
I am not asking what is racism, or whether racism is real, or whether it is the most important problem in the world. I want to know the specific things that the teachers are told to do, in the name of fighting racism. Are they perhaps required to introduce debates about racism into math lessons, or perform weekly struggle sessions and apologize for their whiteness? This is the type of answer I am looking for. If I were at the school where the teachers are doing "the thing that the current controversy is about, in exactly the way it was proposed", what exactly would I see them doing?
Or maybe there isn't a specific proposal yet, just a vague idea of doing something inspired by CRT? Like, maybe each school is doing something completely different? I have no idea.
Here you go:
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmc.asp
How does this work from the perspective of a teacher?
Suppose someone comes to the school and says "hello, here is my independently designed course called 'how to punch your inner Nazi', feel free to meet me each Tuesday evening", and the teacher says "thanks, but no thanks"... and that's it?
As far as I know, there are organizations that prepare course materials to be used by teachers. If you just come out of the blue to the teacher, they'd probably send you on your way, but if, say, a local Union has a list of respected NGOs that prepare model curricula and accessory materials and recommended textbooks, and one of these models would be "how to punch your inner Nazi" and the teacher may be on the lookout for a DIE-flavored course she was asked to add because you can't not have anything about diversity, we're not in Jim Crow era anymore... Then she might have a choice of either spend a very considerable time making a new course from scratch - or using this convenient prepared one, which yes, also talks a lot about punching Nazis, but is it really that bad? After all, she doesn't have to present all the punching parts to the class if she doesn't want to...
I'm not saying it's always the way it happens, but it definitely can be one way it happens.
I just had some exemplary customer service from HP, and there are a couple of policies I recommend in general. One is that they asked me at the beginning what I'd already tried. This is great. I'd already done a number of the usual things.
They gave me a service ticket, so that if the chat ended (it did), we didn't have to start from scratch. (I'm looking at you, LabCorps.)
These are simple, objective policies. The more complex part is hiring smart people and giving them enough time to do a good job.
The specific issue is a paper feed problem in an Envy 6000 printer, and I can post details if anyone cares. HP didn't solve the problem, but they're sending me a replacement printer.
This is a considerable improvement from their customer service last time I had an experience with them, which was ~10 years ago. It's nice to hear. Maybe I should consider recommending them to people again.
Hewlett Packard? That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Two generations of my family made their careers (sometimes their entire fortunes) off that place...I think we still have a couple of those old-fashioned Actual Gold Pensioner's Watches around somewhere.
Growing up, the stories were always about This Once Great Company that had a Downfall and Stopped Providing For Families (tech version of General Motors)...so it's nice to hear they're still around and apparently not all bad.
There are many movies depicting the evils of Nazi regime; for example "Schindler's List". Are the similar movies depicting the evils of Communist regime? If you know them, please post names.
To explain my criteria:
I want movies containing stories, not mere documentaries. Movies based on real characters or events are okay, of course.
I want the movie to show the suffering of people living in the regime. Can be the average people, or can be people who were especially persecuted e.g. because of their faith. (Not outsiders fighting against the regime, e.g. Rambo.) It must be the regime that initiates violence against the protagonist.
I quite liked this recent one, Leave No Traces (2021).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13473548/?ref_=ttrel_rel_tt
Despite the initial impression, it's not really about police brutality - the violent incident is the start of the movie, instead it deals with the aftermath. The way the regime tries to cover the incident up, wiretap everyone involved, find, bribe and threaten witnesses... It's really good at depicting the way the system searched for any lever they can use to turn a citizen into their agent.
Leviathan.
I think Animal Farm got turned into at least one movie. Not sure if it has a protagonist, though.
The 1994 film "To Live" (活着) by Zhang Yimou fits your criteria, it follows a family through 50 years of Chinese communism and explores how various policies impact them. It's also a very good film. I can also vouch for The Lives of Others and Chernobyl (though the latter has some fake news issues) that have been mentioned.
If you're open to book suggestions, Mo Yan's "Life and death are wearing me out" also follows the protagonist family through various eras of communism but has a more whimsical framing.
"Unbearable Lightness of Being" was pretty popular in its day.
Oh, I have seen that one. Technically, it shows problems with socialism (the guy is blacklisted from practicing medicine, because of some interview he gave to a newspaper), but 90% of the movie is about sexual life of the protagonists. :D
I wouldn't say it discusses or even attempts to illustrate the problems of socialism like a class on the subject does. But much of the main events in the film are driven by what it's like to live under the Soviet boot (not nice), and I think there is some intertwining of the themes of betrayal and pretence that are related to what that life was like.
Dr Zhivago doesn't show either the Reds or the Whites in a terribly good light. Though I lose track of what exactly is in the film vs the book.
Can you recommend some movies set in Nazi Germany - not ones dealing with the horrors of its militarism, or of its genocide/persecution of minorities, but more on the ordinary domestic experience of living in that kind of state? I would have said if anything there are fewer films (or books for that matter) about life in Nazi Germany compared to works about life under communism, perhaps because the communist experience was longer/more widespread/often didn't morph into active militarism
Vichy France - not Germany - but “Mr. Klein “ by Joseph Losey is pretty good.
Casablanca is set in a French colony under Vichy control, not in the Reich proper, but it does have more of the focus on ordinary domestic circumstances that you're looking for here. Although it also suffers somewhat from having been produced in the US while the war was still ongoing (1942), so it's got Allied propaganda elements, and it was made with restricted access to good info on what life under the Nazis or Vichy was actually like.
I do not think there are tons of apolitical films set in the Reich. Any movie produced within Nazi Germany should probably be considered propaganda until proven otherwise. And for some reason, few makers of apolitical movies (e.g. romantic comedies) are setting their story in that period.
It has been decades since I watched it, but I think "Hitlerjunge Salomon" (aka "Europa Europa") shows some aspects of everyday life in the Reich.
"Der Stellvertreter" contains some scenes taking place within German society, but is mostly about the holocaust.
Death of Stalin is pretty silly and funny, but I think gets across the true horror and madness that was the top of that regime. Especially if you know a bit about the characters.
There is the mind-blowing Georgian movie "Repentance" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repentance_(1987_film) ). There's a subtitled version on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90LukX3eSgM
It's a rather fantastic allegory, but the evils of the regime are described very accurately - up to certain scenes which are exactly as they were described by survivors.
Fair warning: if you see it, you might not be able to unsee it.
Operation Hyacinth, about the Polish communist regime persecuting gay men in Warsaw, came out last year and is very good. It is in Polish with subtitles available in English.
Mr. Jones, The Lives of Others, Katyn. Not a movie but the Chernobyl miniseries could fit. It falls slightly outside your criteria, but The Death of Stalin is good if dark comedy is your jam.
Katyn is about an important event, but a fucking terrible movie, sorry.
The problem with Polish movies about the evils of communism is that back then they were illegal, and now they're cringe and associated with lunatic far-right hacks. There's a few good ones that made it somehow, but Katyn is not one of them.
That one I haven't actually seen it just came to mind
Death of Stalin was brilliant. While it is comedy, it is depressing to know it is not far from the truth.
The first one that leaps to mind "The Lives of Others", a 2006 German film (released in the US with subtitles) about the surveillance state in late East Germany.
For a broader selection, wikipedia has category pages for "Films critical of communism", "Films about Soviet repression", and "Films about the Holodomor":
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_critical_of_communism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_Soviet_repression
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_the_Holodomor
Beat me to it. The Lives of Others is fantastic.
Looking through the bans, the PEG one seems unnecessary. It highlighted that one man's deeply rooted belief is another man's absurdity, and that some such beliefs are labelled religion, while others are labelled "science" or "reality." It was not particularly polite, but describing reality without sharing someone's dogmas often seems impolite. The reality of a trans existence becomes "magic," just as a god becomes a "sky daddy."
The Bernard Gress ban also seems excessive, although less so. Sure it is grating, but I think in general it is worth it to lower the average quality of comments while raising the variance in their content. So although the comment didn't elaborate, it did provide an alternative perspective and was not overly offensive.
Obviously, any comment that would result in a user ban wouldn't be a great comment, I just don't personally think those two warranted bans.
Conversely, the Descriptor and Impassionata ones seemed more overtly hostile, and seemingly ban-worthy.
The Machine Interface one seems difficult to understand. He was accused of "Attacking other commenters, falsely accusing them of ideas they don't believe." But he cited exact quotes from the user that said precisely what he accused him of. Letting other users know what sort of stuff a user has written so they can choose to engage with them or not seems helpful and productive - certainly not banworthy.
I disagree strongly with your contention that the Bernard Gress ban was excessive. I'd suggest that it's exactly what Scott wants the least of on his blog, and for good reason. It was gratuitous, offensive and entirely unsupported, which is perhaps the most important part. To call an entire movement (one which the blog author is very sympathetic to) as 'pathological' without a single word of explanation or justification is about as ban-worthy as I can imagine
It's worth pointing out that I share Bernard Gress's view. But I try not to express it without some attempt at defending it.
The banned comments are a little harder to judge than the warnings because only one of the reported comments is provided, so I extended a little more of a benefit of a doubt if some of them didn't seem ban-worthy in isolation.
The original Machine Interface comment that got the warning didn't have the cites provided later, and it had a quotation that wasn't a quote, and made a mistake in the attributed belief by substituting "Asians" for "Arabs". Presumably this mistake would be important to the poster in question. A warning seemed appropriate, although "50% of a ban" severity seemed a bit high to me, especially with the poster who was attacked being someone who ended up banned within the week ...
I find myself often thinking about situations/topics where reasonable and smart people seem to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. I'll give two examples of the kind of topics I have in mind:
1) The limit/existence of human agency. I think most people who don't ascribe to the notion of a soul think that our actions are for the most part pre-determined (putting aside any quantum shenanigans). Here I have in mind the kind of people who are influenced by things like The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel, and who believe that our actions are some function of our society, culture, upbringing, genetics, etc. and are not determined by our personal "will". At the same time, very few of these individuals will apply this logic to situations that are far uglier. In those cases, the language used implies that certain individuals involved could have acted otherwise if they just wanted to enough.
2) The objectivity/subjectivity of art. For many people the language they use when describing movies/paintings/books/games they like implies that there is some objective way to grade these things. They'll say stuff like "x is a masterpiece" or "y is a very good movie". Yet, if you push them enough, or if they don't enjoy something that is generally well-received by critics, they jump to a subjective view of art. They'll then say stuff like "there's no such thing as 'good' art, it's a matter of taste and taste is relative".
I think a common thread across these situations is that our reasoning really clashes with our intuitions. If we think about the nature of the universe, it seems very likely that our actions are determined but it definitely doesn't feel that way. Similarly, when I watch a really good movie I feel that it's objectively good, but I have a hard time making a coherent theory of aesthetics to justify my feelings. If anyone has any thoughts on scenarios like this, or any links to share, they would be well appreciated.
For question two, it's fairly common to think that something is good but you personally don't like it, or that something is bad or mediocre, but you personally like it a lot. That's not a contradiction. Some people will insist on rationalising that everything they like is "good" and everything they dislike is "bad", and those people might get into some epistemic trouble if their opinion goes against the common consensus in their group. But saying something like "this is a good movie by movie making standards, it is well made and tells a coherent story, but I don't like it for this or that reason" is totally consistent.
I agree with you but this isn't quite the situation I'm referring to. The people I have in mind won't say things like "Citizen Kane is objectively good but I just don't like it and would rather watch Fast 5" they'll instead sometimes say things like "This movie I like is a master piece" and "The Oscars are stupid because movie quality is subjective"
On my "intersubjective" view picking something like the single best movie of the year does seem like kind of a fool's errand even if taste is shared enough that you can *universally* call something a "masterpiece", simply because "the tails come apart".
Steelmanning these scenarios:
1) Determinism is not at all incompatible with human agency. The circumstances leading up to the act determine what sort of agent the human is, and then the agentive human acts, deterministically, in accordance with their nature and the *immediate* circumstance. It is not the concept of "will" that is wrong or incoherent, but rather the specific view of "will" as being some sort of magic separate and somehow "above" cause and effect. If you accept this, then actions can be praiseworthy or blameworthy even though they can be traced to antecedent causes.
A variety of views are possible within this framework. On one extreme, you assign all credit and blame to the circumstance and none to the agent ever. (I don't think anybody really does this.) On the other extreme, you take agency as "screening off" all credit and blame and assign everything to the agent and nothing to antecedent causes. (People *do* do this, it's a way of "things adding up to normal" for some people.) What I think is most common is inbetween, where credit and blame are either split or duplicated between the agent's decision and earlier causes.
You also have a split between people who view credit/blame as something normative, and those who view it as something purely instrumental. Determinism probably pushes people towards the "purely instrumental" view. From the normative point of view, someone who believes in the instrumental point of view will probably seem to equivocate between blaming the circumstances or the agent depending whether their focus in discussion is society-wide policy or an individual case; for the instrumentalist, there simply is no fact of the matter as to which is "really" to blame for a bad outcome.
2) I think rather than "objectivity" or "subjectivity" of art a better framework is "intersubjectivity"--art is fundamentally subjective, but our subjective valuations of art are predictably not independent of each other, so we can still meaningfully talk about objective characteristics of art making it "better" or "worse" at least within a common frame of "similar tastes". What's switching back and forth here is not necessarily any absolute view on the nature of art, but just the perception of whether or not there's enough alignment of tastes across the discussion to make an "objective" frame a productive one or not.
Are you just getting at the distinction between reasoning and rationalization, and how surprisingly hard it is for even the owner of the mind in question to tell the difference?
It's an interesting question *why* we have such sophisticated abilities to rationalize stuff, so much so that it's very hard to tell the difference between a superb rationalization and correct reasoning. What's the use of this? It isn't in order to get at the truth -- that's what reasoning is about -- it's about how to argue that something you've already decided upon for other reasons is the truth.
There are two possibilities that spring to mind:
(1) Emotional denial. If you have some truth that is just too hard to bear, emotionally speaking, like you killed someone out of carelessness, or perhaps your own or your child's mortality, then rationalization is a way to blunt the emotional impact to keep yourself functional. This seems like a good survival trait among a reflective conscious species, such as ours.
(2) Group persuasion. Perhaps there is value in a group decision that is taken a bit in advance of a factual basis persuasive to all, e.g. a brilliant or creative person realizes the truth of Proposition X, but the rest of the tribe doesn't have the wit or experience to follow the reasoning. It can have significant survival benefit to the tribe if Mr./Ms. Thought Leader is able to persuade the rest of the tribe using something other than the true reasoning -- some form of rationalization, which may make use of tribal prejudices, emotional attitudes, social shibboleths or motivations. I mean, the difference between a Pied Piper and a Visionary Leader is...subtle. Sometimes only history can tell the difference.
Determinism i.e. lack of "free will" is perfectly compatible with various ways of motivation, guilt, punishment and changing of behavior.
Even if a certain individuals actions were/are solely determined by some function of individual genes, upbringing, past experiences and current external circumstances, criticizing and/or punishing them matters, because the expectation of that could have resulted in a different action - it's just that we wouldn't call it "a change of heart" but rather "a change in external circumstances", because whatever "non-free will" results in actions does take into account things like expectation of physical and social consequences.
Are you saying that we should punish/criticize these individuals so they can serve as an example for other individuals in the future, or that we should punish/criticize these individuals because they knew there were expected social/physical consequences at the time they committed the actions? If it's the former I do agree with you, but I don't think that's how most people view the situation. My problem isn't with the idea of punishing/criticizing people who commit crimes, it's that our notion of human agency isn't consistent across different situations when it seems like it should be
> In a Challenge Mode Open Thread, I‘ll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.
Fair enough. Only ... this means I won't ever see what fell below your threshold (until it happens to me), and I won't be able to adjust my own calibration accordingly. This is also true more broadly: folks won't see what counts as not accepted.
I don't have a good solution though. In general just deleting those comments sounds nicer than the alternatives.
I predict that Scott will delete less than 5% of comments. But for a short time there will be less ban-worthy comments anyway.
Comment survivorship bias!
It'll be interesting to see if the total comment count reaches anywhere near as high. Some will sit out rather than face the shame of being deleted (raises hand). Perhaps others will take it in Contra terms..."Are You Man Enough To <s>Save The President</s> Comment In Challenge Mode?" And of course, some people won't notice the announcements anyway and will be confused about why their posts don't show up in next OT.
Personal prediction: fewer but higher-quality comments, more skewed towards The Usual Suspects veteran personalities, about perennially popular rather than unorthodox topics. At least it'll make the midterms reaction gifs less painful to read. (Coincidence?)
And lacking for a measuring stick, you will overshoot the mark so as to avoid falling short: not only do we increase SNR by trimming off the fat, we also encourage the meat to be meatier!
They could be the highlight of the next Open Thread, like the ban/warning list is in this one. "These comments didn't make the cut last Challenge". Maybe even set up some automatic function that reposts them.
I miss the hidden open threads. Much fewer number to read, and I could ask more intimate/ personal questions... which I don't feel as comfortable doing on the open threads. More comments is more noise.
Oh, I'd also approve of a rule that says each person can only start one new thread, though they can comment on other threads as much as they wanted.
I think if one person makes three careful arguments, one about free markets, one about AI, and one about AI and one about discussion quality in open threads, it would be fair for them to make three top level posts for them. On the other hand, making one top level post giving a short abstract of each argument and then self-replying three times to post their actual arguments, while asking other posters to not reply to the top level post would achieve the same thing. (Apart from substack notifying the people interested in discussion of free markets to the AI replies and so on.)
What I do really dislike are the (almost) bare link top posts. twitter link + hot take. Or 'read my blog article', with no summary (fine for classified threads, though). Generally, I would expect top level posts to adhere to higher standards. In the discussion, there will be posts with the content of "actually, I agree with your minor correction to my comment", which do not have much meat on their own.
Right, the top post needs to be of high quality.
(For which I am mostly a fail. :(
There's a huge first-mover advantage to getting a top-level post in while an OT is still fresh, so I wouldn't want to narrow that window of opportunity even further. We already get plenty of "I asked this in a previous OT, but it was too late for traction, so I'm reposting it..." type threads.
HOTs are nice for extra-personal stuff; I also like reserving extra-spicy topics for the hidden threads, mostly out of lingering paranoia of getting doxxed, haha. Won't stop anyone with halfway serious intent, but feeling-safe is certainly correlated with openness-to-posting-controversial. At least for me.
Re-asking if fine, and yeah the fact that first to post gets more attention is part of the problem. I guess part of my thought is if there were less threads started, there would be more attention paid to each one.... pick your most important question for that week. Hmm a single always open OT would get rid of the first to post problem.
As far as HOT's I also like the limited number of people. I feel like I sorta know a bit about the posters on the HOT and so like friends I can judge their response... 'mumble mumble, Dunbar number.'
I'll most likely get them back some day, I just wanted to experiment with alternatives.
I understand. You want to make the discussions better... and so let's try throwing things at the wall and see what sticks. I approve of this. As a dream of better discussions, I loved the usernet model, where it was one continuous open thread. Many advantages, with a discussion on a topic started, then someone brings it up again, you can go back and point them to the older thread... "Well here is what we all said about this before, do you have anything interesting to add or ask about?" It also lets one go back and more easily find old threads that you wanted to read again... or find a reference in. Here it is sometimes back to square one, when an older topic is brought up again, like Groundhog Day, and that gets old and boring.
I'm not sure what's gained by only letting people start one new topic per open thread.
OK this is probably just a personal preference. I much prefer a few threads that go deeply into a topic, rather than twenty that are shallow. On the HOT's there would often be half a dozen threads started by the same person within minutes of each other. (I usually just skip them so no big deal to me really.) I would much prefer one well thought out question/ discussion topic, where the OP, put more thought into it, really fleshed out their opinion, or question and we could have a deep, meaty talk about it.
Anyway this doesn't have to be a rule, but maybe just a suggestion for better threads.
(I'm dreaming of starting a discussion, of how suffering is necessary, and so in some ways 'good'. ... It gets hard to do because in almost every individual instance of suffering, it's easy to say, "yeah this is bad, it would be better if it didn't happen." And yet in total... or from the next level up, or somewhere, suffering is good. I know this needs a lot of work.)
Are there any ACX community in Lyon, France?
What are the current options for a barely responsible wannabe pharmacist who's trying to lose weight? Something not as lethal as DNP but not as ineffective as moderate exercise.
According to SMTM, eat potatoes.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/lose-10-6-pounds-in-four-weeks-with-this-one-weird-trick-discovered-by-local-slime-hive-mind-doctors-grudgingly-respect-them-hope-to-become-friends/
Occasionally fasting for ~48h has an outsized impact as well, IME.
Seeing alot of supplement or medicine suggestions, and wanted to mention alternative I don't see mentioned. Fwiw, I lost about 100 lbs on a strict low carb diet over the course of about 9mos iirc. IME diet is far more of a factor than the exercise.
I also endorse this method but will say I found it much more difficult and harder to sustain than medication.
Much easier if you can eat at home almost all the time, or prepare your meals. Very difficult if you eat out alot, especially fast food.
Just beware that low carb eating and keto type diets can increase your LDL cholesterol if that's a concern. It's effective, but if cholesterol is an issue, you may look for another approach, due to saturated fats mainly.
I use Intermittent Fasting (16:6, 20:4 or 23:1) combined with whole grains, fruit and vegetable. I find that the whole grains keep down blood sugar spikes and there is a very positive hormonal reaction, where you do not feel strong hunger pangs, even with the 23:1 protocol, or One Meal A Day (OMAD).
Moderate exercise will help your fitness, but weight is lost with food. I tried a form of slow-release amphetamine prescribed by a doctor in the past, but it just didn't work for me.
Semaglutide is pretty dang effective but also pretty expensive. I've heard the knock-off variants ok but I haven't put in any effort to verify this myself.
Agree with this, I have a post on semaglutide coming up which might help.
If you can't get semaglutide, Qsymia is a potentially unpleasant but often effective alternative.
If you can't get any of those, stimulant of your choice, Wellbutrin would probably be the easiest. Or you can homebrew Qsymia out of phentermine and topiramate.
Fasting?
Get a Vyvanse prescription, nowadays I skip breakfast, take Vyvanse, go about my day, don't get hungry until about 7pm and eat one 1200-1400 calorie meal.
That said I have found it tends to trigger binging when I'm not on it, so for this method to be effective moderation is needed.
That said, I think losing weight is a worse health goal for most people than "increase cardiovascular fitness". My weightloss is entirely about aesthetics, frankly at some detriment to my actual health.
After being aggravated by too many bad press releases* about epigenetic inheritance, I've decided to write a post series explaining how epigenetics really works. The first post, which covers the basics of epigenetic marks, is here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/what-is-epigenetics
Later posts will cover the epigenetics of the mammalian germline, and why transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in mammals is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
*Like this one, which tries to apply a result about C. elegans sperm to humans, when they're extremely different biologically: https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/09/epigenetic-inheritance.html
Thank you for doing this, and looking forward to the final argument.
Thank you for this! For years I’ve been hearing epigenetic hand-wavey Lamarckian evolution stories and the mechanisms involved just slide out of my mind shortly after. Maybe another pass through will nail things down a bit better
Excellent work!
Reminds me of an example of epigenetic determinism I found in the wild, where the author was arguing in favor of the welfare state by claiming that it's impossible for the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps because of their inferior epigenomes. Shades of Scott's Gattaca post!
This is not based on any epigenetic mechanism, but stress from economic poverty has been shown to retard brain development at a very early age, even at one month of age! See this article, for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17227
I seem to recall Scott being really wary of this entire genre of findings: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that-poverty-and-infant-eegs
...although readily admit there's a longstanding bias against sociology in this community and many of its followers. Do the bad studies cause the harsh evaluations, or the harsh evaluations cause the bad studies (to be the only ones talked about)?
Not the same thing at all. The study I linked is based on measurements of the brain size, such as cortical surface area, cortical thickness, and hippocampal volume. Furthermore, this is not the only study that shows this. The research has been repeated for different age cohorts, such as at 6 years, at 1 year, at 6 months, etc.
Re Intelligence: I always scored high on standardized testing, always in the top 2 percentile, both in childhood, college and army. So in Stanford Binet, Weshler Bellevue, SATs, NMSQT, AFQT (armed forces qualifications test) I did really well, but the deck was always stacked in my favor: culturally, not being test shy (my father was part of mid-century IPAT and we faculty children took LOTS of standardized tests), tests giving alot of weight to verbal ability (I was an early and lifelong reader), etc. So it wasn't too surprising I did well.
But my supposed "intelligence" was a peculiar kind: a general rapidity of response and quick learning in some areas, total bafflement in others. It was very quick to move laterally, not so good at in depth analyticity. So high test IQ perhaps but not translating all that well to real world abilities. I am left with a measure of skepticism of IQ tests as predictors of real world success
For what it's worth, my impression is that the outcome of a well-designed IQ test has squat to do with any learned abilities, such as language. There are definitely IQ tests that can be given to children before they are verbal. I believe some of the most powerful test items for adults have to do with the ability to rotate or otherwise manipulate 3D objects in your head, given a 2D drawing of them. I recall one test item on the kid test that had 3 puzzles pieces with which to make a horse, and the trick was that the 3rd piece was the middle of the horse and didn't look "horsey" at all -- you had to be a smarter than average kid to realize it could go between the obvious front and back parts of the horse.
But having a high IQ doesn't, alas, uniformly translate to high achievement. Indeed, in my own family I've observed that high IQ can often be a nontrivial handicap, because it short-circuits the need to develop mental discipline and patience. Very smart kids can figure stuff out so fast, they tend not to develop mental habits of patience and discipline that less smart kids need to figure the same stuff out. (For the same reason, they have a hard time developing the ability to pace themselves, or stick to a schedule, because they can always ad hoc acceptable outcomes at the very last minute, which the less bright cannot.) It's particularly hard for parents to push these kids to develop these habits, too, because the kid can very reasonable argue that if he's getting the desired outcome, what's the problem with how he does it? In vain does one natter on about what will happen 10-20-30 years hence, when the very smart kid runs up against the limits of what he can pull out of his ass suddenly, and needs habits of mental hygiene to master.
Agree, with anecdotal evidence concerning myself. Martial arts training was helpful for developing discipline in my case. Plus the experience of being overwhelmed in a court of law-like situation.
Have you been reading my mail?
I'm always on the lookout for times when my boys fail at some task they could have easily completed had they studied/practiced/started early but chose not to. I know I wont convince them to do those things in a normal scenario where they achieve every metric an teacher gives them in school, but I've had some success in noting when they could have succeeded but didn't. I might be able to force them to do it now, but it's not building that into their personal philosophy unless they see the value and accept it themselves.
For various reasons my daughter has no such issues, and is an over-achieving perfectionist who seems to always listen to my advice about how to achieve even more. I'm honestly working on ways convince her to let things go and not always need to succeed.
I agree that the problem you describe exists, but if the kid is not being challenged, perhaps one should say that the problem lies with the adults failing to provide suitable challenges, rather than the kid being "too smart"? Current schools are atrocious in this regard. It shouldn't be difficult to just give the kid a stack of eg. math textbooks and let the smart ones do 2 years' worth each year, or whatever pace is actually appropriate for them.
Try and get back to me! Keeping an undisciplined IQ 145 kid interested for 6 hours a day would be a full time job for someone very smart herself, highly and broadly educated, with considerable time and energy resources. If you're wealthy you could hire a small team of Stanford professors, I suppose, who could take turns.
As for the math textbooks...remember the part about "lack of discipline?"
How strong are claims of IQ tests as predictors of real world success? I know a few multimillionaires. They’re not dumb, but their seeming intelligence varies significantly; their success seems much more a matter of character, competitiveness, and social moxie than sheer intellectual firepower. Likewise, I’ve known some high achieving scientists and mathematicians. The way we attach ‘success’ to those people (publication count; organizational position; degree pedigrees) varies considerably from this individuals’ basic ability to draw correct conclusions about systems in the world.
All this is to say I fully agree with you that testing well is necessary for a lot of things in the world (and surprisingly not necessary for some things, like starting businesses) but I don’t find it at all sufficient.
Do you feel like you’ve been able to find worthwhile places to put your talent to use? Separate from issues of intelligence, I know lots of people with outstanding unique talents, and relatively few of us are able to find places in the world that best use our own particular forms of genius.
I worked for a billionaire once and he always used to say "there are two people who get rich in this world: geniuses and salespeople"
Worthwhile places? Yes, but for me, all employment for the last forty odd years has just been to pay the rent. If I myself had any particular talent I'm not sure. You bring up a complex issue of potential versus actuality. Why it is so complex is because there are terribly many variables at work here- some internal to the person, many external, and how over the course of a person's life the two interact. If your last sentence were proven true, I would guess that external, economic drivers would be the problem.
"I am left with a measure of skepticism of IQ tests as predictors of real world success"
I think it is reasonable to believe that:
(a) IQ tests measure something real, and
(b) A population of 10,000 people with a high IQ will (on average) do "better" than a population with non-trivially lower IQs, but
(c) Lots of other things matter, too.
For (c) a sports example is that, for a while, hard work can keep up with more raw athletic ability. This doesn't mean that athletic ability isn't a predictor, just that there is more than raw athletic ability. I believe the same is true for IQ. Hard work and a lower IQ can compete with higher IQ and poor work ethic ... to a point.
+1
a. We want to measure intelligence, but IQ is the thing we can actually measure. IQ positively correlates with intelligence but isn't synonymous with it.
b. Intelligence is one factor in success in pretty-much any field, but only one factor, and others can swamp it. A brilliant person with a shitty work ethic can easily end up a failure.
Can't disagree. With me it's a moot point in that when I took a three hour long neuropsych exam recently, it showed in some functional areas I was "very superior" but in other areas, very poor. Aging is the great leveller sometimes.
Thank you for those helpful comments and the cites! An interesting study by Blackwell, Trzesniewski & Dweck showed that our beliefs about intelligence can effect our real world performance. If we are told that intelligence is changeable (and internalize that belief) we actually can improve our performance or halt declining performance (at least among the adolescent math students studied.