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?
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.
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?
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’d like to signal boost the Brad DeLong-Ezra Klein interview. DeLong is sooo right on 99% of what he says that it is sort of scarry to see that much of this is news to Klein.
As someone who's read a decent among of DeLong (and stuff about DeLong) my impression is that he's not well regarded outside of a certain far left bubble. Could you clarify what he's so right about and how this interview is unique from what's roughly the popular consensus economics on the far left?
Alternatively, if you accept he's a heterodox left wing economist, care to defend why he's right over the mainstream? His comments on energy were in my view particularly egregious but that's a hobby horse of mine.
I think of him as center left (what he calls a "left neo-liberal") not far left. I think he explains the way markets "crowdsource" problem solving to be well done. And while I think that many mainstream economists implicitly understand the "need" for inflation to deal with shocks requiring changes in relative prices when some absolute prices cannot easily adjust downward, I think he explains it no non economist well.
If on energy use you mean his skepticism of taxation of CO2 emissions, I agree with you. But I didn't catch that part in this interview.
As I understand it left of neoliberalism is progressivism or the far left. AOC types. So I'm not sure we disagree. Are you the type of person who thinks the most left wing politicians in the US are centrists and people like Barrack Obama are right wing?
Neither of those things seem particularly unique or the main thrust of why he's popular and seen as insightful. But I'll give it a listen anyway I suppose.
By energy I mean his insistence that global warming could not place requirements on developing nations (including, as you say, taxes but also anything else). This involved him verbally running over a climate scientist who was patiently explaining that CO2 did not respect borders. And then reduced him to some rather sputtering claims about anti-Chinese sentiment and deflection. He, in effect, twisted himself into knots to defend CO2 emissions in the developing world and specifically Mainland China. Not his finest moment.
I've never hear him on energy policy except a podcast with Noah Smith on carbon taxes.
The lowest (total global) cost way to achieve the optimal CO2 concentration the atmosphere is for all countries to tax net CO2 emissions at the same rate. To do so will have the greatest dead weight losses on countries with the most elastic demands for CO2 intensive goods. [
a tax on an inelastic good is just a lump-sum tax] Just how that breaks down by income level is probably pretty heterogeneous. The real action in the redistribution dimension is in costs of mitigation. There it seems to me that high income, historically high cumulative emissions countries ought to feel an obligation to assist countries to adjust/mitigate.
I have no idea what DeLong thinks about any of this.
Yes, I heard that too and saw the resulting Twitter fight. He was not significantly better there.
The issue with that plan, which I agree is solid in principle, is that it won't work without a global government. But that's an implementation detail of how to reduce CO2 emissions. We both agree, I think, that the rest of the world does not get to simply get a pass because they're not western or not as developed. DeLong does not. As I said, he's been quite bad on this in at least three instances.
We don't really need a world government. "All" we need to do is establish our tax on CO2 emissions an a border adjustment on imports from countries that do not have a tax on CO2 missions. Since that IS the lowest cost way of getting to any given CO2 concentration goal (and costs are coming down), in principle it should be "easy" for other countries to go along.
Now I don't think this is in fact "easy" [we have not even gotten Brad DeLong on board], but the idea that the world can get to any given CO2 concentration by different countries agreeing to reduce CO2 quantities by arbitrarily amounts is even harder, maybe even impossible.
Could you clarify exactly what you found so insightful here?
Because there's lots of things that seem...off. Not wrong but off. Like, I'm around 23:00 and Ezra asks Brad why the Fed didn't just raise interest rates during the Nixon administration. And Brad basically blames Republican collusion between the president and the Fed chair.
But this is weird because, well, the theory that monetary action by the Fed was a major factor in economic activity basically arises during the 60's. The big monetarist text, "A Monetary History of the US" by Friedman and Schwartz came out in 1963. Pre-monetarism, economists had very different theories of economic activity that didn't really feature the Fed in a central role. I'm sure they had some ideas about the role of money in the economy but asking why the Fed wasn't taking a central role here is like asking what industrialists were doing in Revolutionary America. Like, there was a bit going on, but they weren't a big thing yet.
Edit: Which again, on the wrong thing, I'm not confident Brad is wrong here, there certainly is a lot I don't know about this and Fed Chairs certainly aren't the independent actors we might hope, but this focus is weird.
I'm an economist and I already knew that Burns played footsie with Nixon; Ezra clearly did not. I agree that Brad could have been more clear about what was a mistake given what people knew then v what we know now. But the thing he got really right, the thing that is still not appreciated is that some inflation is needed, is optimal, in response to a supply shock like the two oil price increases. or the COVID shock. I also thought his explanation of how the right intertwined inflation and "permissiveness" was correct and well done. I LIVED through that period and felt I saw that more clearly in DeLong's exposition.
The necessary inflation does feel really interesting. Either in the oil crisis or the lockdown fallout now, there is just less "stuff" and some kind of inflation does seem necessary. I wish they'd developed that more because, while the concept of "sometimes supply shocks generate inflation and that's ok" is interesting, the real meat feels like in defining how much inflation, or more specifically how the Fed should react in situations where some inflation is required without losing it's credibility on inflation issues.
As for the inflation/permissiveness bit, that just kinda blended into CW because, well, this is a NYT podcast and about the most left mainstream de facto neoliberal thing there is. I dunno, I probably would have bought it from a sincere Bernie Bro but not these two.
Edit: Is there a good journal article or something that fleshes out the "necessary inflation" argument?
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)
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'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.
"In other words, the experts used eminence over evidence to make a recommendation. That is dangerous, and we have too much of it in medicine.
The practicing doctors—with their cumulative wisdom—got this one right. DCP proved that their choice of HCTZ was the correct one.
But I hope you know what my next sentence will be.
We should also not trust the collective wisdom of practicing doctors. I’ve discussed many of the colossal errors we’ve made in accepting therapies that ultimately proved ineffective or harmful."
The way forward, so beautifully shown in the DCP trial, is proper randomized trials."
Part of the reason that your own research and asking on forums is important is it broadens the space of possibilities on your radar, what to check out, what to read about. That can send you down a hypochondria hole, but it can also help you structure and prep what questions to ask a provider, and evaluate whether they're thinking or just listing off memorize Mayo Clinic articles.
Also you should generally trust-but-verify. I've had an otherwise very good doctor mess up my prescription dosages. I've had to correct a pediatrician about the age of my kids and which vaccines we were supposed to be doing that visit. I've also had a child's skin condition misdiagnosed and I had to go looking for something that seemed more correct. I've been on the phone with a medical office which was clearly using the same "guide to your child's rash" to evaluate whether we should be seen that I was using to figure out what she had.
I've also had the experience of googling one set of keywords and never happening upon a potential (and correct) diagnosis that was in the space of possibilities for the symptoms, until I searched THAT DIAGNOSIS itself, or some other less obvious combination of keywords.
I understand the instinct, but it is not clear to me that casting a wider net is actually a better strategy.
If I'm looking for needle in a haystack, is the right instinct to say get me another haystack because looking through 2 haystacks (casting a wider net) might be helpful?
Is more cancer screening always better? Not really. There can be risks (both individual and societal) to casting a wider net.
How about the problem of the curse of dimensionality? A larger variable space does not necessarily increase effectiveness of a model.
I do not think physicians are infallible, 30+ years of cross-examining them has confirmed my skepticism. But I do believe in expertise, including my own expertise at cross-examining experts.
For every time "doing your own research" is helpful, how many times is it not helpful?
It is very hard to detach oneself from a particular personal issue: your health or the health of loved ones.
There may be utility to the case study of one or the anecdote. But there is also potential loss.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." ~ Richard P. Feynman
There are two failures going on at the same time: The failure of expertise and the failure of doing your own research.
When people here have a health problem, they can't wait around for somebody to do a proper randomized trial. My doctor has NO time to discuss my health issues. She is smart, conscientious and polite, but she's got a hallway full of exam rooms with people sitting inside in johnnies waiting for her to see them. She is apparently obliged by some regulation or other to ask me certain things every time we meet, such as whether I am taking all the exact same supplements as I was 3 months ago, do I wear a helmet when I bike, and do I live with anyone who abuses me. She also has to type everything that goes on into the medical record. What she does with the remaining time is examine me carefully and tell me what to do. I can tell that she's squirming with impatience when I ask even a couple of simple follow-up questions with yes/no answers. There is no way I can spend, say, 10 mins in a brief discussion with her about my back, where I have a lifelong problem that is worsening with age. I'd really like to know whether there are any treatments worth trying, and who in town administers them well, and what results has she seen in people getting this treatment, and what is the range of possibilities for what my back is going to do over the next 20 years. She simply does not have time to do that. She pulls out a pamphlet giving generic lower back exercises, some of which I know from experience make my particular back worse. She offers to put in an order for PT.
I've got a good doctor, but that's what seeing doctors is like these days. That's why people ask smart, non-doctor acquaintances whether they know anything about the problem -- any resources, any doctors. Often you find somebody who does.
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."
Ooh, plowable snow in the forecast! I expect I’m going to have the same conversation with Mrs Gunflint where she nags me to buy her a new shovel. Every year it’s the same damn thing.
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).
Say I'm at a party and something comes up where a reference to Henry George and land value taxation makes sense. But the small groups at party have different sub configurations, i leave one group to get a drink or food and I end up talking with other people and Henry George and land value taxation comes up and I chime with a relevant tidbit that happens to be the same pearls of wisdom I previously shared.
Is my second comment unnecessary for the "party"?
Before I knew of the necessary, true, kind (2 of 3) rule, i got a 25% ban which an hour latter got edited by Scott to a 50% ban. Someone was kind enough to point me to the hidden rule.
But as I reflected on rule to me necessary seems obscure (Although your post makes it less obscure). No post is generally _necessary _, we're not first responders or brain surgeons (although some of the posts about contemplated suicide do require some necessary response - just no. don't do it!).
So I've tried to concentrate on true and kind - maybe really true and not unkind.
But I still don't even know what 25% or 50% ban actually means. Is it like a permanent record. Is there confession where it gets absolved?
Are 9 10% bans the same as 3 30% bans. A faq would help.
I've been thrown out of court by a judge, but almost all of the great litigating attorneys I know have had it happen to them. I don't want to happen again but the judge was a total jerk. I am now friendly with judge who is now off bench and occasionally an adversary.
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.
Power users on Mac or Windows probably have learned off some keyboard short cuts. There’s no need for mathematics for that. Excel is used by the people who use Excel, it’s not really math and it’s a program, it is not the OS. Nobody really needs scripting in any OS but there are ways on on all computer systems to do it. Heck the Mac could be driven as a purely unix machine. Far for being a good attribute, complexity as standard is bad for operating systems - if I’m launching the console or terminal to do a standard task then that’s a design failure.
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.
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.
"I'll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be."
Do you know about Deming's Red Bead Experiment? (Not actually invented by Deming but used by him to teach how to understand variation and think statistically. See The New Economics (1994)
Here is a alternative version to make a similar point. Suppose you had the subscribers to ACX flip 100 coins and report the amount of heads. And then you banned those with below average heads count. Do you really think that you will have created a better head flipping club?
In writing this comment, it occurs to me that I should refresh my recollection of the history of "the salon" and consider the complications with having a money making operation (your paid subscriptions) tied to the endeavor of ACX.
> And then you banned those with below average heads count.
I think it has been stressed enough that normally acceptable but low-quality comments (whatever quality means) are deleted as content without causing a ban to the author. So no better coin-flipping club, but only the comments Scott Alexander finds deserving of a chance of replies are left there to reply to.
(It is indeed unclear what the outcome will be, which is also acknowledged)
Not really. Chebyshev's inequality applies to wide range of distributions.
But even so, Shewhart and Deming didn't base their ideas of distinguishing between a special (assignable) causes of variation and a systemic causes of variation in probability theory. See Wheeler. It is an economic choice to reduce the the two types of errors.
I have no idea what relevance you think Chebyshev's inequality has to the question. If you have an explanation, I'd be glad to hear it. Nor have I heard of Shewhart and Deming, or Wheeler[1], and nor do I care, unless you would like to explain some clever insight any of them had that demonstrates that writer quality does not correlate with writer identity, an assertion which is so strongly at variance from common sense and experience that it would take an uncommonly detached sophist to credit it a priori.
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[1] Except for John A. Wheeler, the GR theorist, a name with which I am familiar, but which I doubt you mean.
Deming probably one of the most important American statisticians and management theorists of quality. He introduced sampling theory to the Census Bureau in 1940 and and statistical and management theory to post-war Japan. (Both Shewhart and Deming were originally physicists.)
Chebyshev's inequality is a theoretic basis which supports Shewhart and Deming's (Deming's mentor a Bell Labs) assertions about methods for detecting special cause variation from systemic variation. For any unimodal distribution, about 6/7 of the data will fall within three standard deviations: a normal distribution is not required! Donald Wheeler has also shown this empirically. (no quantum foam here.) You could start with a brief paper here: https://www.spcpress.com/pdf/DJW088.pdf
If I understood you, you made a claim that quality needed to be a random variable. But that really makes no sense to me. For almost any "statistically stable" system producing data, most of the data will fall within 3 std from the mean. A truly crappy post or truly brilliant post would have to fall outside that distribution and there are statistical methods for detecting this.
The quality of posts is essential a quality control problem. It cannot be really fixed by culling the purported bottom or purported top.
The aim seems to be to move the distribution toward higher quality, for the most part since it is highly likely that this is a stable system, this can only be down by changing the systemic causes of variation that produces posts. Culling is an attempt to act on special causes causes of variation but if those posts are not actually produced by special causes it will not help and could make the system worse.
OK well maybe you're unclear about what I said. What I said is that the quality of the comment would have to be *uncorrelated* with the author of the comment for your analogy to make any sense. You're still using it, you're assuming a single random variable controls the distribution of comments, id est you have just one distribution.
But that's not at all realistic. What you have instead is a distribution which is the resultant of the sum of individual distributions for the individual writers. The distribution of writers may well be itself normal or similar, and the individual distributions will also almost certainly be normal or similar, but the overall distribution, since it is the sum of the individual distributions, will be much wider.
Now since it's the writers who are banned or permitted, what happens when that occurs is that you entirely remove (or allow to remain) the individual distributions that are contributing to the (much wider) sum of distributions that describes all comments. Clearly if you remove distributions that have means below the mean of the sum, the sum distribution will shift right -- quality will be improved.
The only way this doesn't happen is more or less if the writers all have the same distribution, so that the sum distribution is just the individual distribution scaled. In that case removing writers doesn't change a thing.
But what *that* requires is that there be no correlation between writers and the quality of their writing, and this is what I suggested defies common sense. Some people write better than others, I suggest that is an observational fact. Even if better writers have wider distributions, as long as the means of the distributions differ, we can bump the mean of the sum to the right by removing the component individual distributions with lower means.
A sample size of 1 or 2? Could one bad post indicative of the poster's competence? Doubtful. But who knows.
We are looking for some kind of signal detection mechanism.
Now, it might be possible to use ML to create a kind of spam filter but instead of spam it would be searching for either good or bad content in the eyes of our moderator.
Without actually offering to do this, it is not an overwhelming task for ML. It is the kind of thing that could be a project assignment in an undergrad ML class.
A problem COULD be that Scott maybe is not so good or consistent himself at making the judgement. It also COULD be that the consequence of the error of getting it wrong might not make things better but could makes things worse. What if posts are like improvisation where that objective crappy Grateful Dead meandering is worth the objective great show the following day?
Maybe the ML would just label posts - bad, meh, brilliant?
Sample size of 1 or 2 for determining whether an individual author is more or less likely to post comments that are judged to be above the 33% mark. This is iffy and also seems like it's against the spirit of the experiment.
There's a far larger sample size if we want to know whether there is generally a correlation.
Even that isn't really going to work, if I understand what to are saying.
I think the "spam" detector model is the best possibly solution.
But I really am not confident that even that kind of ML could actually detect what we'd want it to detect brilliance and crap as opposed to 90% in the middle that the system produces.
There is only one way to find out.
I'm even less confident that Scott or anyone can distinguish between above or below the arbitrary 33% cut off.
As a kid, I used to be able to flip pre-Euro Deutsche Mark coins (can't quite recall if 1 or 2 Mark) so they would end up with the same side facing upwards as thry started at much better than chance.
You just have to get really consistent at the force you apply to the coin when you flip it, and catch it at the same height. The tolerance is high enough that it's not super difficult; I didn't really make a deliberate effort to learn it - I just noticed it was happening, and then tested my observation. I never tried with Euro coins.
Of course I used this to get suspiciously good results for damage etc playing the Pokémon trading card game, which had a frankly unreasonable amount of things that were determined by coin flips.
(It's also how I got enough coin-flipping routine to learn this.)
So yeah, you could definitely select for a "good at coin-flipping" club. I know that's not the point, but I think it's funny.
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.
A little bit. When I was 17 I was lucky if I could focus on one thing long enough to read a Spiderman comic. There were 17 year old girls around after all.
IIRC Hofsteader himself poked fun at the book’s doorstop heft in the later “Metamagical Themas.” Something like “If you managed to find your way through GEB…”
Penrose in TENM has a very different take on consciousness than Hoffstadter.
I read GEB when it came out and then again have relooked at it over the decades. I just finished reading I am a Strange Loop. This might be a better starting place than GEB.
I'm keeping an open mind as to whether I'm keeping an open mind as to whether I'm keeping an open mind as to ... whether Hofstadter is a one trick pony that has become stuck on recursive metaphor as an alternative to algorithmic processes as the mechanism for consciousness.
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.
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.
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'.
Your responses seem unduly hopeful, but within the bounds of reality. The other two predictions seem borderline delusional.
Conventional, ordinary wisdom at this point--not my wishful thinking--says the GOP is going to win huge, to the point that SNL is mocking the president by suggesting he really wants to switch candidates right now. "Huge" in this case means they're the ones likely to pick up 3-4 seats in the Senate and a substantial majority in the House, limited only by the fact that they did far better than expected two years ago and so have fewer seats to pick up.
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.
There's an enormous likelihood--not a 60% chance but closer to 90%--that the polls are understating GOP support.
I freely admit this could end up being wrong, but all I'm doing is repeating conventional wisdom--which should at least be, you know, acknowledged in the discussion?
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.
The idea that Dodd helped Dems is easily a month old, as is the notion that the GOP candidates were losing because they sucked. Walker has been leading in the polls since the debate and is up in RCP. Oz is as well. Laxalt looks pretty certain. Kelly and Hassan are only up by 1 which, assuming the usual skew, means that Kelly and Bolduc have a shot.
So your notion of conventional wisdom is about three months back.
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.
I don't "have the opinions" of any kind of believer. I think election predictions are a waste of time, and it's bizarre to me that people are interested enough in it to give both Nate Silver and Sean Trende a living.
I merely find it amusing that someone would be so delusional as to not even acknowledge conventional wisdom.
By the way, Nate Silver has the odds of Senate winning at over 50% and, as you say, Walker to win in what he considers the best forecast. And the reason he now includes "Republican" polls is because all the "neutral" polls were wildly off for several elections in a row.
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 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.
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.
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".
It would be less labor intensive but going strictly by ‘likes’ tends to enforce group think. A prevailing group ethos develops and dissenters are ostracized. Well reasoned and respectful dissent is important.
With the ‘likes’ rating system commenters tailor their responses to what they think will get ‘likes’.
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.
Liz Cheney is a huge opportunist. She assumed that the GOP would overwhelmingly reject Trump after 1/6 and so jumped out in front of what she thought would be the crowd to get a leadership position.
What she didn't anticipate was Georgia. This is where a lot of other Republicans (McConnell and McCarthy both come to mind) got lucky. They weren't happy with Trump's actions and had started clearing their throat--but the Georgia runoffs also 1/6. A lot of conservative pundits blame Trump for the Georgia senate losses, but the politicians clearly saw it otherwise, because they all flipped to radio silence after that. What they heard, I think, was a lot of GOP voters saying something to the effect of "Fuck you if you turn on Trump and impeach him and make it radioactive for us to have ever supported him." They saw the Georgia GOP voters decision to stay home NOT as pundits see it, but rather as a warning. And so they shut up. I don't think they like Trump any more than Cheney does, but they realize the voters see the 1/6 riots as no worse than the insanity of the summer. (and not I use the word riots rather than insurrection.)
Cheney's not honorable. She's not sane. She's a hack and an opportunist who made the wrong call and is now making the best of the outcome she couldn't walk back.
As for the rest of your comments, oh, well. If your position is that most of America is insane one direction or another simply because you disapprove, I suggest another theory is in order.
> Cheney's not honorable. She's not sane. She's a hack and an opportunist who made the wrong call and is now making the best of the outcome she couldn't walk back.
Once again I have to remind myself that we are all so vey different.
I doubt we're that different. I'm not saying she objectively made a wrong call in opposing the 1/6 riots. I'm saying that, had she known how Republican voters felt, she would have done with McConnell and McCarthy did. Because she's an opportunist and a hack. Her mistake was thinking that listening to conservative pundits and assuming that voters felt the same way.
I think that we are all so very different because I’m one of the people that thinks she did it out regard for the constitution. Your read is entirely different.
What makes you certain that she is an opportunist rather than placing country above party?
I’m more disturbed that there are so many like Lindsey Graham that have no principles of their own. Going whichever way the wind blows and having no fixed values seems more opportunist to me.
Sometimes you just have to do what’s right and live with the consequences.
The first time her caucus tried to remove Cheney as leader this is Adam Kinzinger’s take:
“You look at the fact that Liz Cheney, one of the most conservative members of Congress, casts a vote of conscience after a frigging insurrection that killed a Capitol police officer under the name of our party, not Antifa. . . . Maybe you should blame President Trump—who, by the way, if we don’t say a word after this meeting, is the only voice speaking for us. I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m all for unity—but not unity under the Trump banner.”
I read it more like Kinzinger.
Or Republican Freshman from Michigan Pete Miejer:
“If Liz Cheney is the person who suffers the most for what happened on January 6, we’re in a dark, dark place.”
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.)
The trick is probably psychological. The questioner is telling you that smart people find this harder than dumb people so off you go looking for caveats and hidden variables, including yourself.
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 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.
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.
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
Somehow my day went uninterrupted without anyone challenging my...time bubble...until around 5pm, when it was finally brought to my attention that DST had happened and I'd forgotten to adjust my analog watch. Had spent several hours until then being all "wow, the sun really does set a lot faster in winter", "sure feels like work's passing by quick today", "man the delivery truck is hella late", etc.
This is also exactly why I don't like digital watches - the hands of DST supremacy. (And also the face, I guess.) I want the change to be as jarring as possible, to force me to update on an unwelcome and unnatural adjustment. Glad that CA is at least now legally able to abolish DST if we ever want to. One step at a time!
Most of my clocks don't. The one of my phone and the one on my computer do, but the ones that get me places on time (my alarm clock, my watch, my kitchen clock, and my car clock) all have to be manually adjusted. And if I had to manually adjust them every day for six days, I guarantee that five out of those six days I would be some degree of late to work.
At my current job, it's a bad look but not a big deal. At previous jobs, it would be a huge deal. I had a job where it was in the employee handbook that it was a fireable offense to be late, at all, three times.
I've been waking up at 5:00am for some stupid reason for the past two months. Today I woke up at 4:00am. Yeah, the new time schedule is going to suck until my brain adjusts.
> 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
You can decide not to believe in IQ, but then you're deciding not to believe in one of the only fields of study whose research *doesn't* suffer from a replication crisis.
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.
Yeah, that's...a bit overstated. And as Scott himself says, even if everything Dweck unconvincingly argues is true, it wouldn't disprove the fact that high cognitive ability is better than low. You can read Scott's take on Dweck here:
Kind of an open-ended question, but- does anyone respect 'exercise science' as being even halfway to a real scientific discipline at all? I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people coming from the actual hard sciences.
Originally I was going to ask a more specific exercise science question- how credible is the evidence that doing random exercises 'explosively' increases one's speed or explosiveness *at a totally different athletic maneuver*. Examples would include the idea that performing Olympic weightlifting exercises, like say a power clean, would then translate to increased speed and/or explosiveness in a completely unrelated movement- say, an American football tackle, high jump, or baseball or golf swing. The supposed idea is that doing one activity fast (power cleans) makes you faster at something unrelated (a golf swing).
Personally, this sounds like not just absolute pseudoscience, but is veering into sympathetic magic. Doing one thing fast makes you faster at something else- performing the rain dance makes it rain. But then I realized that this is basically a tenet of modern exercise science and has been for a couple of decades, which lead to the question 'is exercise 'science' a real science or can we completely ignore stuff that sounds like sympathetic magic'.
I mean, as Scott has noted previously, there's lots of studies 'proving' that homeopathy works too, but we can safely ignore them. Does anyone respect exercise science?
Edit to include: Pseudoscientific frauds within the exercise science industry, just in the last 20 years, include cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, and dry needling. All were promoted by some exercise 'scientist' or another- all are fake. You can see why this makes one skeptical of the field in general, no?
I seem to remember a look into this perhaps a decade ago, by an author/site that was legit, though I cannot recall where I read it. They looked at the "evolving consensus" on one topic -- I think it was weightlifting/rest, the optimum mix or rotation of weight sets vs recovery.
Most of the information was posts on several message boards for the powerlifting community. Apparently there were two or three schools of thought, each with their own proponents and detractors (mostly proponents, there wasn't much jeering.) Since I can't point to a source here, I will just quickly summarize from memory:
-- Very few people were academics or trained scientists, though several were very diligent and produced results with methodology that seemed rigorous.
-- In the exercise community, there is the obvious "Look what this did for me!!" proof of concept. It cuts both ways: If you are promoting your "system", you had better be winning bodybuilding competitions. But also those results are just one person.....
-- There were several people driving the discussion, which spanned maybe 5 years, or even ten.
-- The remarkable thing: Over time, people of different camps were open to new evidence and results, and several changed their minds. Consensus shifted over a decade to a new rest/lift cycling paradigm. (Of course, this may have become "dogma" by now.)
-- One was reminded many times that this question [maximizing workouts and building muscle] was not academic, it was of vital personal importance to everybody in the community. You might think the personal nature would make things acrimonius; on the contrary, the chance that a different idea might be better and beneficial was what was important, and new ideas would get a hearing and some 'trials".
Overall it was very heartening to read. A small example of "science" with evidence and questions to ask/test, and open results being shared and checked.
BRetty
PS -- I will put this down here. While writing this, I was struck by how similar and yet different this example was from the last several years, with Invermectin and other Covid treatments being viciously shouted down and attacked. violently repudiated. Of course, weightlifting is not like a [barely] dangerous virus, no lives were at stake.
But the language and personas of the people in the weightlifting debate struck me as exactly the kind of "trust me, I'm just an ordinary guy" appeal that makes Joe Rogan, for example, so popular. And it is also the polar opposite of the condescending, "Do not question authority!" messaging of the CDC FDA, the entire Covidocracy. That supercilious message is also the essence of Hillary Clinton's amazing anti-charisma. To me, it seems to form the essential identity of the Democratic party, all the way back to the "remarkably lifelike" Al Gore.
Saying people who disagree with you are deplorable, and stupid, and wicked, and congratulating yourselves that you are better, is a just a terrible way to ever persuade or lead.
It's just absolutely astonishing that you took a discussion about exercise science and explosive weight lifting, and made it about Hillary Clinton and your fringe views on Covid. I can't tell if this is a parody or a joke or just sad, though I suspect it's the last one. It's just mind-blowing how much politics has broken some people's brains. Good luck,
-- Communicating scientific and medical research to the public has not only been one of the most important things in the entire physical/political world for the last three years, but is also of the essence of Scott's writing, and hence this comment section.
-- The CDC, FDA, and various governments have failed very badly, in many ways, at that task. (Scott Alexander has written several times about the structural problems at the FDA, and his personal anger and outrage at how difficult they are.)
-- I noted, and felt subjectively, that the way "scientific" and "medical" research was communicated and understood by this particular community, [exercise community] was different and notably better than the way official government communication about life-and-death matters have been, recently, and, it seems, always have been.
-- I wrote that, subjectively, the kind of negative and condescending tone I felt from the CDC, FDA, etc, all around COVID, were Very Bad, off-putting, and seemingly calculated to alienate and anger huge numbers of people. [Zvi M______, a friend of this blog, has been forced to write of little else for the last two years, alas.]
-- The connection to Democratic Party and their politicians is essential, and valid. Hillary Clinton lost an election to Donald Trump. That requires an incredible will to alienate and piss off ordinary people. The tone and tenor of the Democratic Party seems to be one with the icy condescention of the "experts" at the CDC, whom astonishingly still have jobs.
-- I take credit for calling out H.R.Clinton's "anti-charisma". However, the description of the "astonishingly lifelike" Al Gore must be credited to David Foster Wallace, who in 2000 absolutely savaged every single candidate running for president, in harsh terms too incredible to quote briefly.
-- I'm sorry if you took offense, my intention was not to stir the pot but to find a better way to talk to each other. It seems I did not succeed.
I kinda liked BRetty's post and could see the point. There's scientific dispute, which requires common interest in some kind of progress and there's belief in authorities as a more or less useful heuristic. The cited examples don't matter too much to me.
I don't have much actual specific knowledge here, but I generally expect "exercise science" to be about as good as medicine generally - which is to say, established results are usually right but plenty of junk abounds.
My reasoning is very simple - humans are really difficult and expense do do good experiments on, resulting in lots of underpowered studies and statistical noise, but eh thing being studied is ultimately both testable and important to many people, so I expect all the large effects to hold up and the uncertainty to be about the (far more numerous) small ones.
Sure, I do, and I'm trained and work in the hardest of hard (empirical) sciences. Exercise science certainly suffers from its share of incompetents and fools, like any other science -- there are physicists who are complete clowns, in my opinion, but every time I ask for their PhD to be revoked in a secret meeting of The Brotherhood the chairman gavels me out of order <shrug>. But I'm pretty convinced that it has serious scientists, who do their best to figure out what really works and what doesn't, for grant money or publication fame, or just because it scratches their own curiosity bump.
But exercise science, like medicine and economics, suffers from the twin curses that (1) its subject matter (the human body) is very, very complex, and we are very, very far from having a complete understanding of its parts and principles of operations. We know far more about how the Sun works than the human biceps. (2) its results are of intense and immediate interest to large numbers of people. Hardly anybody gives a crap if the Higgs boson is real or a data analysis mistake, but there are 5 milliion who will leap on the idea that Supplement P builds muscle 2% faster than Workout Regime Q -- even if the data are marginal and noisy to the point of near worthlessness.
It's my impression this creates a tremendous amount of "woo," which is what I call it when shamans, hucksters, Internet pundits, college PR departments, and corporate ad agencies all conspire to trowel a layer of sciency sounding facts 'n' figures over some nostrum on which they can see making a nice profit. There's just no end to the human ability to figure out a way to run a slight scam to make a quick buck, and unfortunately anything to do with health or fitness is fertile ground for this. So you have to wade through a lot of "woo" and bullshittery and hucksterism in exercise science, like you do in economics or pop medicine, and unlike you would have to do in (say) the linguistics of Old English or chemical engineering.
I don’t think the exception taking to training exercises being generalizable makes a ton of sense. Take a random NBA player who has never played golf, and take me, who has also never played golf. Who do you expect to have a more powerful golf swing on their first try?
I’m also skeptical of lots of things in the field, but there’s an extremely intuitive reason why exercises would help: they allow you to overload the muscles beyond what the activity itself can provide.
"I don’t think the exception taking to training exercises being generalizable makes a ton of sense. Take a random NBA player who has never played golf, and take me, who has also never played golf. Who do you expect to have a more powerful golf swing on their first try?"
I can provide an (golf!) anecdote to support this. My son grew up playing baseball (little league on-wards). When he was about 12, he went golfing with a friend and the friend's father. It turned out that my son could drive a golf ball about as well as his friend, but also a bit further. His friend had been golfing with dad for a few years (and also his friend was playing little league baseball ...) and my son had never golfed, but the golf drive appears to have a lot in common with a baseball batting swing.
Wait, you're skeptical of exercise science because high performance in one motion is supposed to build high performance in another motion? I...don't think this is an accurate representation of exercise science.
I'm no expert but my understanding is that different athletic competitions have very, very different training regimens. Normal people train for general athleticism, which works because their baseline is so low, but very quickly people begin to train their bodies for very, very specific activities. Even at the casual level, your friend who runs marathons is going to be really bad at rock climbing and vice verse. Even without getting into high performance, they're using totally different muscle groups and have totally different nutritional requirements.
But ignoring "general fitness" type stuff, if you get into a specific sport like soccer or MMA or biking or tennis, there's a very specific set of training exercises that will be programmed out and you should do those and they generally work.
In general, I trust exercise science for certain things a lot more than other fields because, at the top level, there are regular competitions between top talents with tens of millions to billions of dollars on the line. That incentive structure is fantastic for generating real results because, if you think it's bunk, there are NFL/NBA/MLB/etc sports team who will provably pay you millions if you can do better.
If the incentive structure is so fantastic, why have athletes in all of those sports at various times recently used cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, and dry needling? Every one of which is junk science.
The incentive structure is not fantastic because studies on human biology are very complex, the mechanisms of action are poorly understood, and it's tough to say what's effective and what isn't. Hence, a field with tons of snake oil. You can't replace say KT tape (which half the athletes in the last few Olympics were visibly wearing) with 'the well-known treatment that magically makes you better at teh sports', because such a thing may not exist, or there may be no way to prove that it works better than crystal healing or what have you.
If the incentive structure were so fantastic, Tom Brady would not be advised by Alex Guerrero, an 'Argentine alternative medicine practitioner and alkaline diet advocate' who has been sued by the FTC, legally barred from ever again falsely presenting himself as a medical doctor, and 'sued twice for allegedly defrauding investors in his health product business enterprises of hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment funds'
Because that's normal? Because people experiment with things and most of those things fail and that's fine?
Like, I'm not sure what you're expecting. What scientific field gets, like, a 70% success rate on it's experiments? We try lots of different stuff, sometimes something works, we record it, test it, and if it keeps working, we use it. That's science, it has a really high failure rate if you look at every single experiment.
Does the "explosive" exercise involve the same muscles as the activity you're trying to get good at? This makes a big difference in how plausible it sounds.
I'm not sure of what the target of your ire is here, but since I work in a role that involves supporting a global top-20 academic exercise science department at times, I'll offer a mild defence of that field. If you're complaining about online pseudoscience, that's a different matter, as is perhaps the question of how easy it is to apply exercise science to yourself.
I doubt any actual exercise scientist would be so ignorant of human biology to expect improving expressiveness in one action to improve it in unrelated ones. Done properly exercise science is simply a subset of biological sciences and medicine, and includes pretty well the whole field of physiotherapy, since repairing and improving physical processes are inherently related. It is also demonstrably effective. It is, along with targeted psychology, the basis of sports science, which forms a large part of many successful sporting programmes. Three I would highlight from the early part of this century (and please excuse my UK-centric perspective): the dominance of cycling's premier events by Team Sky; the transformation of Arsenal into one of the two main competitors for the (English) Premier League; and the transformation of the British Olympic team into one of the five most successful (if we ignore the snowy sports). Each of these transformed existing paradigms around training, rehabilitation, diet etc on the basis of exercise science. If you care about improving sporting performance then you likely respect exercise science, and probably invest in it heavily.
"Kind of an open-ended question, but- does anyone respect 'exercise science' as being even halfway to a real scientific discipline at all? I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people coming from the actual hard sciences."
I think that it can be real because I think that the Soviet-bloc folks working with athletes knew what they were doing (aside from just handing out steroids). Does you random exercise physiologist know much that is real and non-trivial ... I dunno.
>Doing one thing fast makes you faster at something else- performing the rain dance makes it rain.
What? Doing one thing fast trains your muscles and central nervous system. A priori, there's every scientific reason in the world to think this would allow your muscles to work differently during other movement patterns that involve these muscles. Whether or not this is true is an empirical question.
What exactly is your problem here? If we take two groups, one trains in explosive movements and another in non-explosive movements for some number of weeks, and we measure their performance on some different explosive move before and after these weeks of training are completed and compare them.
What's inherently unscientific about this? As long as we have samples of sufficient quality and quantity and perform the standard statistical experimental design and hypothesis testing, why would this be less scientific than any other experiment?
"performing the rain dance makes it rain"
Do you actually understand basic statistical hypothesis testing? What you've said is basically a (faulty) fully general counterargument against all scientific experiments remotely resembling the one described above, even those in the "hard sciences". We test something, see if there's an effect, and use statistics to decide how likely the effect was caused by the parameter we are investigating. And if you disagree about the validity of hypothesis testing, then again, there is nothing specific to exercise science in that argument.
>As long as we have samples of sufficient quality and quantity and perform the standard statistical experimental design and hypothesis testing
My question is- is exercise science a real field that's really measuring these things, or is it just a bunch of p hacking and weak correlations? I don't think anyone's disputing that the overall field has historically had an absolutely enormous amount of frauds and charlatans- athletes have just in the last 20 years cycled through cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, dry needling, whatever the hell Tom Brady is promoting these days.... Literally every one is a fraud with zero scientific backing. You can see why this makes one a bit skeptical of the field, yes?
I'm assuming that I don't have to mention the utter nonsense that this the supplement industry. I'm assuming that I don't need to point out the rampant fraud in the diet industry. Or, the level of pseudoscience and quackery in really any field studying the human body (acupuncture, osteopathy, chiropracty, homeopathy, naturopathy, reiki, etc.) Or the low replicability of most medical treatments in use today.
> If we take two groups, one trains in explosive movements and another in non-explosive movements for some number of weeks, and we measure their performance
Sure. With an n=15, which is what's the norm for the exercise science field, half the time probably made up of untrained undergrads (i.e. because they're untrained they will achieve positive results from literally any exercise). Add in some p hacking and you can find whatever result you want!
It's OK to discuss if some fields are less rigorous and empirical than others
I’m not an exercise scientist but I’ve read a fair bit about it. To your specific question, a power clean is based on the posterior chain e.g hamstrings, glutes. Other explosive exercises also use the posterior chain, e.g. sprinting. A golf swing is maybe a little farther but has overlap with some of the same muscle groups. Does that help clarify?
I believe kinesiology has been one of the fastest growing majors at most universities in the past decade or two. That doesn’t tell me whether it’s real or not.
I'm currently offering services as a research assistant for $20/hr! Any literature review you want performed or general questions you have I will do my best to answer. CV and work samples available upon request!
Halfway through a degree in Natural sciences, with a focus on cellular and molecular biology, a couple of summer research internships in molecular biology labs and I used to do contract work as a technical writer filling in RnD tax credit applications.
(Clarification, the degree is BSc Natural sciences, so I study some chemistry, some physics+math prereqs throughout the degree but with 50% of my classes being molbio)
Repeating my comment from the jhana thread as it didn't get any replies:
Like several others, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
If there really wasn't one, then I suppose this crush and panic was a spontaneous phenomenon caused by general crowding, sort of like phantom traffic jams.
IIRC research has been done in mosh pits to discover the 'fluid dynamics' of crowds for the purpose of designing spaces to not be crush-prone. Like phantom traffic jams and sonic booms, I suspect it involves shock dynamics, where the particles are flowing and encountering an obstacle faster than information is travelling through the medium.
I'm glad the authorities seem more willing to admit mistakes and learn lessons here than they were following Hillsborough.
I attended New Years 2000 in Times Square. Immediately after New Years the crowds were exciting Times Square. The police had set up dump trucks blocking most of the side streets, with metal barricades closing off the rest. There was only room for 1 or two people at a time to exit through the gates on each side of the street, but thousands were all moving toward the gates at the same time.
Before I realized what was going to happen there was a cop standing on top of the dump truck yelling at people to stop, but it was already too late for those who could actually hear him. Very quickly the crowd became more dense and soon everyone was packed so tight no one could control their own movements.
I could not lift my arms, it was a single mass of humanity weighing many tons. We basically wavered this way and that like a blob of jelly. At 6’2” and 240 lbs I’m not easy to push around, but I had absolutely no control of where I moved.
My girlfriend was crushed in front of me and lifted off the ground, it was obvious that if she had fell she would have been crushed, not by panic, but by the pressure of tons of flesh pressing on everyone around us.
Thankfully shortly after the crush became irresistible people at the front managed to lift some of the metal fencing and toss it out of the way. The extra room to exit quickly relieved the pressure. As far as I know, no one was seriously injured.
I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to be tumbled in sizeable surf, sizeable rapids, and a small avalanche. They all felt quite comparable to a crushing crowd, pressure all around and no real control of where you are going or in what direction you will be oriented when you get there.
Right. When all are standing, the forces on the crowd are in equilibrium, but as soon as someone stumbles and falls, the sudden lack of pressure means others are pushed into the void. Plus, I know those alleys. In combination with the crowd dynamics, they slope downwards towards the main street and the subway exits there by the Hamilton Hotel. You can see how there would have been a horrible falling domino effect as those at the top of the alley fell, pushing over those below them on sloping ground without the room to correct their balance.
There are some very hard questions being raised with the police response as well. In papers here there have been articles where, if you read between the lines and know Korean culture, you can get a fairly damning picture of certain aspects of the response. The fallout has been marked by some fairly strange acts and statements by those in positions of authority and it's shaping up to being a major test of the new president, a man relatively inexperienced in matters of state.
I don’t think you could stumble and fall creating a void. Once the crowd is so dense you can no longer control your own movements, there is no space to fall into
Having been in such a crowd once, what I can imagine happening is that someone can step on you, pinning your foot or leg to the ground, the movement of the crowd could then drag you down. You are correct that the void you leave will be filled by the crowd, there would be no way to get up again, several people will unavoidably be standing on you.
I initially tried to hold ground and make space for my girlfriend. I could not. And even if I could magically resist the force of thousands of people, the rest of the people around us could not resist it and would fill any void I could make.
The analogy of the crowd being like water is very good, it will irresistibly fill any void. Put a spoon in a glass and pour in some water, even if the spoon does not move it is completely surrounded by water. Such a dense crowd is exactly like that. People are the water, trees, buildings and other items attached to the ground are the spoon.
Healthy mental states from physical suffering. I was musing on it the other night, commuting home by bike in an early taste of winter, thinking about how, in a strange way, I am looking forward to the depths of winter. There's a strong NW wind that blows in off Siberia and China (I live in Korea) as part of a weather pattern that drops the temperature way below freezing, and I have a 25 km (15 miles) ride home into the teeth of it at times. I characterize it as being good for the soul--good for the metaphysical self I guess--and it's something David Goggins talks about often. Anyone else value the mental state that comes of suffering physically?
Suffering means, for me, something uncomfortable not under control. The uncomfortable part signals danger and, maybe, gain. Losing control is great if survived. Most of the time I opt for "quite uncomfortable but well controlled", like biking in the cold.
I don't know about suffering __in general__, but find dry cold/heat* delightfully bracing. Inside a walk-in freezer or walking in a desert: that's my happy place. There's a certain clarity of thought that springs from the conscious and unconscious being united in affirming, "I feel alive". (Which only comes up in adverse conditions, since otherwise things like homeostasis are rightfully taken for granite.) Suspect this is part of the mental model behind Wim Hof Method and icy showers to start the day.
Wounds sometimes also have this function? The stinging sharpness of a cut, for instance. A little hurt focuses the mind, while a lot is distracting. Easier to feel an embodied connection to one's vitality when it's so visibly exposed/challenged. (Seem to recall the kid's novel __White Fang__ having a passage along these lines...maybe that's where I picked up the mental model.)
*Humid cold is just as awful as humid heat. That just feels sluggish and painful...stultifying. Trigger for hibernation.
The so-called Marathion monks of Japan practiced such austerities to reach elevated spiritual states. The Buddha himself also did. But many teachers warned against austerities saying they just wore out the body and drained/degraded meditation practice- the opposite of ones goal. When I was a young man I was attracted to austerities, thinking them a shortcut to enlightenment. Not now.
Well, but it's not really suffering per se, which it might be if you lay on a bed of nails or just stood there and let the wind freeze you. You're riding your bike into the teeth of the wind, accomplishing your desires in the face of Nature's attempt to kill you. Defying the gods like this certainly does feel good, and people test themselves against Nature's worst all the time. For myself, I like climbing mountain peaks, and if I reach the top in shitty weather when everyone softer has turned back ha ha I feel like Apollo was my father.
You're exactly right, in that it's not suffering at all. I wear sufficient clothing to be just fine and I'm not actually trying to suffer, I mean, it's a commute to and from work, but really, it's a combination of transport, exercise and recreation. I'm trying to find the word I should have used and sort of coming up short? But you're totally correct, in that it's hard work, but you are prepared, you know you will be just fine and yeah, you get through it, no one else around, you are triumphant and it's like Piltzintecuhtli's your dad. I mean, you really just rode 30 kms in the wind, but it is a triumph. Really builds you up inside when you've been through a whole season of those rides, you carry your taiaha on the inside as someone once said.
I agree! About 16 years ago (when I was in my late fifties and still could) a friend and I ran all the way around Mt. Hood in Oregon in one day (early a.m. start at Timberline Lodge, running counter clockwise to make the Whitewater Glacier stream more doable). It was hard but no suffering involved and the feeling of achievement at the end was overwhelming, emotional and incredible. The memory of that day has never faded.
As a side note, my running partner was much the better runner and had to slow and stop often to let me catch up. She was a well known ultra runner in the Oregon community, having been the first to complete the annual Hood to Coast relay, SOLO! I couldn't have completed the circumambulation run without her.
Cold water swimming is gaining in popularity. Aside from the supposed health benefits there is a certain zen feeling that comes from the physical pain of cold. And the pain from the cold might release endorphins. For me very cold temperatures force me to live in the moment, and there is a distinct before and after to being very cold and then warming up.
There is a distinct before and after, I agree. I always have a balancing act of too warm or too cold on the bike. You have to start cold, so that by the time you warm up, you are not overheating. Then stopping becomes an issue, in deeply subzero weather that is, because you do not want to get too cold. Coffee outside on some of those mornings becomes a quick small cup or two before racing off to stay warm.
Even the raw physical pain itself can be enjoyable. Many people enjoy minor gum pain and perhaps similarly, many enjoyment eating very spicy, seemingly "burning" foods.
Of course, the cold can also have other effects, like helping you focus on something - like your own metaphysical musings themselves.
If you live in Korea your philosophy fits well with the Korean geist. As you know they very much value hardiness and endurance. The monks took great pride in wearing thin cotton work clothes even in winter. Hard to get drowsy in prolonged meditation sessions when you're at the verge of shivering.
The gray winter clothes are slightly thicker, but not by that much; they're certainly not padded. My favorite thing is their absolutely balling Nikes, though. "We seek enlightenment, but nothing says our feet need to be uncomfortable while doing so." The combo of gray clothes, shaved head and badassed big ol' Nikes is a Korean classic.
Well you get a padded quilted outer robe but the tough guys eschewed wearing them. The cotton work clothes were worn by most except during the monsoon season when some switched to hemp material, almost indecently transparent. I didn't see the Nikes, but I was there a long time ago and the monks were never allowed to wear leather shoes so they would travel wearing sneakers.
Seoul city slicker, I warrant 🙂. Even the padded winter robes had a prestige ranking based on how beat up and patched and stuffing coming out they were. All my fellow monks had nice neat tidy ones. I was given the most beat up one in the monastery! But it was nice and toasty in the Arctic winter.
I've lived in a few places, but yeah, close to Seoul in the greater metropolitan area. It's funny, in that martial artists are the opposite. The older and more faded the outfit, the greater the prestige.
Yes, very much so. There's nothing like going for a run in a thunderstorm and taking a moment to let the cold wash over you. I think it's just good for neuroticism, immediate physical stimuli that draws attention away from whatever's happening in your head. I used this to teach myself to become a sexual masochist when I was 16.
Speaking as a recently warned poster, the moderation policy here is not based around what posters want or are OK with, but what Scott wants his own comment section to be. Fair enough.
I feel as if what is acceptable for the left-of-center is not acceptable for the right-of center.
Liberal viewpoints are assumed to be 'norms'; conservative viewpoints are suspect. I know it's a sad old tale: my values have largely remained the same for six decades. They have become unfashionable and possibly dangerous.
Liberals insist they want to hear other points of view, but when we speak with half the frankness they're happy to use, they can't handle it. Scott's just responding to the new 'norms'.
There are definitely places like that online, lots of them. And you are right that the Overton window shifted, in many areas to the "progressive" side. I don't know what your values are, but something that is, or can be easily misconstrued as racist or sexist is definitely less tolerated now than it used to be. On the other hand, there are places and areas where discourse shifted to the "right".
Your comment was just "Gross." which is a perfect example of low-quality and high-temperature comment that Scott doesn't want here. Quite a few people got warnings and bans for similar infractions.
In absence of voting, how are people supposed to express dislike? If a comment that is disliked by 20 people always received 20 angry replies, this would become a horrible place.
So it might seem like Scott is randomly banning people no one actually disagrees with, but I think it is usually people familiar with this style of moderation exercising self-control and assuming that Scott will ban the author if things get sufficiently bad.
You can always see the comment that got someone banned. I assume that if people disagreed with Scott's judgment, they would write it. I probably would, if something seemed to me very unfair. Seeing no such comments is for me evidence that people are happy with moderation.
Specifically, I am pretty sure no one would get banned merely for asking politely why someone else was banned. Yet, people are usually not asking; and it's not because they are afraid to ask.
Do you need to express dislike of other comments? If you have something interesting to say in response to a comment then you can reply, if it's rule-breaking then you can report it. If it's bad in a boring way (ie isn't conducive to interesting further discussion) then I guess you just scroll past it.
If most people decide that a comment is bad in a boring way, and just scroll past it (which is a good thing), and later Scott bans the author, it may then seem like Scott's moderation policy is unrelated to what readers want to see (because it may seem like silence is consent, or at least indifference).
The confusion would not happen on a website with votes, where people would downvote a comment first, and then Scott would ban its author. There we would probably see that most banned comments were downvoted first.
This feels incorrect, or at the very least self-correcting over time. Why should the comments section be made up of people that don't want to follow Scott's and the community's posting policy?
I think the strongest point in favor of Retriever's point would be the sheer amount of time that MarxBro was not banned from this substack. A decently large portion of the commentariat pretty strongly hated marxbro, but Scott took a very long time to ban him, since marxbro usually managed to only be outright rude to Scott, and otherwise just pushed the line very hard. I think that if Scott was optimizing for "do commenters like this sort of comment" marxbro would've been banned very quickly, but instead he was not banned for a decent amount of time
Fair enough, I did misinterpret the tone a bit. But I still challenge that perhaps a preponderance of readers and posters may indeed support the moderation policy currently in effect. And remaining here and reading/commenting is a tacit endorsement.
I mean, I guess there are rules, as other people have pointed you to. If you go looking for rules for how to be part of productive conversations because you might be too close to being a dick, then it really may be that you’re too close to being a dick.
"Remember, ACX rules are that comments should be at least two of polite, relevant, and plausibly-true-according-to-me. This means I do not generally delete comments for being false (ie “misinformation”) unless they are also rude or irrelevant. However, I may also unprincipledly delete comments that bring shame and/or negative media attention upon this blog, depending on how much shame and negative media attention I’m up for that particular day. And I may occasionally delete comments I think are stupid and lowering the average level of debate."
As I recall this is not specified anywhere for new readers, and it would help to have rules in the 'about' section.
I suspect that "kind" is the most obvious, least controversial and enough to avoid issues with moderation on this blog, even if the other two are missing. Of course some people would insist that their harsh criticism of someone is them being "kind".
Of course, there's no objective definition for any of these terms (I mean, whether something is true is literally the very thing being debated in most arguments!).
I think usually "obviously true to most" subs in for true. most of the time, and has to: very few things are unquestionably true. So something like "the reason they are called 'amputee models' and not just 'models' is that people understand that non-identical beauty standards are likely to be in play here" is going to be necessary sometimes (when someone says "why did that article say 'amputee model'?") and true (since it's a different, smaller candidate) but probably misses kind (which would probably be "just not explaining" in this case).
I'm not sure as a general answer for Substance, but this blog is essentially a continuation of SlateStarCodex and you can find the comment policy of that here:
Would like an outside perspective on this idea: I weight the upper bounds of what is possible for a super intelligence to achieve based on the Fermi Paradox. Looking for hole pokes, other than
Some examples below as to what conclusions /questions this leads me to.
If paper clip maximizers were possible and inevitable on an intergalactic scale wouldn’t I be able to see a large portion of the sky as paper clips? What could the paper clips of the things that I do see and why isn’t the universe homogenous?
This in general leads me to strongly fall into the camp of weak orthogonality. I think maybe you can build something able to simultaneously 1. Want 2. Achieve 3. Self Propagating enough to paper clip maximize your solar system but probably not you galaxy or your universe. My guess is that it would evolve itself out of the maximalist position fairly quickly on cosmic time scales.
1) Maybe intelligent life is just rare enough that paperclippers are too far away for us to have seen them yet (because, for example, when the light we're seeing left the galaxies where they are, their creators hadn't evolved yet).
2) Maybe the first major thing any galactically-capable intelligence does is to artificially induce a transition to a lower-energy vacuum state, which spreads at a speed basically indistinguishable to light so you can't see it coming, instagibs anyone who's not prepared for it, and has the nice effect of making the other galaxies stick around longer for you to be able to get to them at slower-than-light speeds. The reason we're still around at all is quantum immortality, but we see a "natural" universe and a Fermi paradox because we're only around at all in branches where there's no major evidence of alien life to be seen.
Depends on the density. If the average number of paper clip maximizers is less than 1 per galaxy, the sky could readily contain billions of galaxies made of paperclips[1] and yet there might happen to be none in our galaxy.
-------------------------
[1] We would not be able to tell the difference at several million or billion light years between a galaxy made of paperclips and the usual type.
I think that’s interesting because it limits what kinds of paper clips are interesting to build and also seems to imply some insurmountable travel limit.
Right. That is the type of question I sometimes ask myself. Like when there is a mysteriously empty spot in the field of galaxies much larger than it should be, is that natural or does it only appear natural because something did it a really long time ago?
I like this but I think I should have added a few more pieces to my thinking.
For this kind of thing to be true, there can’t be instantaneous travel or communication because then the agents could all know for sure if they were the strongest without first having to give away their position. So that restricts the field of play in that sense.
Also, just in general, I my intuition is that being able to reprioritize and restructure your values is at the core of the “general” in general intelligence. When you see a skyscraper or a space shuttle you can reduce the reason humans built those to the desire to have children. Except it’s “have children by a really long, circuitous route that is necessary because of intractable obstacles.”
depending on what anthropic principles you use and assumptions about speed of space colonization, you'll get different results.
See, for example, Robin Hanson's theory of grabby aliens. Any grabby alien civilization could very well be an AGI spreading across the universe. If an AGI was turning the universe into paperclips at near the speed of light, you wouldn't expect to see evidence of it until shortly before it reaches us.
Nothing currently more than about 16 billion light years away can ever reach us, even traveling at the speed of light, because of the expansion of the universe[1]. Since the universe we currently observe is already much bigger than this, we can conclude no alien species can conquer more than a small portion of the visible Universe no matter how fast it moves, unless it started almost literally at the Big Bang, and even then there is likely to be a huge amount of universe beyond its event horizon it cannot reach, which statistically speaking probably includes us.
This is definitely interesting and I agree with the gist of it, but I would expect there to be a few glaring exceptions that make it obvious. Also, in this scenario are we assuming instant transformation/optimization of whatever the variable is that the AGI is trying to maximize such that it can travel and maximize at the same speed? To me that is where this things start to get really tricky because I would expect there to start to be significant signal that proceeds whatever agent is causing the change if those mismatch at all. And also selection pressures as mentioned previously for Von Neumann type scenarios.
One interesting phenomenon right now with the midterms is that betting markets all seem to rate the Republicans much more highly than 538 does. (eg giving them about 70-80% chance of taking senate, vs 538 saying its a toss up).
Based on past performance I feel like there is a pretty high bar to saying that you are smarter than 538. So is this all dumb money? Or is there some good reason to think so? ("polls get it wrong" is insufficient since 538 already models the relative accuracy of pollsters and considers other factors)
The money is absolutely dumb money. Everyone sane who follows PI closely knows that. That doesn't mean they are wrong necessarily. But they aren't doing a principled and unbiased study of the data. There are just a tons of Trumper Pumpers with money to burn, for a variety of reasons.
Basically prediction markets and *especially* PI just assume the environment is +5 more for Republicans than it is. That is the reason behind basically every difference between PI and forecasters. If PI existed in 2012 they'd have been Romney poll unskewers and been dead wrong. As they were in 2018.
Prediction markets are more attractive to "red grey tribers" than any other demographic. The markets are tainted by the composition of the userbase.
I am in favor of "dumb money" hypothesis. Zvi Mowshovitz has noted that in the past, prediction markets repeatedly overestimated Republicans (here: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/weekly-roundup-3).
I would say that 538 thinks there will probably be a medium to high difference between "the polling averages" and the actual results, and prediction markets agree.
Prediction markets believe it will almost certainly be the Republicans who outperform polling if there is a medium to high difference, and 538 disagrees.
Interestingly if you look at the different models on 538 the pills only model has dems at 53% to win senate, the"classic" model (which incorporates fundamentals, incumbency, etc) has them slightly less favored, and the "deluxe" model (classic+expert opinion)* has republicans slightly more favored. (Though these are all close enough to 50/50 it's probably insignificant.) so 538 is assuming some degree of poll unreliability. But the betting markets seem to be expecting it to be massive. You'd need a correlated error of several points across all polls I think to get it into 70% range.
*(Personally I dislike the "deluxe" models approach, as expert opinion seems to just encourage herding, and be there for risk aversion. So I'd consider "classic" the real 538 prediction.)
In the past two presidential elections, there were correlated polling errors that led to the media in general including 538[1] overestimating Democratic chances. So people have learned that these kind of systematic errors are possible, and perhaps even expected.
The challenge with that position is that in 2018, 538 was spot on and if anything the polls were slanted towards Republicans. Also the markets were substantially wrong on Trump's chances to retain the presidency, both via lawsuits and more nefarious approaches, and lots of people around here managed to do well by fading the chance that Trump would stick around as president.
Fundamentally the basic problem is that polls can't get a good sample of voters due to systematic differences in who responds to polls on various platforms. So what they do is weight responses to try to correct for that. The problem is that there are many degrees of freedom in how they do that, and they are susceptible to some extent to groupthink, and so weighting errors can all be pointing in the same direction. 538's approach does a great job of correcting for idiosyncratic or pollster-specific errors, but has trouble with systematic errors.
My personal take is that probably Republican chances are a bit overestimated due to the pollsters overcorrecting (they all shifted rightward more or less at the same time a few weeks ago), but even ex post it's going to be really hard to tell what's going on, especially since we've been voting during a voter shift rightward.
[1] Actually in the 2016 election 538 was basically the only site that gave Trump a reasonable chance at all, so that should update us towards believing them over other sources. However the betting markets did better.
My assumption is that the "shy Tory" effect was especially strong for Trump due to the amount of hatred/shaming of Trump voters that was going on at the time.
I would expect it to return to historical norms for the mostly generic boring Republicans who are up for election this year.
My suspicion is that right now pollsters have more incentive to lean on the side of overestimating GOP votes, given the negative press around them underestimating them in the past. And the reputational consequences for overestimating and under estimating are asymmetrical. So I'd suspect an overcorrection is more likely than under correction.
"Polls don't catch GOP voters 'has become conventional wisdom to the point of cliché since 2016. So is probably overestimated in how people bet. Especially in the low information end. (The markets for individual races seem closertto 538 results than overall control bets, which would make sense if it's a question of information level).
There’s definitely big media vibe on the Republicans side right now, and people remember that 2016 and 2020 were both correlated misses on the Republican side, so I suspect a lot of people are betting on that. It’s definitely possible, but its also not out of the question that the miss will be on the other side this time, like in at least some of 2018.
It depends on factors including (but not limited to) age, gut microbes and flux.
For a graphical representation of factors in NAD+ metabolism, see Figure 1 in this paper:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcp.2022.114946 "A systems-approach to NAD+ restoration". In short, if old, inhibit CD38 (extreme NAD/NMN consumer) with, for example, apigenin ($0.26 for 200mg).
NAD+ flux is greatest in the small intestine, pancreas, liver and kidney. Oral intake will hit the high flux areas. No one has any data on efficacy for getting NAD or precursors into cells, mitochondria or nucleus mostly because there isn't a way to measure it yet.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2018.03.018 "Quantitative Analysis of NAD Synthesis-Breakdown Flux" There's a section titled "Tracing the Fate of NR and NMN" which covers oral supplementation. In mice.
NAD+ has a circadian rhythm and influences the circadian cycle directly through BMAL1/Clock so keep any dosing at the beginning of the active interval (ZT12-16 so morning for humans).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.semcdb.2021.07.008 "Circadian NAD(P)(H) cycles in cell metabolism" Great summary graphic of NAD/H central position in metabolism, circadian rhythm and aging in Figure 3.
Anything taken by mouth is going to see some influence by microbes even with the relatively lower levels (10^4-10^6/ml) of microbes in the small intestines. NR, NAM, NMN, nicotinic acid (B3), nicotinamide or tryptophan are all going to get some microbial metabolism to the NAD+ cycle and contribute to host levels of NAD/H.
Tyrptophan and grape seed extract (GSE) will do a very decent job of producing NAD+ and is very inexpensive (1000mg tryptophan $0.30 plus 500mg GSE $0.39)
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep24977 "Dietary proanthocyanidins boost hepatic NAD+ metabolism and SIRT1 expression and activity in a dose-dependent manner in healthy rats" Rats have some differences with humans in tryptophan metabolism so this one may not carry over the same way.
There may be value in using a little of all the different NAD precursors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9316858/ "NAD+ Precursors: A Questionable Redundancy" (2022) From the abstract: "Here, we discuss the possibility that the conservation of all of these biosynthetic pathways through evolution occurred because the different NAD+ precursors might serve specialized purposes."
There is a lot of hype and marketing. It's probably not useful to do NAD+ precursor supplementing if below ~35yo because of youthful homeostasis mechanisms. Supplements will get shunted to MeNAM (methylated NAM) which influences epigenetics through methylation and histone modifications. Probably not something necessary if it isn't broken. Aging will shift the homeostasis. Apparently, so far, no evidence of harm from youthful supplementation of NAD precursors... so far.
Do you have more analysis on supplements you can share? I'm trying out a few things but going on your post your research is of higher quality than mine.
Sorry for the delay... I just saw the reply notice when checking today's Open Thread.
I think this review article is an excellent way to think about supplements when the basics are under control. "Basics" being what you'd expect: sleep hygiene, sufficient "healthy" food, stress management, physical movement. The "basics" also assume getting out of toddlerhood healthy such that healthy structure and enzyme function was demonstrated and healthy intestinal development happened.
I've stopped thinking about individual supplements having a single target (the right side of Figure 2 "specialized reporter"). I'm now considering that the health degradation that happens with aging comes from a diminution of network connector or global reporter molecules (the left side of Figure 2). The first six I think the network biology research area have identified are: NAD(H), ATP, SAM, alpha-ketoglutarate, FAD and Acetyl-CoA. See Figure 3 in this review for the example of NAD(H).
So, NAD(H) supplements as above, D-ribose -> ATP, SAMe -> SAM, OKG/AAKG/CaOKG -> alpha-ketoglutarate, 5-R-P -> FAD and Ca-Pyruvate -> Acetyl-CoA/CoA. Glucose -> pyruvate -> Acetyl-CoA/CoA but we all already eat too much glucose.
scholar.google search with "network metabolic genetic" is a fruitful search sequence. The idea of "network medicine" seems to be gaining some traction and it's about time. However, it's going to be hard to overcome the regulatory capture of "standard-of-care" medicine.
Your question is very broad and I've been doing biology research intensely for almost 10 years so pointing at the network nature of biology is probably the best summary I have. Mass transport would be the next area of attention so a search around the "Understanding Gastrointestinal Absorption-related Processes (UNGAP)" would be useful. UNGAP is in support of addressing pharmaceutical bioavailability but I'm sure you can see the corollary with food and supplements. Transporters (influx/efflux), diffusion, lymph, portal vein, etc. apply. The NAD papers above regarding microbes and flux applies to anything taken by mouth.
I'm not sure which is more effective (if any are) but they are different chemically. NAD+ has an extra adenosine on it. NAD+ will end up being hydrolyzed down to nicotinamide riboside, and then just nicotinamide: https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/113.2.412
Cribbing from Austin, I'd like to make a gentle plea for fellow feeling and maintaining good naturedness in this election week. There are only a few real bad guys just people with competing visions of the good. Let's reestablish community in this country!
How did that old Rationalist saying go..."Almost everything is broken, almost no one is evil".
It's still nice to dream about, at least in a Pascalian fashion. Always get kinda depressed when lefty friends work themselves into a towering rage over the "hateful" Others; sometimes I wanna just kinda pop the bubble and be like, hey, I dunno about those Others, but see someone right in front of me who's *definitely* consumed with hate right now. I guess this is why being genuinely ambivalent/dispassionate about politics has become framed as another insidious form of #privilege. (Righty friends I at least expect to get angry, so it's less dissonant.)
Man, I long for people I disagree with but respect anyway. I can think of a few examples in electoral politics of the last 30 years where I heartily voted against the candidates I disagreed with, but where I could have seen plenty to respect and appreciate had they been elected. Do you honestly think that’s the name of the game today? I can’t speak to the dirty and dishonest tricks my team is up to these days— those aren’t very salient to me— but I can point to lots of ways that the guys I don’t like aren’t just embodying a different idea of the good but are in fact doing whatever they can to subvert any of the pluralistic ideals we all claim to hold.
Is unilaterally stepping back from an arms race a tenable strategy?
This particular space is usually a pretty good one to find people to heartily disagree with AND appreciate listening to. In the actual power competition, though, I perceive such significant — and immoral — threats to the body politic that politeness and respect seem woefully inadequate approaches.
I used to spend way too much time thinking about politics. I still do, but I used to do it even more.
Eventually I managed to convince myself of this: over the course of my life, roughly half the elections will be won by the idiots I oppose, and the other half will be won by the idiots I oppose less. This has been happening since before I was born, and will continue to happen after I'm dead, and it never seems to actually change my life much at all. Getting worked up about which party wins any particular election is a total waste of time and emotional energy.
I think your statement is true for regular people, but not true for politicians. Bryan Caplan argues that the vast majority of politicians are basically evil. They mostly act out in their own self-interests with little regard for what is best for the populace. Decisions politicians make have extreme consequences in the real world, including having major effects on people's lives, or even ending hundreds of thousands of lives in the case or wars or policy on some matters (disease, drugs, etc.).
Such consequential decisions demand extreme caution by politicians who are morally bound to investigate the consequences of their decisions extremely carefully. But they mostly don't do that.
Let's take as an axiom that some people are more intelligent than others, with IQ acting as one proxy for that intelligence.
Here are two possible meanings of "more intelligent" I can think of:
Option A) Being more intelligent means that you just absorb stuff faster. These are the kids who are always bored in school, don't need as much time to pick up new ideas, etc. They are more likely to get more education credentials because as time goes on the pace of learning to earn a credential gets faster and faster, and they can keep up. There isn't a ceiling to how much someone can learn, it just might take a long time.
Option B) Being more intelligent means you have a higher ceiling for what you can learn. Everyone can learn addition and subtraction, most people can learn basic algebra, some people can learn calculus, a few people can learn engineering, and only a tiny minority can learn the standard model of particle physics. People learn more or less at the same speed, but some people have a much higher ceiling for what they can learn.
Now I think it's almost certainly a mix of the two. But I'm curious if there is any evidence for Option A vs Option B, and in the absence of evidence, do people think it's 50/50? 70/30 toward one side or the other? Is there another option I'm not thinking of? Etc.
From experience tutoring people (mostly math and programming), I lean towards option B. There are people who just get things as soon as they are explained, see the connections, quickly get a bird's eye view of the context and so on. There are also people you can show a bunch of easily connectable concepts and they'll struggle to do so.
I think part of it is trainable, as good mental habits and attitude, but the training takes place in early childhood and rewiring it takes multiple years. The rest might indeed be genetic potential.
I suspect B is real. I feel like I hit a wall in certain math and physics classes beyond which I could not pass. It seemed I just didn't understand it, and no amount of studying seemed to help clarify. Perhaps it was my study methods - I don't know. But I certainly heard other classmates explain how easy some of it was for them, and I was at a loss to understand why we were even looking at a problem in a certain way.
It’s probably real, but there’s another relevant variable too, which is how you react to not “getting” something in math. I used to get really obsessed
with math puzzles and just things
I didn’t understand in math. It had nothing to do with grades or competitiveness Not understanding just bugged me, like having something stick between my teeth! I remember rumenating for weeks in high school about how conic sections worked. For instance when you slice the cone on an angle you get an ellipse. But how come one end of the ellipse isn’t fatter than the other, given that it comes from lower down on the cone, where its circumference
Is intelligence really about learning ability? I'd start by questioning that. I tend to favour something more like "ability to figure things out". That would include figuring out _what_ the teacher and/or text book is trying to convey, and sometimes even what strategy to pursue to attain better grades, but not be limited to academic pursuits.
Possibly related - number of factors the person can consider at the same time. Can they figure out complex things, that can't be broken down into a few independent components - or do their minds drop relevant detail, leading to persistent error.
I think at a high level, (B) is the main barrier. I used to think it was (A) because I had never personally run into a learning barrier, so assumed anyone could learn anything if they were taught carefully enough. However, I eventually got to a mathematical subject in college that was extremely difficult for me. I could do the homework problems, but it felt like I was manipulating meaningless symbols.
I think anyone can experience this to an extent by considering a sentence like 'I thought that he thought that I thought that he thought that I thought he was thinking'. It's hard to understand as a statement about what the speaker is experiencing rather than as a word game. To progress, you either need better abstraction capabilities or to be able to pick up heuristics about how to play word games. Neither of which can easily be taught.
I think B is mostly down to memory. At some point you hit a limit of how many things you can remember at once, and problems that require more parts than that are impossible.
(Part of the problem with that sentence is there's no clear difference between the second and third layer; thinking you think they're thinking at least informs us they think they're looking clever, but what does thinking you think they think you think they're thinking do differently?)
Interesting, that's certainly possible. With respect to the sentence, to be honest I'm not sure what the difference is, but there are lots of somewhat-analogous examples in math where you have to deal with several nested quantifiers. For instance, the Fields Medalist Peter Scholze describes here (https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2020/12/05/liquid-tensor-experiment/) that "In the end, one formulates Theorem 9.5 which can be proved by induction; it is a statement of the form \forall \exists \forall \exists \forall \exists, and there’s no messing around with the order of the quantifiers. It may well be the most logically involved statement I have ever proved. " So I think this sort of capability of mentally dealing with nesting might be one of the most valuable skills when doing (at least, parts of) higher mathematics.
I think this is the (a) wrong way of framing the question - intelligence is not a rigorously-defined term, and trying to make it one won't work.
Humans have a wide range of mental capabilities. Many of these are correlated, but not perfectly. intelligence is used to gesture broadly at aggregates of them, but does not refer to any specific one.
Your A) and B) are both recognisable abilities; they're correlated, but not perfectly; people who are good at either are more likely to be called intelligent, but trying to be more precise than that is building a castle on sand.
You have a point, but.... Maybe, what if there were a handful of recognizably characteristic types of "smarts?" We have the Big 5 personality traits as a useful approximation/aggregate of the subtle and virtually infinite range of emotions and drives within any given individual. Oversimplifying certainly lends itself to psuedo-scientific "what Harry Potter house are you" typecasting, so that's not desirable.
But it might sometimes be useful to classify peoples' intelligence in broad (but not unidimensional) terms along the lines of:
"Quick study: A+ / Big ideas: B- / Perspective: B+"
vs.
"Quick study: B / Big ideas: A+ / Perspective: A-"
Yeah, I'd likewise distinguish "being a quick study" from "capable of grasping advanced concepts," with plenty of room for overlap. The former is more quick/clever/bright, while the latter tends toward the pensive/absent-minded professor type.
I'd suggest one more: an eye for the telling detail. So much of thought involves distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information. It's a bit like mental rotation of imagined objects: turning until one sees the most useful angle, or like the goal of "carving nature at the joints." This type is good at coming up with "insight porn," and it often overlaps with high social/emotional functioning (charisma).
As for relative percentages, I'd expect a lot of variation between individuals.
I have no idea what the answer is, but reasoning from first principles, "A not B" should be more common than "B not A." It's easy to imagine someone who grasps introductory material quickly, but then plateaus early. Conversely, it's hard to imagine someone who is slow to grasp new concepts but then can learn complex high-level topics.
There are also various domain specific talents - Ramanujan and math, Einstein and physics, various talented artists, etc. And of course, there are lots of further details - someone might have a talent at math that means they pick up the basics almost instantly, don't pick up the advanced stuff any faster, but have a much better 'skill ceiling', so to speak.
I also think an extremely important factor is enjoyment - that is, someone who enjoys learning math will find it much easier to get good at it than someone who finds it worse than pulling teeth, even if they have the same innate ability at it.
Also also, I think 'skill ceilings' should generally be understood more as a rate of diminishing returns. I think you could teach most people the standard model in it's full mathematical glory if you were willing to hire enough tutors and spend enough time and resources on it.
Intelligence is general. It's called the general intelligence factor. There is a very strong correlation between cognitive abilities in different domains. It's weaker for some than others, obviously this is the case for idiot savants, but in general they're not close to being independent abilities.
Caveat: not sure if this passes the threshold for a high-quality contribution (apologies if not, in which case I'm happy for this comment to be promptly deleted).
I've been working on a series of posts/essays concerning the question of whether large language models (LLMs) understand language, and how we'd even go about trying to adjudicate that question. I wanted to share a summary here because of the back-and-forth between Scott and Gary Marcus, which I think is quite relevant. My intended contribution to the debate is to try to clarify some of the different views and ultimately to connect this to our understanding of how humans understand language (I'm a psycholinguist by training).
Broadly, I think much of the debate can be boiled down to two opposing camps:
1) The “duck test” view holds that if a system (like a large language model) behaves as if it understands language, then it probably understands language.
2) The “axiomatic rejection” view holds that behavior alone is insufficient––that true language understanding requires some foundational property or mechanism, such as grounding, compositionality, or a situation model.
In this post (https://seantrott.substack.com/p/how-could-we-know-if-large-language), I come down more on the "duck tester" side. For one, I think that for a question to fall under the domain of scientific inquiry it should be something we can empirically test, which sort of makes me a duck tester by definition––it's just a question of getting the "right" tests. Further, the axiomatic rejection camp often makes somewhat under-specified claims, and it's amenable to a "moving the goalposts" problem.
All that being said, I think there are some merits to the axiomatic rejection view (which is sort of akin to an anti-functionalist account), and so in the remaining posts I'm planning to explore some of the axiomatic criteria people have referenced (e.g., Marcus references compositionality) as being necessary conditions for "True Understanding".
I'm curious to hear more about what people in this community think about the debate.
nostalgebraist has done a bunch of good posts on transformer-based LLMs specifically, including probing their understanding.
I also think people tend to underestimate the level of understanding of, in particular, GPT-like ARs. Some of them exceed human performance at next-token prediction, which means that some of their infelicities in sentence completion come from having to work on a small horizon, and encountering coincidences where the best couple of completions don't begin with the most frequent next token because a lot of low-probability completions all start out the same, thus leading the model to corner itself into bad completions. (I think this is a common source of the excessively repetitive completions, for example, because I think statistically it can always be the case that natural text would be likelier to break the repetition *after* the current token than *at* the current token even though it's overwhelmingly likely to break eventually.)
Related to your second point, there's some interesting work comparing how much LLMs copy their training data relative to humans: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09509
I've also done some work (with collaborators) showing that even with simple next-token prediction, GPT-3 does pretty well on the false belief task, a common measure of Theory of Mind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.01515
One mistake people repeatedly make is to judge the LLM by its ability to replicate the appearance of human agency under adversarial questioning. For example, if you ask an LLM an absurd question, it will generally respond as sensibly as it can as if the question was legitimate (unless explicitly prompted to display incredulity). A human will respond with some form of confusion or incredulity. People frequently use this as an example of LLM's lacking understanding since its response isn't what we expect from the perspective of an intelligent human agent. But the mistake is expecting a human-like response.
The difficulty in evaluating LLMs is that we have a hard time translating our intuitions from the context of human agents to the context of sentence completion. The function of understanding will look very different in the context of a system trained only to complete sentences. If we want a good answer to the question of whether LLMs understand, we need to do the conceptual work up front, we can't just rely on our behavioral intuitions.
For my part, I don't think "understanding" is a binary and LLMs are very far along the understanding gradient.
> If we want a good answer to the question of whether LLMs understand, we need to do the conceptual work up front, we can't just rely on our behavioral intuitions.
Yeah I agree with this as well, and I think your point about expecting a humanlike response in the face of nonsensical questions is a good one.
Also worth noting that humans often treat nonsensical input as if it's sensible. In psycholinguistics the notion of "good enough parsing" was developed to get at this idea. E.g., if I ask "How many animals of each kind did Moses bring onto the ark?", most people just say "2" without realizing the issue.
> For my part, I don't think "understanding" is a binary and LLMs are very far along the understanding gradient.
Agreed that it's not all-or-none (which is also a point I made in the blog post).
I'm in the field, work closely with LLMs, subscribe to your duck test view, and believe that LLMs don't really "understand" language very well at all right now.
They've improved immensely over the previous best tech for understanding language, and for the first time feel like we're getting close to human understanding. But it's still very easy to get them to make mistakes that no reasonably intelligent human would make. The returns to scale don't seem to be flattening out much yet, so they'll get better, but I think we're still at least one breakthrough away from exhibiting true understanding.
The great thing about LLMs is that they're so *useful*. We can improve tons of products, and create new ones, based on their power. So in that sense they're awesome.
What I think they are showing on some of the benchmarks/tests they've more or less solved is Goodharting -- the test isn't as good a measure of NLU or reasoning as we had hoped. That makes this sort of question very hard to test; we don't have a way to verify that our tests test for true understanding or intelligence or whatever, so when a system passes them, we just turn it into an argument about whether the test is valid. This has a long and glorious (?) history in AI, so in that sense it's nothing new.
But for now the answer is the same regardless of whether you buy Searle or not: by the duck test or the axiomatic rejection test, LLMs are not yet human-level understanders or reasoners.
> But for now the answer is the same regardless of whether you buy Searle or not: by the duck test or the axiomatic rejection test, LLMs are not yet human-level understanders or reasoners.
Yeah I think I basically agree. That is, I think observable behavior makes sense as an evaluation criterion, but I also think that the observable behavior LLMs exhibit right now are not at the level of human language understanding.
> What I think they are showing on some of the benchmarks/tests they've more or less solved is Goodharting -- the test isn't as good a measure of NLU or reasoning as we had hoped.
This is one of the main tensions I find too (and I'm conflicted about how I feel about it). So many benchmarks are susceptible to a kind of clever Hans effect. Yet goalpost-moving is also a real problem.
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This smells like bullshit and I mean that in the technical sense (1): something communicated without regard for truth or falsity. It clearly isn't TDS; TDS is frantic but it's also earnest. People, sometimes people we know personally, genuinely believe that Trump is a Russian asset who tried to personally lead a coup. You can hear real fear in their voice, real concern. Whatever TDS is, it is not insincere.
But this sounds so generic. The tone, the presentation, the word choice, it's all so formulaic, so PSA, so...not vulnerable. This sounds like a guy reading from a script; both literally and in terms of Democratic messaging, over stock images of Washington DC to save on cost. It's rote, generic.
This is not a man who has made any significant changes to his 401k or his lifestyle in general based on what he's saying.
Had to look up the guy since I don't know who he is. Former speechwriter for Joe Biden, amongst other things. So yeah, hyperbole. Especially as he's got a new book out.
Anybody can get a Pulitzer these days, so that is less of an achievement than it might once have been. He seems to do a lot of presidential writing, so I'm not surprised he's selling his Lincoln book on the back of "Orange Man Bad" for this go-round.
For what value of these days? His Pulitzer was 2009 for American Lion, which was about Andrew Jackson. And was well regarded, IIRC. Also pretty decent, IMO.
Can anyone here steelman the view that consciousness doesn't exist or that it is an illusion? It seemed immediately evident to me that there was a hard problem, and I currently would even be much more open to idealism or solipsism (even though both seem implausible to me) than to believing consciousness is illusory. However, it seems that many philosophers believe it might be an illusion, so I feel like I must be missing something.
1. For a concept to be meaningful, it needs to cash out into some way that it changes the world or makes predictions about the world. Otherwise we can invent all kinds of ideas (ether, invisible pink unicorns, whatever) that don't lead to more understanding.
2. Whether or not someone is conscious doesn't seem to make any predictions about the world. (See the hard problem of consciousness.) I have no way to verify that you are conscious, just as you can't tell that I am. We could be behaving in the same way, including claiming consciousness, and be p-zombies.
3. (Not actually required but may help as an intuition pump.) There are tons of ways in which we are mistaken about our own experiences. You can think you're angry at someone but actually are tired or hungry. We are systematically mistaken about our perceptions (e.g. we think we see much more detail than we do, don't see blind spots as holes in vision, tiny focal area, etc), memories, motivations, and reasons for making a decision. Being mistaken about mental properties and subjective experiences is the default.
4. Consciousness isn't a meaningful concept because it doesn't predict or cause anything. It's therefore an illusion, and a plausible one because basically our entire sensorium and set of beliefs about ourselves and indeed the world are also illusory.
1. Treats consciousness as something to be discerned in others, which misses the central point, that one is aware of one's own consciousness becaus one is conscious.
As for 2, there is no evidence that consciousness is causally idle ,.or tha p zombies are possible.
For (1), isn't this making some assumptions about what is meaningful? You could alternatively say (as idealists might say) that the only meaningful things are the facts that we experience or could experience, and consciousness is one of those facts, while science allows us to come up with other such facts.
For (3) and (4), usually when we claim something is an illusion, there is some truth that exists in its place. For instance, as you said, we might think we're angry but in reality it's hunger. We might see an oasis in the desert but in reality it's a mirage caused by refracted light rays, etc. What would be the 'true' thing which would replace the false idea of consciousness?
The true think would be, I suppose, the harsh fact that free will is not compatible with physics, that our neural networks have inputs that cause outputs but there's no magical way to generate something from nothing, no creativity that doesn't come from stimulus, and that experiences are merely sequenced firing of sets of neurons in response to firings of other neurons.
Fair enough! Thank you for steel-manning this point of view! I agree with everything you say in this comment. Free will being a (probable) illusion does make me a little more skeptical about saying it's obvious that consciousness isn't an illusion. Although I do think it's also possible that we will end up revising our laws of physics to accommodate consciousness. Plenty of food for thought...
I don't see how the p-zombie notion is anything other than a fully general argument against explanatory theories. How do you distinguish objects affected by gravity from g-zombies, which aren't *actually* affected by gravity, but happen to always move towards other objects in exactly the way that gravity *would* cause them to? How do you distinguish animals that evolved through natural selection from ns-zombies, which are immune to natural selection, but always have exactly the traits natural selection *would* select for? "Your theory is wrong, but everything still appears exactly as your theory predicts it should for no clear reason" is not a proposal that merits serious consideration.
>How do you distinguish objects affected by gravity from g-zombies,
P-zombies and analogues require that there is a conceptual distinction between two phenomena and a lack of bridging principles or arguments connecting the two concepts. For example, the morning star and the evening star are two conceptually distinct phenomena such that we can intelligibly imagine them having separate sources. But given a heliocentric model of the solar system and an explanatory framework that entails the identity of the morning and evening stars with the planet venus, it is unintelligible to accept this explanatory model and also imagine that the morning star doesn't exist or is something other than the planet venus.
On the other hand, it is intelligible to imagine an explanatory model for human behavior, including all the things we think and say about consciousness, without there being any consciousness in the system. This is because our physical theories lack an explanatory role for consciousness. The physical dynamics without consciousness can, in principle, provide a complete explanation for any possible set of behaviors imaginable for a person. That this "p-zombie" is conceivable highlights the limits of science to explain consciousness, at least given our current conceptual machinery and notions of explanation.
I absolutely don't find it conceivable that non-conscious people would spend so much of their time writing down arguments about p-zombies, unless they were chatbots written by conscious people instead of evolved creatures. Evolution produces a lot of weird tics, but not ones like that.
I agree that its far-fetched. But the point of the p-zombie argument isn't that we're possibly p-zombies, but that there is a conceptual gap between the typical explanations science offers and consciousness. The challenge of the p-zombie argument is that science seems ill-suited to bridging the conceptual gap between descriptions of behavior and consciousness. This suggests that we need something "more" to solve the problem of consciousness, either new conceptual tools or an expansion of what is considered proper science (e.g. fundamental consciousness).
It doesn't seem to say to me that science is ill-suited for anything. In the absence of other explanations, talking/writing about consciousness is evidence that consciousness exists and is part of the same causal circle of 'things' as the air we breathe and the paper we write on.
I think 2 is missing the point. The hard problem of consciousness is allowed to be agnostic about whether anyone but me is conscious or not. Whether everyone is conscious, or it's just me, the hard problem remains the same: how is it that I am having experiences? My own consciousness is impossible to deny.
The only thing I can think of is that evidence that others are conscious are their behaviors such as saying I'm conscious, and these behaviors can be explained in terms of reductive materialist conceptions of behavior.
I feel like whatever attempt I take at steelmaning depends on what you mean by consciousness - can you please define it first so that others know what to explain?
I guess something like-- 'the first person experience of existence and of awareness of the external world'. I'm not sure whether this is the best definition, though.
The strongest i can steelman that view is that the continuation of consciousness is an illusion (i.e every night you die and a new person awakens, just every second instead). That is at least believable since the feeling of the continuation of consciousness is only backed by memories, and we understand they can be manipulated.
But consciousness itself not existing i can't understand. Maybe at certain abstraction levels you can say it doesn't exist (at the level of atoms, a rock doesn't exist it's just a collection of atoms, for example), but at some level consciousness seems very much to be real.
I could believe that continuity of consciousness is illusory. I actually do feel like a very different person in some respects than who I was several years ago, so this doesn't seem altogether implausible.
It escapes me how a person with (presumably) qualia could believe that qualia do not exist. Or what it could even mean for anything to be an illusion if qualia do not exist, as what is an illusion but a qualitative experience failing to reflect an external reality? I haven't found the attempts to steelman this position on this thread any more satisfying than the naive statement.
For the last three nights, I've suffered from sleep maintenance insomnia.
It's reasonably easy and quick for me to fall asleep at first, but at any point from 1 to 4 hours after falling asleep I wake up and it takes me a *long* time (anywhere from 3.5 to 7 hours, very roughly guesstimated) to fall asleep again. Even when I do fall asleep again, my sleep is light and fitful, with many repeated awakenings. The next day, I feel horrifically exhausted and basically can't do anything productive.
I've struggled with insomnia before, but only for a day or two at most.
I've already started doing all the standard sleep-hygiene things (no caffeine late in the day, cool and quiet bedroom, turning off the lights and putting away electronic devices early, etc.). Maybe, in your experience, they take more than a few nights to start working?
I do think a significant part of the problem is a current medical issue that causes mild stomach pain. But it's mild enough that during the daytime I can easily ignore it, and in the past I could easily ignore it at night as well, sometimes with the aid of an Advil before bed. These last few days, though, it's been driving me crazy when I'm trying to sleep, even taking Advil every four hours overnight.
For me, reading (on a backlit e-ink reader, if you don't want to wake your partner) is far superior to attempting to get back to sleep while tossing and turning, and ironically makes me fall asleep faster. It's one of those "don't think about the pink elephant" things.
The stomach issue really sounds like something you should check, especially given that some NSAID painkillers will give you stomach ulcers when overused.
If you're able to use tylenol/paracetamol/acetaminophen maybe try that instead? Advil will make you feel the stomach pain less but probably makes the pain itself worse.
When you say that the stomach pain is a significant part of the problem, I doubt that anyone who doesn't share that particular symptom has comparable experiences. The standard sleep-hygiene things might just not work given the pain. That being said, what you describe is exactly what I experience when I try to go to sleep more than 2 hours before my usual bedtime, save for that it only takes 3 or 4 hours for me to get back to sleep, but there's nothing that might be disturbing my sleep otherwise. However, melatonin is a good reset button: it makes my sleep worse but I'll take 6 hours of bad sleep over 3 hours of good sleep. It might work for you, but your best bet is to try to address whatever is making your pain worse.
I’ve dealt with insomnia involving repeated awakenings and while it’s taken me less time to fall asleep again I can attest that my resulting wakefulness and energy was severely diminished.
This was also concurrent with an ulcer/acid reflux which made sleeping extremely unpleasant. Like yours, it was mild at first but escalated to gnawing, burning pain. I was prescribed antibiotics and PPI for the ulcer, but they gave me said insomnia as a rare side effect (along with horrific migraines).
I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but my sleep gradually got better after solving my stomach issues. And by solving I mean there were underlying issues beyond the initial ulcer/acid reflux; the ulcers and reflux were just the most visible and pressing symptoms, and insomnia persisted even after the acute pain resolved. I can only speak for myself but my sleep did not fully recover until my gut issues were addressed, thus I will weight my answer more towards gastrointestinal interventions than sleep interventions.
Unfortunately for me, there was no one silver bullet that fixed the issue, and it did not happen overnight, but here is everything I did. While my stomach symptoms sometimes recur after periods of unhealthy eating (such as vacations and other people’s parties) they and my sleep issues are largely in remission. Also note that while I hope this helps, this is not intended as substitute for diagnosis by medical gastrointestinal professional, nor is it a blanket rant against antibiotics/PPIs. Apologies in advance for typos and brevity bc mobile.
-DGL licorice, 1000-1500mg per day. Chewable tablets as it needs to interact with your saliva for gastro protective activity.
-Korean cabbage juice extract of the kind you get on amazon (I bought AllJeup). No, you are not drinking it for the taste. 2-3 packs daily when symptoms flare, 1 pack for maintenance.
-Gastricell (probiotic). 2-3 sachets when symptoms flare, 1 sachet for maintenance.
The above three reduced severity of symptoms and improved sleep about 40-70% after a couple of weeks, in conjunction with a more vegetable centric diet and regular (non vigorous) exercise, about 10000 steps per day. NSAIDs such as Advil were an absolute no no for me due to blocking prostaglandins which make mucus for the stomach lining and I pretty much always had horrific rebound symptoms after taking them.
What really cemented the recovery/remission on top of the above were the following:
-you may already be aware of these, but Andrew Huberman’s sleep toolkit, particularly the part about exposing self to natural sunlight regularly every morning, helped noticeably. Vitamin D supplementation (I took 1000-2000 iu, more is overkill) with a light therapy lamp is an imperfect but acceptable substitute.
-im not sure how well it works for general gastritis and nonspecific stomach issues, but regular zinc carnosine (75-150 mg per day) improved remission rate from 40-70% to 75-95% after about two weeks when used in conjunction with all the other stuff above. I found and used the book Ulcer Free by Georges Halpern MD (free on internet archive library) as a source for its safety and efficacy. Had I known about it sooner I’d probably have used it from the start. Anecdotally but frankly, it works better for me long term relieving pain than PPI/H2 blockers which have awful rebound effects.
-go to bed at the same time every night, not too late. If I stay up late just an hour I feel off the next morning even if I sleep in an hour for the same time. Two hours late and I might as well pull an all nighter. This is already on many sleep hygiene lists but was important enough for me to repeat.
TLDR: zinc carnosine, morning sun, regular bedtim, other gastroprotectants/diet change as necessary, NO MORE NSAIDS.
Again apologies for typos due to mobile. Best of luck to you and hope all goes well.
Forgot to mention this in the original post but CBT-I therapy can also be very effective. As Laurence said the sleep issues will probably not go away without cessation of the stomach issues, but a good CBTI therapist can work with you to provide advice and empathy on those (as an example, another thing contributing to my insomnia and another side effect of my antibiotics was severe bladder/pelvic irritation…like running to the bathroom every 15 minutes bad…and though I finally found relief through some massages and marshmallow tea, my therapist also had mega cystitis issues with her pregnancy and was able to provide really good advice and consolation on non-sleep issues as well.)
> An especially common offense this time around was “low-content high-content comments”
Did you mean low-content high-conflict?
I'd love to see more experimentation with aggressive moderation (where stuff that's not strictly bad, just dull or low-quality, also gets deleted), it's a very underappreciated tool. In a high-volume comment section, free time becomes a participation filter; as free time tends to be inversely correlated with skill and experience, that's not great. Clearing out the low-value comments makes more space for high-value oned, in a way. (Of course it's very time consuming for the moderator.)
Old-timer forums used karma systems for that, it's sad that that's not very popular these days.
1) Imagine some set of at least somewhat productive comments at a top level
2) Then imagine there's a low-quality branching, that invites higher-conflict comments
3) Eventually, someone calls a particularly awful comment
4) That call-out is (in and of itself) low content and high conflict, but in the context of the thread may be more meaningful. For example, a prior request for clarification was ignored, or rules of argument were repeatedly ignored.
5) the call-out receives a warning or ban, but the low-quality precipitates do not.
This invites a hazard of endless low-quality content that a) cannot be called out without extensive re-hashing of what's been said, and therefore b) appears to be high-quality because no one has the time to write extensively, over and over again, about why it is low-quality content.
I check the context for every comment I moderate, and I try pretty hard not to punish mild escalations of terrible threads. That is, if we rate comment badness on a score of 1 - 100, and my usual thread for banning is 50, if a thread goes 0 -> 10 -> 20 -> 30 -> 40 -> 50 then I'm much less likely to ban than 0 -> 50. There were a few cases where I punished both participants in a terrible thread.
Remember that my usual policy is that a comment has to be be 2/3 of true/kind/necessary. Some unkind comments will get through because they are both true and necessary. But these are both really subjective, and I agree that you are throwing yourself on the mercy of my subjective judgment if you write unkind things (which are usually more objective to judge).
1. Substack could benefit from giving moderators the ability to highlight good comments, so I can read those first, like setting a threshold of +3 on Slashdot. I don't have time to read most of the comments otherwise. But I don't want a comment voting system to degenerate into reddit where people are just pandering to the ignorant masses to collect karma.
2-4. A lot of shitty comments are from newbies who don't know any better. It might help to link to something like the rules at r/themotte at the bottom of every open thread. There are also some shitty comments from people who do know better, but temporarily forgot or are being lazy or something. They might also benefit from the reminder.
8. shoutout to Oliver at Redwood Research who was my buddy at CFAR I in Prague last month.
My ideal moderation system is where I can upvote or downvote comments, nobody else can, and your overall lifetime score corresponds to the probability of your comment showing up on any given thread - maybe each user has a 50% chance of seeing it usually, but it could be 100% if your comments are always great, and 1% if they're always terrible.
This might lead to an okay experience for casual lurkers who just skim comment threads once in a while, but it sounds immensely frustrating for regulars who have (e.g.) 90% scores and are just trying to have conversations with each other and get their comments randomly dropped.
I don't mind the idea of yourvranking comments and that changes the order they are presented to people but i want all of them to be visible even if they are at the bottom of the thread. You or any person might not like a comment, think it repetitive , etc., but others might find it interesting.
Is there a way to "gray out" comments as a way to make it clear you find them less compelling but still leaving them readable to those who are interested?
There is a bit in the series mythic quest where they have to deal with censorship/moderation. They don't to be against "free speech" but they don't want to allow pedos and nazis to be associated with product. So they secretly create a second game space where they put all of the people that are undesirable (banning without banning). I can't really remember what happened in the end.
I had a semi-similar idea that Substack should allow bloggers (substackers?) to assign custom badges and titles that appear only on their blog. So for example, you could give everyone who migrated over a SSC badge or a "SSC Refugee" title. You could also give people good commenter status or temporary ban status. The system already kind of does that, wouldn't be too hard to implement.
It also seems a pretty obvious feature in that it'd allow bloggers to give different badges based on subscriber level.
Based on some experience I had elsewhere, I don't like awards or badges or such systems.
I think if I were writing "how can I get the most people to like and upvote and award and badge me?" comments, that would be very different from how I write presently (mostly, blorking up the brain contents that resulted from stimulation of reading a post/other comments like a cat with a hairball).
Now, maybe I should be restricted to a litter tray and not be getting hairballs all over the floor here, and that's a fair judgement. But once a system of "pats on the head for being the goodest boi" is introduced, that is going to have a definite impact on how people write, what they write, and how they slant it.
I don't mind a Reign of Terror. I do mind a Reign of Sugarplums, because they end up being worse for the health.
As a programmer I think it would only take 1-2 programmer days to implement that moderation system (but possibly an extra order of magnitude if the technical debt is bad or the programmer is bad).
Substack's revenue from you is probably more than a programmer's annual salary, so it seems reasonable to ask for that moderation system.
Unlikely: I don't think Substack wants to spend the programmer time it would take to try this, especially since I might decide that I hate it a week in. Maybe one day they will add user plugins like WordPress used to have, and I will beg/pay one of you to implement it.
Do they ever solicit feedback from you as an influential voice? Can’t imagine they don’t have a scrum team with a backlog to make small enhancements like this.
Yes but this doesn't seem like a "small" enhancement. My guess is I have enough political capital with them to request maybe one thing like this per few years, and I want to save it for something else.
Have a sense that the utility of replying to this may be fairly low because there’s lots here I’m assuming but just in case:
Fair point on the conservation of political capital. That would trump any of the below.
The specific reasons I think your ask here might be relatively low effort is because substack already seems to maintain permissions to comment and like comments based on subscriber/not subscriber so adding in owner in there as an option seems achievable and I would guess those fields probably exist somewhere on the same table since you can see the author swag in the comment itself.
As to the ranking piece for order and historical ranking, if you just did a very simple rule of comment creator who has the most author likes in their activity history popping to top followed by runner up and so on and so forth that doesn’t seem too hard. Again granted, I don’t know how well activity history and ranking are integrated so this is the one I’d guess would be slightly more difficult, but again it might not be since they do seem to keep an activity history and you can see number of likes and things on a comment itself.
But most importantly you still might hate it after a week.
Does anyone know where I can find datasets on weather forecasts and outcomes? For example, a dataset on forecast rain probability each day and then the corresponding outcome of whether or not it actually rained?
I'm working on a project to report forecast performance metrics for as many possible datasets as I can, including the ones usually discussed on ACX like election predictions (538, PredictIt, etc), as well as other kinds of forecasts like sports betting and weather. So far finding a good weather dataset with outcomes has actually been kinda hard.
I can't point you to any datasets, but I remember reading in Nate Silver's book that weather forecasters intentionally overstate the chances of precipitation because if they say it will probably rain and it doesn't, people will be happy. But if they say it probably won't rain and it does, people will be pissed off. I can't confirm the veracity of that, but it seems plausible.
There is a British forum called netweather full of relatively friendly weather nerds ( just don’t hate on snow). It’s got a forum where you can search or ask that question.
I'd like to encourage people not to use the word "meritocracy", and not to fall into the ways of thinking it implies.
Scott uses the word to mean "selecting applicants for competed-for, desirable jobs based solely on how well they'll do them". And I think that's a good thing, and find his arguments for it compelling, but I think that referring to that as "merit" is both misguided and offensive.
It's absolutely true that, all else being equal, if you work harder you'll do better than if you work less hard. But it's also true that, with the same level of effort, someone with rich, educated, supportive parents and genes conducive to academic study will acquire far more ability, and do far, /far/ better, than someone less lucky but equally hard-working.
And while I think it's defensible to use a word like "merit", with its strong connotations of virtue and moral worth, not just of ability, to refer to "hard work", it clearly shouldn't be used to refer to those forms of luck.
If you want a genuine "merit"ocracy, you should be doing.. not the opposite of, quite, but something orthogonal to, the thing we call "meritocracy" - doing your best to give out jobs based not on achievement but on effort. That would unquestionably be fairer, but the cost in terms of everything worse would be far too high.
Hiring lazy people with upbringings and genes that let them turn effort into accomplishment efficiently in preference to harder-working but less able people is clearly the right thing to do - it's unfair, but a) it benefits a lot of people a lot, and b) "hire the person who will do the job best" is a useful Schelling point that avoids squabbles about how the handicapping system should work. But pretending that it's fair, or that you're hiring based on "merit", is unnecessarily adding insult to injury.
"Abilitocracy" is obviously an ugly word, and no-one will understand what you mean if you use it. But try "hiring based solely on ability"? Or, if you must use "meritocracy", please add a caveat pointing out that you recognise and explicitly reject the connotations and subtext of what you're saying.
1. "Selecting applicants for competed-for, desirable jobs based solely on how well they'll do them" is not something anyone meaningfully disagrees with. It's also not an actionable standard unless you can literally see the future.
2. "Meritocracy", as originally defined, is pretty much synonymous with "credentialism", i.e. Goodhart's law as applied to signaling of merit/ability/whathaveyou. Credentialism being bad is not a controversial position either, including among proponents of meritocracy (Scott being among them, I believe).
3. Whatever actual scope of disagreement exists is about a concept of meritocracy that lies somewhere between those two extremes. That concept would indeed probably benefit from being called something else than "meritocracy". (But I think at this point people are aware of the potential semantic mismatch and can just take precautions to avoid it.)
4. It's probably still wrong, however, because "is most qualified/able to do the best job" and "will actually do the best job" are not the same. My go-to example: superhuman paperclip maximizer AGI. It's better qualified to do a better job than any human. It just won't, and will optimize for paperclips instead.
1. Most university admissions are extremely far from being optimized for selecting the students who will perform best in their chosen studies. Ceteris paribus an Asian needs >300 more SAT points than a black to get into the same school, and this creates a predictable huge disparity in post-admission outcomes.
2. Credentials are more confounded by class than test scores. Compared to the present, the original meritocracy was more about test scores. The shift to credentialism happened because of the disparate impact doctrine making it harder to use test scores.
My understanding is, this is not a change of meaning as it was originally conceived, but of worsening historical circumstances. As in, the people using meritocracy as a pejorative have always seen it as a tool of enforcing class barriers. Since there was no elite overproduction back then, the barriers used to be fairer and more welcoming to commoners willing to join, but it's a difference of degree, not kind, and the framing makes the change perfectly natural and expected.
This is not to argue against differentiating between the two. It's to point out that much of the "how can people possibly oppose meritocracy?" genre could avoid ending up in strawman territory by realizing that said people operare within a framework that does not diferentiate between them.
Meritocracy was originally seen as exactly the opposite of a tool for enforcing class barriers. Any lower class kid who did well enough on a test could go to a fancy school and get a fancy job. Before that you needed connections and class markers instead of test scores. Now you need extracurriculars and essays instead of test scores. The current US approach to college admissions seems way more class-loaded than using test scores alone. Extracurriculars cost time and money that a kid doesn't have if they're working part time to help their mom pay rent. Essays are way more susceptible to paid help than test scores.
Now some misguided people see the use of test scores as a tool for enforcing class barriers. But there isn't any inexpensive alternative to testing that's less class-correlated while having as good predictive validity for school/job performance. "test scores correlate with class because partly because innate ability correlates with class" is a tough pill to swallow for many on the left. They blame it all on preparation instead. Would be nice to see an RCT of some expensive SAT prep program's effect on test scores. Personally I improved my original score of 720M/640V to 790/800 using only self study with a few cheap books that I got from amazon (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1438000324/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) but could have gotten for free from a library or as a handmedown from an older friend. I doubt having an expensive human coach shouting at me during that process would have added anything.
I thought meritocracy (at least originally?) meant using tests to determine who gets the good jobs.
The problem is that there's direct-to-mind signal of who will be good at a job, even assuming such a signal is wanted.
Tests are, by definition, not the job itself, they're a hopefully useful shortcut. Tests can be biased or faked or examining a feature which isn't actually relevant.
Subjective approaches have a large risk of selecting for cultural markers more strongly than tests do.
I'm not saying people should drop "meritocracy", but it would be good if they say what they mean by it.
I'm with you here. I found W E Deming's insights into understanding variation and statistical thinking to be very useful. The New Economics (1993) is very accessible, even if I first came to his thoughts reading out of the crisis in the 80s.
There is so much life where a red bead experiment is passing itself off as meritocracy.
It is not only the measurement problem but it is the meaningful distinction problem and the disregard for systemic influences on outcomes.
I submit for your consideration 'symptocracy' - rule/privilege/preference accorded to those for whom effort, ability, and luck coincided to maximise the results.
This smells to me like the term "merit" has changed its common meaning since it was incorporated into the compound term meritocracy, where it was all about giving poor-but-talented boys a chance at the things that were automatically given to the children of the upper classes.
On the one hand, this was about giving them more schooling than boys of their class normally got; on the other hand, it was about promotion based on ability, rather than whether the candidate was the "right sort" (Eton, Oxbridge, etc.)
And yes, I believe (without checking) that the term is old enough that my gendered terminology is entirely appropriate. Also that the sense of the term I got from non-recent authors I happened to read is correct for their time. I could of course be wrong about either or both.
All that is meant by merit is how good a person is at a particualr job/task. It's not some moral claim about whether they "deserve" to have a job based on how hard they work. That would be a particularly useless definition.
Who should be hired for a position? The person who is extremely hard working? Or someone smarter who is more effective at their job without needing to work as hard? Hiring the latter person would be hiring based on merit because that person is literally better suited for the position. THAT'S what makes a successful society, having effective people in the positions they are best suited for, not rewarding dummies for trying.
And by the way, do you not understand how flawed your conception of merit is? How 'hard working' somebody is subject to all of the genetic and environmental influences that e.g. intelligence is! Conscientiousness is literally a (partially) heritable trait! It's also obviously effected by environment. You seem to conceptualize it as something that is external to the law of physics and arises through sheer force of will. It's more malleable than intelligence, but the idea that how hard working somebody is is independent of the chance cirumstances of their life is rudimentarily wrong.
>Or, if you must use "meritocracy", please add a caveat pointing out that you recognise and explicitly reject the connotations and subtext of what you're saying.
You're the one applying those connotations. You should be the one to deal with it.
We either hire somebody who is most suited for the role based on their ability, or we hire on some other factor. The former is meritocracy, the latter is something else. Period.
I would only accept this if I saw people advancing the same argument when conservatives and libertarians argue, as they often do, that redistributive taxation is unfair because it's taking money away from people who have earned it and giving it to those who don't.
Since those arguments are common and often go unchallenged, I conclude that those people are - at least when it's convenient for them - using merit in precisely the sense you say they aren't.
And as far as I can see, the best way to attack that bailey is to go after the motte.
>I would only accept this if I saw people advancing the same argument when conservatives and libertarians argue, as they often do, that redistributive taxation is unfair because it's taking money away from people who have earned it and giving it to those who don't.
Seems like a non-sequitur to me, but vOv. Redistributive taxation is unfair because, ceteris paribus, it selects against one speficic time-preference (making money) against all others (and it's evil in addition to unfaire, because it selects against a time preference that benefits others, instead of oneself).
Consider A and B. They're the same persons, but A spends his week-ends working a side-job. A will have a higher income, but B will have more free time. Why redistribute A's additional income (which comes from being useful to someone else), but not B's free time & leisure?
"But what about extreme income disparities? Abstract identical persons don't adress the fact that billionaires makes absurd level of money", one will ask. Which drives back to Edwardoo's argument: their superior usefulness, not harder works, enables that. Not some inherent moral virtue.
There are two arguments here, and I hope to not motte/bailey this, but I think it's necessary to understand.
There are definitely people who try to make this a moral argument, on both sides. Instead, it's a matter of effectiveness. If you reward people for doing what society wants/needs them to do, they will continue doing it. If you take away the reward, it will be less successful or potentially even fail.
Let's use a generic common example: doctors. Doctors are generally very smart and quite capable. In order to become a doctor there are many years of hard work and grueling schedules. Society generally pays doctors very well, to compensate them for the unusually hard process of becoming and being a doctor.
Now, we could take away the wealth of doctors, and could use that money for good causes. What would happen very shortly after that is that people who would otherwise become doctors decide to do something else that requires far less effort and time. Existing doctors may decide to retire or switch to something more lucrative, if they are able. This will result in a net of far less doctors, which pretty much everyone agrees would be bad.
Redistributive taxes is one way that you can take away the rewards society gives to people in a way that makes it less likely they will do whatever it is that we want them to continue doing. Higher taxes affects people on the margins, and maybe slightly higher taxes would affect too few people to matter, or that the net benefits outweigh the costs, but these are not a given in any particular situation. When someone is making the argument that "redistributive taxation is unfair because it's taking money away from people who have earned it and giving it to those who don't" they are signaling that the proposed tax increase is enough to change at least some people's calculation about whether it's worth continuing to be effective at something society values.
If we don't want someone to do something (cigarettes, thievery) we tax it or criminalize it. If we want people to do something, we need to incentivize it. We can't forget about this basic tenet of society when we're trying to solve other issues (like poverty, which should still be addressed).
When talking about rewarding people with money, most commentators seem to ignore the logarithmic utility of money for humans. If we want to take a "flat tax" in terms of experienced motivation, or even a somewhat regressive one, our tax rate in dollar percentages should still have an asymptote at 100% on the high end. ("Flat" would be keeping a fixed, <1 power of your income, modulo lower-order terms.)
That said, probably paying off investments like student loans should be completely tax-deductible.
Hiring the useless saint is unfair to the customers who expect you to provide them a good product for a good price. Hiring the efficient devil is unfair to the useless saint. Unfairness is inevitable either way. But fairness is not a very useful frame here. Better to think about what the consequences would be of universalizing the rule of hiring people according to alleged moral worth instead of productivity. The USSR tried that (in terms of giving party loyalists and proletarians the good jobs) and it was a disaster.
I think you're defending the thing, when I'm challenging the word, and your defence doesn't work as a defence of the word.
I'm entirely happy with the idea that fairness/unfairness isn't a useful frame here - that's essentially the thrust of my post! - but what I'm saying is that the word "meritocracy" smuggles in a claim of fairness, and should be rejected on that ground.
"If you want a genuine "merit"ocracy, you should be doing.. not the opposite of, quite, but something orthogonal to, the thing we call "meritocracy" - doing your best to give out jobs based not on achievement but on effort. That would unquestionably be fairer"
I don't agree that it would be fairer to hire the hard-working incompetent person, if your conception of fairness is expansive enough to include the effects on customers etc.
But also I kind of got sidetracked mid-paragraph into defending meritocracy the thing.
Another problem with "hard-working" is that you can end up incentivizing people to wreck themselves to prove they're hard-working, while not actually doing better at the work. At some point of exhaustion, a person can actually be doing worse work.
Or the appearance of hard work, which can take on many forms. Being in the office 80+ hours a week or never taking a vacation day, even if you aren't doing anything productive, can appear to be productive.
Much better to measure results, rather than Goodhearting the inputs to those results.
This argument seems to hinge on "merit" meaning something like hard-working and virtuous, but I'm not sure that's the case in this context.
Consider the sentence, "we'll judge your argument on its own merits". It just means we'll judge argument by how good of an argument it is.
Similarly, "we judge applicants on their merits" just implies you're judging applicants by how good they would be for that job.
I guess if you support meritocracy, you feel the people who get jobs by merit "deserve" it in some sense. But this seems kind of unavoidable. If you support abilitocracy, you're saying we should give jobs to people with ability for the jobs. In other words, they deserve the jobs, in some sense.
>If you support abilitocracy, you're saying we should give jobs to people with ability for the jobs. In other words, they deserve the jobs, in some sense.
No! I am saying that we should give people with superior abilities the competed-for, desirable jobs /even though they don't deserve them/, because the positive consequences it has in terms of jobs being done better outweigh the harm done by the unfairness.
(Also, as a corollary, elsewhere in the thread I am saying that we should take that unfairness into account when deciding how redistributive tax policy should be).
The confusion is over the poorly defined word "deserve". Deserve is commonly used to mean "the person who should get it". People who argue over who deserves something may give different reasons. One may argue person X deserves something because they're a kind person, or because they're legally entitled to it, or because they'd make the best use of it, etc.
You're using a particular version of "deserve"; I think your version is something like people deserve something for effort. If we avoid the word deserve, I think you're saying something like we would ideally strive to reward people for effort, however, for pragmatic reasons, we should give people jobs based on ability.
But the word obfuscates your point of view because the word is not well defined. Everyone has a different idea of what it means.
And importantly, not enough people draw the distinction between deserve meaning "the person who should get something" vs "the person who should have gotten something if not for some practical concerns". If the word "abilitocracy" became popular, it would suffer the same problem you're perceiving in meritocracy. It would adopt the connotation that people with ability deserve the job. Which is a correct usage. That's one of the meanings of deserve.
So, if you have two children and one cupcake, and only one child wants the cupcake, they deserve the whole thing, but if they both want the cupcake they each deserve half? Or if it's something too small to split like a smartie, the winner of rock paper scissors deserves the whole thing and the loser deserves nothing?
I contend that your proposed meaning of "deserve" does not exist.
Yes, that is the meaning I am arguing against. There are a lot of situations, including in my comment above, where some method is used to determine who gets a thing, and the method is even recognized as fair (!), but nobody would use the word "deserve" in place of "should get" or "should have". In order to "deserve" something, it is necessary not only that it is best for you to have the thing, but that it would be unjust for you not to have it ex ante.
Clearly your work should be redistributed, not your pay. The companies want work, not pay, otherwise they would work and you would be paying them (i.e. you would be a customer).
It's an interesting thought experiment. I would argue it's more interesting in the "partnership" sense since there we can't just say "companies don't deserve things, only people do".
I think there actually is an answer, if a somewhat unsatisfying one: most of the things people deserve are messy, un-fungible things that have built-in tradeoffs with other people's deserts, such that even if we recognize the world is full of unfairness and injustice we can't always do anything about it in any practical way. But money is super fungible--being fungible is its entire purpose! So economic injustices like "a lot of people deserve a better paying job and a few people deserve a worse paying one" can actually be somewhat corrected, at least at a broad societal level.
More technically, I think *all* discussion of desert fails in some sense; even if you get a job by working very hard, you lucked into the genes/environment/etc that made you a hard worker. I think every analysis of desert has to stop at some point and call the remaining unexplained factors "deserved" even though there's an ultimate sense where that's false, I think it's pretty clear what level the meritocracy discussion is stopping at, and so I think it's okay.
You can build habits that will let you work harder, or make better use of your intelligence. You cannot do much to make yourself smarter, you can do a lot to work smarter.
The point is that the ability to 'work hard' in and of itself is often considered a genetic predisposition, similar to having a high IQ. If both are innate, then neither should be praised (nor condemned).
While I do credit this to a large extent, for the sake of personal well-being I choose to believe (and act) as though it were not true.
Genetics and environment may be necessary (I have my doubts, but that's a different discussion), but are certainly not sufficient. By praising positive social behaviors in socially beneficial directions, we can help create a better society.
Even beyond "works hard" and "high IQ" is the effective means by which they are used. Just about nobody praises a very smart and hard working scammer. Martin Shkreli is about universally loathed, despite being both smart and hard working. Someone using their intelligence and hard work to play video games very well is of limited social utility, and deservedly receives little praise.
“You want to hire someone that’s honest, smart, and hardworking. You want to look for those traits in that order because if they’re dishonest, you’d strongly prefer that they be dumb and lazy.”
Even if it's genetic, the ability still has to be cultivated, and the same is true for "converting" IQ into useful skills and knowledge. One might object that it's unfair that genetic luck makes some people respond better to cultivation efforts (which might include praise), but the alternative seems to be to just throw your hands up and give up on cultivating anything (a reasonable description of the state of education in much of the First World, I'd say).
The thing that I think of as "merit" or virtue or what have you is, roughly, sacrifice (of any form) for the benefit of others. How many hours of work you can do before it reaches a given level of unpleasantness for you is obviously determined by genes and environment and practice and so on, and different for everyone. But I think that how much sacrifice different people made is probably something that can be used to apples-to-apples comparison.
The reason why I think this matters, and why I don't agree that when people use the word "meritocracy" they understand that they're only talking about ability, not about anything to do with desert, is the frequency with which I see it being cropping up in arguments opposing economic redistribution, from people arguing that because we're a meritocracy the rich deserve their wealth and it would be unfair and morally wrong to take it from them because they've earned it through merit.
I think that the prevalence of arguments like this proves that people /are/ associating it with moral desert, and makes this an argument with meaningful material consequences.
(I think I'm probably reiterating a lot of what Freddie deBoer has said in "The Cult of Smart", but I'm reluctant to just cite it because I haven't read it and I don't know for sure that he doesn't say "and therefor we should start using babies as condiments" on page 217 or something).
I sacrifice nothing, I come to work to shoot the shit with my colleagues and work on interesting problems. If I couldn't, and I lived off UBI, I'd probably find something else to work on out of boredom. According to your criteria I should be paid $0, despite creating value for my employer?
I suspect that people are going to make similar arguments no matter what word you use. If you have a system where you've agreed that the people with trait X are going to receive Y, then those people are going to start looking at Y as their right rather than their privilege, no matter what X is.
Then if you try to take Y away from them, they're going to get upset, and they're going to conflate "the previous rules said I should get Y" with "I deserve Y" in order to make their objection seem more justified (both to themselves and others).
I don't think the words that you use for X have *zero* effect, but I don't think they're a very powerful lever to use to influence this dynamic.
Why does it seem like you're interpreting merit as being chiefly about hard work? Usually I see merit used to refer to either ability/skill or achievements.
But perhaps most importantly, why wouldn't it be fair *if* those most able were preferentially hired? Surely unfair is the word we use for situations where that isn't the case?
What I'm actually interpreting "merit" as being about is virtue and moral desert (consider what you would believe was being told of someone if you were just told that their behaviour was "meritorious").
But of the things contributing to getting hired in a meritocracy, I think that "hard work" is the one that it's most defensible to relate to that, so I'm taking without challenge the idea that working hard is virtuous/meritorious, and even granting that I'm saying that that's far from the only thing "meritocracy" rewards.
In terms of "fair/unfair", they're obviously very nebulous words, but what I see as "fairness" in this context is rewarding good deeds - effort and sacrifice for the benefit of others - and not much else. And that obviously has nothing to do with ability.
In a game people have entered voluntarily, I'm happier with using the word "fair" to refer to giving the prize to the fastest runner rather than the one who tried hardest - I think because the unlevelness of the playing field has in some sense been abstracted out when you zoom in on just that game (different people having different bodies is outside the scope and context of the game). But when we're talking about who gets to have a nice life, nothing is out-of-scope.
It seems to me like, when you zoom out of the game under scrutiny to the point where you're considering the "loaded dice" of genetics, the concept of fairness is pretty much meaningless. You're basically working at the level where there is no free will, trying to apply a concept meant for a level where agents can make free decisions - which we can clarify on a fairness scale. Sure, at some level the guy who achieved the most had no control over it and in a sense didn't deserve it, but then of nobody gets to decide what they do what does fairness even mean? Plus, hard work is not unlike intelligence in this respect - capacity for it can also be reduced to biological (and probably genetic) constraints. Why should these traits be treated as the sole determinants of moral worth?
Effort, being hard-working, being willing to sacrifice, these are all traits subject to the same genetic and environmental influences that intelligence is.
Black kids in the US spend less time doing homework than Asian kids, which seems like as good a quantititative measure of being hardworking as anything. Are you going to say that it is fair that black kids have worse outcomes in life related to academic ability and career? Or are you going to selectively offer environmental explanations for why black kids are less hardworking than asian kids?
I think you might like the essay "Bourgeoisie Virtue" by Dierdre McCloskey. It's relevant to your post because it contextualizes the "hard working = virtuous (meritorious) " against a broader backdrop across which "meritocracy " operates.
the last sentence here is too conflicy-theory-y for me. There are some crucial mistakes in the worldview of many in the anti-meritocracy camp.
1. Believing that historical wrongs cause outcome gaps that persist instead of automatically regressing towards ability in a few generations or less. (e.g., US jews have 50% above average household income despite the fricking holocaust).
2. Believing that reverse discrimination is an effective or efficient way of of reducing income gaps
3. Massively overestimating the importance of shared environment
4. Underestimating the utility of free markets and letting decisions be made by people with a stake in the outcome (e.g. leaving employment decisions up to employers who know the business and have a financial stake in the outcome, instead of judges that don't know the business and have no stake in the outcome)
I find myself having the same argument with smart people over [1] and over [2]: is it reasonable to consider that things without brains might feel?
It think it's quite reasonable to hypothesize (but not assume!) that e.g. plants can feel pain. Other people seem to think that, without some kind of sophisticated information processing, pain makes no sense.
I also think ego death/dissolution is probably the closest analogue to not having a brain, or at least not having the recursive/self-aware aspect of human experience (which almost certainly requires a brain)
Good question! I think you do, but there's no memory formation.
I base this on a few experiences (especially taking Galantamine) where I've transitioned from wakefulness directly into REM sleep, presumably through a brief NREM stage (which feels *super* weird)
I’m not sure I would use the word “feel” or “pain”, but I think it’s highly plausible that particularly complex plants and fungi have intelligence and experience of their own forms, hard to compare with those of animals.
I’m using the idea of taking in information from you’re surroundings, processing that information, and using it to engage in behaviors that do a better job of achieving your goals.
I’m not sure where cognition in particular is meant to play a role (or how we know whether cognition is going on in most human behavior or any plant behavior).
I can very much believe things without brains may _suffer_ (but i hope every night they cannot), but i don't believe they can feel _pain_, since pain means something pretty specific and without the complex pain-sensing setup brains have it would be so different that calling it pain would be incorrect.
Interesting! I usually define pain and suffering the opposite way. Pain is the raw sensation, and suffering is its recursive analog (which involves memory/expectations about pain).
It's not unreasonable to hypothesize that plants can, on some level, have experiences, but if anything like that were true then it'll be so far removed from ours that the concept of 'pain' is completely inapplicable. I did enjoy that piece on Barbara McClintock, and I have no trouble believing that empathizing with plants made her a better scientist, but I don't think the experiences of plants are in any way conceivable to us.
When I think of things that cannot have experiences, I think of jellyfish, nematodes, and other things that just do not have the necessary complexity to support something like that. But trees are massive complex organisms that interact with and process information from their environment in a myriad of ways, many of them poorly understood. It's certainly possible that, on their timescale, this results in experiences.
I think most people are probably basing it on visible movement in human-relevant timescales. That will privilege animals over plants. But if you watch plants on time lapse, some of them seem to engage in much more goal-directed movement than some animals -I’m thinking particularly of tendrils and roots that explore, move, and sense their environment searching for what they are looking for.
Totally agree! Some of the Planet Earth time lapse shots completely disabused me of the impression that plants are just static things. Growing my own has helped a lot too.
It's interesting to think of sharing the world with a slow-moving consciousness, and what that might look like. You might enjoy this short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOPwXNFU7oU
Time for me to pull out the quote from "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" again:
"And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
So far, the evidence is that organisms with nociceptors (pain receptors) can feel pain. The Wikipedia category page for nociception only has a subcategory for "pain in animals", not one for plants.
I don't know about kinds of feelings that don't involve specialized sensory organs or organelles. I don't think anyone does.
But we have a huge anthropomorphic bias here. We only know about pain receptors because we're able to correlate people's self-reporting of pain with the activation of those receptors. If there's an entirely different kind of pain receptor in jellyfish, how would we know it's a pain receptor? We can't ask the jellyfish what it's feeling.
So of course we don't know about any kinds of feelings that don't involve human-like organs--there's no way for us to know about them!
No; insects have nociceptors. Since evolution imposed that energetic cost on them, we can be sure they're feeling pain, even if they experience it differently to the way we do.
Can we really be sure they feel it? *I* think it's pretty likely, but many people seem to think the feeling requires a prefrontal cortex--that without symbolic self-representation the pain receptors just trigger a mechanical aversion. And I have no good argument against that.
*That* seems pure anthropocentric mysticism to me. Clinging to the belief that some old dude with a white beard made humans different to the other creatures of the earth, or some such. No evidence for any of that.
Whatever insects do with the input from their pain receptors I'm going to call "feeling pain". It sure looks like it. I have no way of translating their experience to my own, but that's true of every being besides me. If it waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, etc.; and "nullius in verba" (take nobody's word for it).
I think that because you're using words like "might" and "hypothesize", I can't say outright that you're wrong, but if you I think that the odds on plants having any kind of subjective experience are infinitesimal.
We don't understand the mind at all yet, so I can't claim certainty, but everything we know about it very strongly suggests that it is generated in some way, and closely linked to the physical structure of, the brain, and that makes me extremely confident that nothing without a... not necessarily similar, but equivalent along some axis we haven't identified yet that almost certainly requires structural complexity... structure will have anything recognisable as a mind.
Right--this seems to be the general argument. No one reasonable makes a strong claim one way or the other, but people like me think it's highly plausible, while others (like you) think it's highly implausible.
I think a large part of my belief comes from having experienced mind states that are both extremely simple and extremely intense (via meditation and drugs). It gives me an idea for what it might mean to have "experience" with out a lot of information processing going on.
Were these experiences "simple" in a biologically relevant way though? This might be a LMFGFY comment but how "simple" is meditation at various scales of measuring neuron activity
No, they were *phenomenologically* simple. For instance, a sensation of throbbing at around 2 Hz (probably the feeling of my circulatory system).
I should also point out that even though most of my attention might be absorbed in that throbbing sensation, there's often some background static. So I imagine you'd still see a whole bunch of noise on an EEG.
Interesting side note though: some very intense mind states are associated with a *drop* in neural activity, specifically in the default mode network. I would have suspected that intensity of feeling was heavily correlated with the level of electrical activity in the brain.
Prior to those experiences, I saw "thinking" and "feeling" as kind of the same thing. I couldn't imagine feeling pain without thinking "man this sucks I'm in a lot of pain." I couldn't imagine sensation without a sense-of-self, and that (presumably) requires a sophisticated system of representation.
After those experiences, it's trivial for me to imagine pain by itself, without any thought or symbolic representation.
I don't think plants have a sense-of-self or a sophisticated system of representation the way mammals do. So prior to those experiences, I doubted that plants could feel anything.
So your distinction between "thinking" and "feeling" isn't quite the division I'd draw. I don't really have a good vocabulary to discuss this, but I think that there are two things one might talk about:
1) Having a cognitive architecture that, if you input a complicated problem, outputs a solution.
2) Having subjective experience, qualia, cogito ergo sum, what have you.
These seem similar, but not identical, to your "thinking" and "feeling".
The first is simple and measurable and not particularly profound; the second is the thing we're interested in but can't measure, identify, or even define.
A P-zombie or a computer capable of passing the Turing test with a lookup table clearly have the first but I guess they don't have the second.
An anchovy or a shrimp probably has the second but only a tiny amount of the first.
A plant clearly doesn't have the first, and I guess it doesn't have the second.
My /guess/ is that the only organisms on earth with the second are those with structures that permit at least some of the first, but a) I can't prove that and b) I can't rule out wholly alien structures with the second but not the first.
Yeah I think we're on the same page in terms of definitions here.
Sounds like you believe "thinking" is a prerequisite for "feeling". Tononi's IIT says they go hand-in-hand--feeling and information processing are two sides of the same coin. I suspect that feeling is much more pervasive than thinking, but like you say, I can't prove it. I can't even imagine what proof would look like!
I don't think this is true. Most people will (finally) admit that cows and pigs have feelings, but the political agenda is mostly focused on reducing suffering (e.g. making sure they have enough room to turn around in their pen, not separating kids from parents). Very few are trying to ban farming entirely.
And if we decided that plants had feelings, we wouldn't just ban eating! We'd hopefully make sure our agricultural practices were humane. But at the end of the day, you have to kill *something* to fuel yourself.
Jainists do have some rules in this regard, but it's not strictly about pain. From Wikipedia: "Jain monks, nuns and some followers avoid root vegetables such as potatoes, onions, and garlic because tiny organisms are injured when the plant is pulled up, and because a bulb or tuber's ability to sprout is seen as characteristic of a higher living being."
Its interesting that banning people on Substack must be much more powerful than banning them from the old blog, since your account here may be tied to other subscriptions. At SSC being banned meant losing name recognition (probably desirable for many people banned there) but probably just making a new account. If you have many paid subscriptions on Substack, if you're banned here but still want to comment it means either maintaining two accounts or switching all your subscriptions from the old to the new. Thanks, network effects.
Sorry, maybe wasn't fully clear. Yeah, his bans definitely only apply to his Substack. But if you're a person who has subscriptions to multiple Aubstacks, and get banned from this one, then either (a) you keep using your old Substack account and can no longer comment here, (b) make a second Substack that you log on to exclusively to comment on ACX, or (c) make a new Substack, switch all your subscriptions from the old one to the new, and have that be your primary account.
So, banning on SSC just imposed the cost of name recognition / switching time, while banning on Substack can be a lot more inconvenient because you have a multi-community identity. Putting it more on the level of other forms of social media.
You mean for ban evasion? I'm not quite clear about what you are saying. If I am subscribed to multiple Substacks and Scott permabans me, I can't comment on here. I can still read it, I can still read and comment on my other subscriptions, but I'm banned here.
So yeah, if I want to evade the ban, I will have to spin up a new account. It needn't be a paid subscription, but it has to be a new one. I don't see where the extra effort comes in, this is what people did all over if they wanted to ban evade (or have sock puppet accounts or the like). If I'm not paying for a new subscription, then all the effort is sign up with a new email and a new moniker to a new Substack account, then come back here and continue on.
Assuming you want to keep commenting under your other name too, the extra effort comes in when you need to log out of one account and into another to comment on other substacks.
But if you’re logged in to other paid Substacks with your account that is banned here, then it means you have to switch accounts when you go back and forth. When it was its own blog, you would just be signed in as your relevant account at each blog and never have to switch.
Because to comment here you'd need to log out of one and into the other, and to read there you'd have to do the opposite, so there's a switching cost you have to pay continuously. Versus on SSC where you'd just discard the old account.
After feedback I think I'd replace the word "much" with "marginally."
I casually have to do a lot of operations to string data, on 1M+ rows datasets, and am constrained to Python (mostly by skill, but also by the entire tool stack that the rest of my team uses). How do I make my workflow not suck? Because right now it's an almost daily occurence that I do "pd.read_csv('file.csv')", go for a cup of coffee, and come back to a dead kernel because Pandas tried to load it all into RAM and never managed to. And if lo-and-behold it managed to ingest the file and create a dataframe, anything I do to it like basic loc's or pivots/reshaping runs the same risk and also takes mindboggling amounts of runtime.
I heard a lot about Arrow/PyArrow, but IDK if it's workable already. I also tried Modin, but my laptop got hot enough that I couldn't comfortably keep my hands on the keyboard, and froze dead after a few operations, to the point I had to do a hard reboot.
1M+ rows is... not much, really. If your datasets are really taxing for Pandas for some weird reason, maybe try R? It has surprisingly good Python interop. I'm pretty sure that's not necessary, though.
I assume you have a machine with 16+ GB of RAM, ideally 32? Your problem sounds like memory usage running into swap space and thrashing.
For reference I just took a few minutes and tested a 2 million row dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository (1). This isn't instantaneous to load, I timed it at ~3.8 seconds, but that was with R. If Pandas is failing or you have time to go get coffee, something is really wrong. 3.8 seconds is the time for an old beater laptop with R, Python with a modern work computer should be killing this because a million rows or more is...nothing. Like, most companies will record tens of millions of transactions a month and data analysts and other usually do basic analysis with those in basically real time.
This is not something that should require advanced tools. Doing greps and string manipulation should be...probably a few seconds but even really intense analysis shouldn't take more than a minute. Something is fundamentally wrong here.
Do me a favor. Download the dataset I linked, test it on your work computer, then test it on literally any other computer. Something is off here.
This was my instinct, too. I remember the late 80s and early 90s, when you would go get a cup of coffee or leave a machine on all night to crunch something.
Load it into a SQLite database, then use something like sqlalchemy. Then the dataset doesn't have to live in memory, and you can batch your operations / use built-in aggregation that should be memory friendly.
You'll probably want to use Apache Spark instead of pandas. There, you can choose to read the dataset incrementally without crashing your computer
If you're using .loc, you should also be using Parquet files instead of CSV since parquet is columnar based storage
If you have access to Copilot, you can get basic jobs to run, although it's no good for more advanced transformations and you have to look it up yourself.
This website is helpful, as well as the Learning Spark textbook
Reposting from the mid-week open thread where I received some great ideas, but I'd also like to see what the Sunday crowd says.
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
ADHD meds shouldn't make your tachycardia worse at minimum doses, and these are already very noticeable mentally. You can also try increasing your cardiovascular fitness (e.g. running) to lower your RHR, which honestly sounds like a good idea either way for long-term maintenance of your body.
As for rewards... just stop having to decide every time. If you have to wash dishes after dinner, get up and do the dishes, every time, out of habit. Or create a timebox for home maintenance tasks every day / N days / whatever. Ironically, people with ADHD get extreme benefits from scheduling, despite being the most reluctant to do so.
I do have a bit of running (well, treadmill running) in my rather weak exercise routine, which may or may not be helping. I also take a very low dose of metoprolol, a selective beta blocker, which helps level me out and reduce my heart rate a bit.
My main concern is 1) the sudden and out-of-proportion spikes in blood pressure or heart rate with even a small stressor and 2) the fear of long-term damage caused by a heart beating too fast for decades on end. You may rightly ask if I could try mixing beta blockers and stimulants, but using a medication to treat side effects of another medication feels too "the woman who swallowed a bat" to me.
Probably I just need a more thorough cardiac workup, as the sudden spikes thing is probably harmful even if I don't take stimulants.
It feels to me like my brain has a higher than warranted temporal discount rate. I might intellectually know in the moment that if I eat this big bowl of ice cream right before bed I won't sleep well and I'll feel awful, but something in by brain says, "It will taste so good right now, and it won't be that bad later." From experience I know that it always is that bad later. Or, for another example, "I'll extend my lunch break to browse and comment on this ACT Open Thread, and I'll just catch up on work a little later."
Yeah, I think the part of the brain responsible for doing stuff is one that's quite a bit older and never really got the concept of long-term effects that well.
I am reasonably sure that the answer is "you can't, at least not fundamentally", but that doesn't mean that you should stop trying. The expected reward that is the direct result of doing the task is only one thing that enters into the calculation. The direct reward for doing the dishes might be clean dishes and nothing else, but there are several indirect rewards that you could consider: the satisfaction of a clean, organized kitchen, being able to cross something off your to-do list, and having your place appear more welcoming to guests. It's not easy, but easiER to increase the expected rewards by adding indirect rewards to the calculation, for example by making a to-do list or inviting a friend over for dinner (even if you're just going to order pizza to eat in).
Then there's habit and prediction error. I'm sometimes surprised by how much my behavior is driven by my predictions: last week I had completely run out of food except for a small block of feta cheese, and yet I couldn't bring myself to go to the shop even though I had ample time to do so. Then, on Friday, I made the plan to go directly to the shop after work before going home. Then a) it was raining by the time I got off and b) something happened that necessitated stopping by home after all. But it didn't take an act of will to go back into the rain and to the store. In fact, it would have taken effort NOT to, since I'd get a substantial prediction error if I didn't go after planning to all day. I think you can leverage this with detailed daily plans: set a calendar reminder for something if you need to do the dishes, and plan to actually do so once that time comes around. I think you'll find it becomes much easier.
That leads into habit. Habit is the natural mechanism by which we save cognitive effort that we usually need to spend on doing things we're not fond of. If you're highly limited in the amount of cognitive effort you can spend, you can cut that down by building habits. This is easy by adding one thing to anything you're already doing: for example, when cooking, you wash out the pot immediately after you're done, so it's easier to clean. Or, if you spend too much time scrolling your phone in bed, add 'turn on airplane mode' to 'plug in my phone to charge'. Also keep track of how many times you've done this consecutively, and if you do break your streak, note down your record and try to do better next time.
Those are some of the things that helped me, so I hope you benefit from them too.
Taking advantage of prediction error sounds like it could be quite helpful! I do have a few small tricks, too, that help a bit - I try to leave my phone out of my room and I do a bit of dish-rinsing to make it easier later on. It's always nice to start a task that's already half-done.
I appreciate all the comments everyone left! They gave me a lot of interesting angles to work with and Frankenstein together into something neat. Thanks!
It's usually the latter - can't start tasks, do something else - though I am also easily drawn away from stuff I'm currently doing, too. Environmental triggers are quite useful to me and have worked well in the past, but my current situation is very self-directed and suffers a chicken-and-egg problem; I need environmental triggers to get me to set up environmental triggers.
Switching from expected reward to triggers/cues is quite an interesting angle, as is maintaining focus for the first few goes - much easier than making myself focus for every task forever!
“ delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.”
This is going to be a bit hard to judge well. I wasn’t sure you even were reading all the comments.
It’s also going to delete follow on comments, which might aggravate more people than the ones with the disappearing posts. Might be worth a try for a week or two though.
Britain is possibly the world’s most famous monarchy. Maybe less well known is the decade it spent as a republic after executing Charles I. Executing the king had never been the plan and for the next decade Britain struggled to try to find a way to make it all work. A revolution in a deeply conservative country. Anna Keay was a great guest on the podcast. Subscribers to this blog may particularly enjoy the story of the scientist William Petty (google him - amazing guy). And Anna has a beautiful English accent of the kind so loved by Americans! Can’t recommend Anna or her book The Restless Republic highly enough.
The English Ciivl War was the first example (the French Revolution was the second) where the established power made a negotiated or compromise settlement impossible. The execution of Charles I was a purely practical choice, because as long as the King was alive, he could keep raising armies from those who remained convinced that he was a King by divine right. On the other hand, one serious defeat for the Parliamentary side, and that would be it, because the Royalists would certainly have executed their leaders. There had been no plans to create a Republic, and indeed it wasn't obvious how to move towards one, any more than it was in 1789-92 in France. In each case, (and arguably in Russia in 1917) an established power that could not compromise precipitated a civil war that it lost: a lesson perhaps to bear in mind for other contexts.
The issue (per my understanding of Anna Keay) was not whether or not to have a King. People were fine with that. The argument was about what were the limits on the King’s powers and Charles was too arrogant/foolish to compromise. By the time he was finally ready the radical elements in the army were in charge and they decided on execution. The country as a whole was appalled.
I don’t really agree with what you say about the danger the King would keep raising armies. By this stage the Parliamentarians were completely dominant militarily.
I wouldn't disagree with your overall point, but on your second paragraph we know that despite military dominance proponents of a divinely-inspired supreme monarchy would keep rising up in Britain. The Jacobean attempts to retain/seize the throne(s) is a wonderful proof of this.
Charles I's immediate predecessors, Elizabeth I and James I, were every bit as despotic as him in their way, if not more so, although their power had dwindled over the decades as Parliament became more assertive. Elizabeth I acknowledged this, by saying "I sit not so high as my father (Henry VIII)"
The big difference was that Charles I made promises he couldn't or wouldn't keep, a vexing fault he had in common with one or two other sovereigns who came to grief such as King John.
One moral of the story is that it is better to say a task will take two weeks, and then complete it in one week, than to say it will take one day and take two days!
Interesting! We didn’t spend long on this and I don’t know a huge amount about the subject independently of what Anna told me. But her take on James was that he was better at the politics and knew how to do deals etc.
I really like new substack app (especially on iPad). It’s great for keeping track of read and unread posts. My biggest pain point is that there’s no “download for offline” feature. I love reading my substacks when flying for example. The app at least keeps the text but loses any images or embedded tweets. This can have varying importance depending on the content. Sometimes I can load the full post whilst on Wi-Fi and then the images stay loaded when offline, my success with this has been spotty. If anyone can escalate to the substack team it would be greatly appreciated, it seems like a small fix!
What do you think the effects are of the large number of different strains of Christianity?
Given the huge number of doctrinal issues that various churches might disagree on, i suspect that most people's understanding of, and beliefs about "what christians believe" is calibrated to whichever strain of Christianity most was predominant where they were.
What kind of second order effects does this have?
When Neal DeGrasse tyson says, "even the pope believes in evolution, can you even get more christian than the pope?", for example, i found myself surprised/not surprised. The rough impression i have is that the simpler an idea, the more likely it is to go viral, for example. So what i would expect is that most people have no idea how much complexity goes into the thinking of someone like Aquinas, or the continuity between classical thinkers like Socrates. From what I understand, catholicism has tried to walk this really fine line between 'the hereafter is what really matters', but 'this life matters as well.' It makes me think catholicism is an anti-meme which is more easily outcompeted by simpler belief systems.
Well, it does make it even easier for non-Christians like me to come up with the most noxious possible stereotype for the Christian members of their outgroup. It may be that no Christian sect believes in/does *both* bad thing A and bad thing B, and vanishingly few self-identified Christians opt for both of them, but I can cheerfully attribute both to my outgroup stereotype.
> The rough impression i have is that the simpler an idea, the more likely it is to go viral, for example.
My view from the outside is the Catholicism *is* a simple idea. The idea is that whatever the church leadership believes is probably right. Worshippers learn the basics and for the rest it's "I don't know, ask the priest."
(1) At this stage, I wouldn't take deGrasse Tyson seriously if he said grass was green, he's had a few too many blunders showing off on social media
(2) The effect that annoys me is that people seem to think the Rapture is a Christian doctrine, or at least a mainstream one. This is something peculiarly American, although it has its roots in a particular Anglo-Irish clergyman, and it's not something the majority of Christians worldwide believe or have even heard of. But it seems to have made its way into pop culture that all Christians believe we will be Raptured. I only heard of it when discussing issues with Evangelicals on a now-defunct site, and I had no idea if we Catholics even *had* a position on Millennialism (seemingly we do, we're agin' it).
Are there parts of the world where Catholicism is growing? My understanding is that in Latin America it’s losing out to various strains of Pentecostal/evangelical Protestantism, as it also is in the United States, and in Europe it is at best stagnating but likely losing out to unaffiliation. Maybe it’s growing in Africa or Asia?
Top line is that the Church added 16 million in 2020 to a total of 1.4 billion, keeping pace with population growth, so the percentage of the world that is Catholic, about 18%, neither grew nor shrank.
By breakdown, it's the largest single denomination. By local breakdowns, the major Protestant denominations are the Evangelical churches, with the Baptists the largest grouping there.
A conjecture I have not one shred of evidence to support: the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Europe was more conducive to the development of scientific thought than either alone maintaining a cultural hegemony would have been, because it brought the idea of challenging and arguing more into prominence.
I cannot stress enough that this kind of Just-So-Story untestable unquantifiable thinking is a terrible way to understand the world, and should not be used for any serious purpose, but it's a fun idea to consider.
Well, but then wouldn't the effect have been most intense in Germany, which suffered the greatest conflict, and much lower in England, which hardly suffered at all? Yet England towers above Germany at the start of the Enlightenment. (Arguably the Germans catch up by the 1800s though.)
I don't think it's reasonable to put those conflicts in the same category as the Thirty Years' War. They were at most only in part driven by Protestant-Catholic conflict, and I think had a lot more to do with (rapidly) evolving English attitudes towards the respective power of monarch and parlaiment -- its very signifiant France was evolving toward absolute monarchy at the same time. And FWIW Wikipedia asserts the Thirty Years' War knocked off 5-8 million people.
It depends how you understand earlier protesting movements though, with the obvious case being the Hussites in Bohemia, who staged an earlier attempt at reformation with similar public support before the spread of printing.
The western-European church was actually prone to attempts at reformation: papal primacy itself was for example primarily the result of the Gregorian reformation in the eleventh century. What is notable about the Protestant Reformation is not really a conflict between reformers and those supporting an existing system (often with their own reforms in mind), as that was and arguably still is part of the life of all organised churches; rather the Protestant Reformation stands out because the debate it involved was never resolved, unlike earlier reformations where there was (eventually) a clear winning position be it one of the parties or a compromise. We might attribute this to printing, but I'd like to see what the mechanism for this would be.
I don’t think my point is a controversial opinion. The earlier divisions in the church didn’t have the capacity to spread. And Protestantism’s dependancy on the printing press was predicated on more than just spreading propaganda, but also on spreading the bible; giving every family a bible in the vernacular, disregarding the build up of Catholic doctrine over the centuries.
Even now even hardline Catholics rarely read scripture, while hardline Protestants devour it.
The effect of the printing press on science is obvious.
> Just-So-Story untestable unquantifiable thinking is a terrible way to understand the world,
Can you say more about this?
This sort of untestable, unquantifiable hypothesis seems to be the Jungian shadow of the lesswrong community. I can understand saying, "hold onto this kind of hypothesis lightly', but the idea of 'reject any hypothesis that isn't testable" seems to me to be more of a recipe for self-denial than anything else. If you identiy as 'someone who only believes things which are testable,' i would ask, "How can you test whether or not that is true? What would it look like if you had lots of unquantifiable thoughts that you couldn't consciously assess and re-evaluate?"
Sorry, "this kind of" is doing more work there than is obvious. There are absolutely some domains where untestable, unquantifiable thinking has value.
But when you're trying to explain, for example, why humans behave the way they do, it's incredibly easy to come up with plausible-sounding explanations like this for pretty much any observation, and the corollary of that is that they clearly aren't a useful tool for understanding the world.
For example, ask yourself:
:- Why is it that that in more martial cultures the largest and ornate headgear tends to be worn by men, whereas in more peaceful ones it is worn by women?
:- Why is it that progress in military technology Western Europe slowed down so markedly in the early eighteenth century and then picked up steam again in the 1770s?
:- Why were "plough cultures" more prone to bone cancers than "hoe cultures"?
:- Why are far-right political parties finding more success in those parts of Europe that were never conquered by Napoleon than in those that were?
Obviously, none of those is true - I just made them up - but I'll bet you can think of good reasons they might be without trying too hard!
I think that Catholicism works at many different levels, from the simple historical post pagan “peasant” beliefs in local saints which are replacements for pagan Gods, from
the spiritual to the practical, and the rational too - like William of Okkam.
It’s all a bit inconsistent though and hard to keep under one church, even a broad one.
Most Christians don't believe in different levels of Hell (and quite a few even disagree about whether Hell is actually a place or something else, such as being cut off from God).
What you're probably alluding to is that the Bible contains several passages speaking against heretics in ways that go beyond how it speaks about pagans. That is, pagans are potential converts, but heretics are actively undermining correct teaching. This doesn't mean they go to a worse Hell or even that they necessarily go to Hell at all.
I do note that very few top level posts are of horrible quality, even if they garner no replies. More often when (we) members of the commentariat post crap comments, they are nearly always in response, and frequently as part of a downward escalating spiral.
I would like to note that David Freman does a repeatly decent job of disagreeing strongly but politely.
Just voicing a bunch of support for this Challenge Mode experiment (and doing so here, since a vague "yay X" comment might not make the bar on Wednesday!). I'm a fan of easy-to-access wide open content spaces, but there are already plenty of those, and the environment of "someone with good taste ruthlessly culls every subpar comment" is much harder to find and so correspondingly more valuable to have around on the margin IMO. Much like Groucho Marx didn't actually say, I can't wait for this club to be good enough that I don't qualify as a member.
I'm not opposed to the idea of challenge mode but I think if you're going to do it you should pick examples, both long and short, of opening comments and replies you consider good and would like to see more of. Otherwise you're just asking commenters to guess what you think is valuable.
More broadly, I think your previous blog had a fairly high quality comment section though not without issues. However, your commenters got mixed in with the Substack median which caused a reversion to the internet mean.
This comment would go really well with a side of Reign of Terror.
Though that is a harder sell when a significant portion of those terrorized would be paying subscribers. Though... I do wonder what portion of the internet mean people (in both senses!) are paying subscribers, maybe it's almost none, in which case it would be a clear positive.
Yes, I think the main problem is that I'm kind of soft and hate banning people for less-than-clear-cut badness. Most of this experiment will be about my psychology and whether giving myself permission this way makes me better at actually deleting stuff.
If you thought you could do a good job vetting someone to apply similar standards to yours (with an appeal process you are involved in) this might be a thing which could be outsourced fairly inexpensively. Outsourcing areas of comparative weakness makes the world a better place!
Maybe a word of warning. I once was a mod of a forum of relatively small interest, but it had, nevertheless, fairly decent traffic. We were, like most of the internet back in the day, the Wild West for a while. Then we brought in a banning system that banned the most egregious posts. That solved some of that.
Then there were posters who were more than occasionally posting badly, off topic, or being abusive. So we added a warning system. Basically yellow cards would be given and after a certain number lead to red cards, similar to your partial ban percentages. Besides that a red could also be given at any time.
Problem one is that after a while even relatively decent and good posters would get banned as they accumulated yellow cards over many years on the site. We set it to be automatic, so a mod in a sub might yellow card Johnny Interesting who was perhaps provoked by Johnny Troll (also carded) and the decent poster would be banned as he reached the limit of 5 cards over 5-10 years, and the second - being newer - lived on.
This system doesn’t reward people for getting better either. We decided that Yellow cards needed to get removed from the system after a certain time limit. So we added that.
But people **really** didn’t like warnings. The software used to show a permanent yellow card on the post, which was like a permanent scar.
Often we would get more anger at warnings than the immediate red card (banned posters could appeal for a while), I suppose because the latter were obvious breaches of etiquette and the former, by the nature of subjectivity (we also had a Be Kind posting philosophy) were not.
I think, therefore, that deleting comments may aggregate people more than you might suspect.
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion (I want to argue that we need to build more of it into rules, not less). Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian whose rule it was to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book. Thanks for those who submitted in previous open thread.
Actually, I was more suggesting that you read the posts there rather than make a post of your own, since a common factor in these stories is arbitrary rules made by people who don't know what they're doing.
In Challenge Mode, how often are the 33rd&below comments going to be deleted? Is it within 5 minutes of posting, every hour on the hour, once at the 18-hour mark, etc? Knowing this will help me informally make odds that a comment I just read won’t be there later today/tomorrow/etc. Or will the timing be at Scott’s discretion?
I can't help but think there's an incentive mismatch if you can bet on yourself getting banned for a comment. For enough money, I'm sure any of us can manage a banworthy comment on ASX....
It wants to happen. It will almost certainly not be me doing it but I think someone should, haha. There are a few other awful, hilarious permutations of this which I couldn’t bring myself to post. We’ll see, there may be a large enough mass of mature people here, or neutrons I suppose. I think keeping the delete-timing a little vague is smart.
Anyone here have experience with POTS (tachycardia)? The wife who is a super low anxiety person recently came down with it out of the blue. No new stresses, actually pretty low stress time in an overall low stress life. Beta blockers have been helping, but as with most “syndromes” kind of frustrating for an otherwise super healthy person to come down with weird illness at 38 and for there not to be a clear physical cause. At first they thought it was for sure heart valve issues, but that has been ruled out.
Luckily her case seems pretty mild, but any advice is appreciated. Seems kind of related to the past discussions around historic fainting sickness among women and such, but I don’t think that type of social contagion is what is going on here.
My wife had a kind of (probably) post-viral syndrome after a bad case of the flu a few years ago that was like this--for about six months, she had occasional episodes of tachycardia, low fevers, and fatigue, for no reason that her regular doctor or the ID doctor, cardiologist, or couple of other doctors she was referred to could identify. Eventually, it just stopped happening.
Unless you imagine that this forum is a collection of physicians, why would you seek information about a medical condition affecting a loved one from a bunch of internet randoms?
Talk with doctors.
How does your wife, the actual patient, feel about you discussing her condition on the internet? And that you would even bring up history of women and fainting (which is in part a history told by men to justified the notions of a "weaker" sex) perhaps requires some soul searching and discussion with your spouse.
[Tongue in cheek] my spouse of over 3 decades would hit me with her frying pan if I investigated her condition with a bunch of randos on the internet.
A) Patients with a condition and their familes often have helpful experiences and have done research and know about things new sufferers have not. This is a rarish condition, so you need to cast a wide net, but I asked somewhere like her becuase it is full of relatively intelligent rational people who are less likely to talk about crystals, or how Spiralina solved all thier issues.
B) >why would you seek information about a medical condition affecting a loved one from a bunch of internet randoms
We have talked with doctors (on 5 separate visits now including one to the emergency room that concluded with 36 hours in the hospital)...
but you have WAY WAY WAY too much respect for doctors, they are just people. Smarter than average, but not generally A LOT smarter than average, and in fact I find a lot of them I see rather unimpressive mentally and basically just good for a few specialized tasks.
The diagnosis part of their job doesn't really seem to perfrom any better than making a clear specific list of symptoms and using the internet. Certainly in this relatively odd rare condition (that the doctors themsleves seemed unsure of in a cardiology department of a good hospital), it was the main diagnosis I suspected assuming her heart was fine. Eventually when her heart turned out to be fine it was the diagnosis to caridologists made.
I would also point out that this third time seeing a dcotor (when went to the emergency room), she gave them a clear list of symptoms and our previous interactions on 2 doctors visits, are we informed them "she needs admission to a cardiology department and an echocardiogram (in large part based on infrom from previous two docotr's visits)". We were rewarded with about a 12 hour wait and about 3 or 4 different confirmations that she didn't have diabetes, and wasn't pregnant, and 6 other things which had already been established earlier that week (I think at one point she was tested for pregnancy 8 times in 1 week!). She weighs 125 lbs, she clearly isn't diabetic in the way they were suspecting (inspection of feet).
After the 12 hour waiting to see a cdoctor, doctor is like "you need an echocardiogram", really no other information we didn't have from previous two appointments. Thanks! After 12 more hours we get one, it suprisingly detects a perfectly functioning heart (before that the main diagnosis that seemed likely was a valve malfunction that had suddenly worsened (also a diagnosis which was clear from googling and the shape of her EKG (which is something you can easily interpret with googling too)). Anyway, so 24 hours for them to follow the basic guidance we came in with. Then 6 hours later cardiologist came, and you guessed it...hadn't even looked at the echocardiogram yet. So another hour of delays, by this point I was pretty sure it was going to be a POTS diagnosis due to the good echocardiogram (and my 7! hours to interpret and research what that might mean), and then they eventually came back and basically read me the same Clevland Clinic page on POTS I had previously found. Nearly word for word.
Now providing and interpreting the echocaridogram was a real value, that is something I cannot do. And if she needed heart surgery or whatever, well you obviously need a doctor! For 90% of the day-to-day medical shit, (colds, flus, intital disagnosis, guidance on cost/benefits of various treatments (something they are often shit at), giving people some symptom reducers to give their body to heal and telling them "rest and fluids"), they are borderline worthless and basically only maintain their position because they are a legalized guild/proteciton racket that gates access to therapies and drugs. "nice body there, would be terible if something were to happen to it, now where is my $500?".
Anyway doctors, aren't magic, they are people with some specialized training but in an extremely broad subject, so if you are dealing with something at all odd or anomalous, they aren't really going to perform better than random intelligent person who understands human anatomy and physiology (I took adv. chemistry and human anatomy and physiology 20+ years ago and am almost certain I could still nail an MCAT today). The probably 3 biggest medical events that have happened to me personally in the last two decades, doctors failed horribly and performed pretty poorly. If you want to get in a debate about docotrs I will get into the specifics of those.
C) "How does your wife, the actual patient, feel about you discussing her condition on the internet?"
1) She could not possible care less that I am discussing it, she is open to whatever good sources of information we can find. It is not like I used her name, though I doubt she would even care about that.
2) Why the fuck would anyone care, stop being so precious. You are trying to "gin up" harms where none exist. Concern trolling.
3) >And that you would even bring up history of women and fainting (which is in part a history told by men to justified the notions of a "weaker" sex) perhaps requires some soul searching and discussion with your spouse.
Nope just the reality of something to mention when there is a syndrome that is basically "young relatively fit women of child bearing age who get high pulses and faint when standing or exerting themselves without a clear physical reason". You would be a fool not to draw the connection.
Once again stop it with the creation of harms and concern trolling, you are big part of what is wrong with social media. I mean literally the syndrome is "fainting or lightheadness but we cannot find a reason". Because when there is a clear reason it gets filed under that.
D) >My spouse of over 3 decades would hit me with her frying pan if I investigated her condition with a bunch of randos on the internet.
I am sorry you have such a shitty untrusting relationship with your spouse. My spouse of 15 years deeply respects my judgement and does not phsyically or mentally abuse me, nor does she have outbursts when she disagrees with my judgement. And I also know her and her wishes well enough to stay in good alignment with them. What she wants is help with her fucking condition, not internet white knights worried about her "feelies", because they make a sport of finding "problems" with whatever post they can so they can feel better about themselves and who "enlightened/feminist" they are.
If you are going quote me you should do it correctly: you left out "[Tongue in cheek]" which began my sentence in part D)
Does using the fuck/fucking make your response necessary, true or kind or even better in any way?
"Concern trolling". What does that even mean? It is not rational, in my judgement, to be seeking medical information by posting here. "Rationality" is supposed to be a theme or so I thought.
I have been cross-examining doctors for 30 years; I don't hold them in a special high esteem. But, would a engineer post: I'm building this bridge: any randos have some thoughts?
To me what is wrong with social media is your first post (which ignores the virtue of "right forum, right question, etc") and then this second response - which is just upsettedness.
You are obviously concerned about your wife. I hope she gets better.
>Does using the fuck/fucking make your response necessary, true or kind or even better in any way?
Absolutely, it conveys how frustrated fed up and angry I am with your shitty attitude. It means "I am asking a specific question about needing help for my wife, and you are looking for any little edges in the phrasing or situation that allow you to speechify on how maybe I have somehow harmed my wife simply by asking questions" instead of you know, providing an actual repsonse (or no response if you don't have anything helpful to say).
>But, would a engineer post: I'm building this bridge: any randos have some thoughts?
No because engineers have more useful specialized, specific expertise than doctors with more clear answers and settled methods. Granted a lot of that is because engineering is a wildly simpler problem than doctoring.
Doctoring a lot less far from the "bloodletting" stage than it likes to portray, despite its massive advances in quality of care and outcomes. Civil engineering on the other hand is quite settled, with most advancements being incremental, and the methods and answers being pretty pat.
I'm middle aged and have been dealing with tachycardia for a long time. Never been diagnosed with anything though. Eating a lot of food makes it worse, alcohol makes it worse. I have been borderline hypothyroid a few times and took medicine for that but it made it worse so my doc took me off. I also have reynauds and "non pathological abnormalities" on my EKG.
The only thing that consistently improves it is fairly vigorous aerobic exercise (swimming in my case). Even so, after doing that my heart is often racing for hours, but after it settles down I can have long periods of 60 BPM or less.
Obviously need to consider caffeine and other stimulants as well, I only take caffeine with L-Theanine now, but even so I have to limit the amount of tea (I don't drink coffee anymore).
Hey, sorry about that. I'm 26 years old and I've been dealing with tachycardia for the last few months although I don't think it's POTS. My doctor thinks it could be long covid since I got sick with something in August. I know there is actually a lot of research connecting POTS to covid although that probably doesn't change treatment options.
There's research showing that fish oil can slow your heart rate so I've started taking that.
I have paid zero attention to Musk antics since I don't use Twitter, still read this to get up to speed and it was a surprisingly great summary of what it's all about and what can be useful to know about it. Thanks!
I assume I should have continued to read Zvi even after I stopped being interested in the covid roundups?
He doesn't post very often and he posts on such a wide variety of topics that it feels like there may be one post a month that I actually want to read. Still, he's a decent writer and very thorough in his analysis, so I end up reading most of his others posts as well, even though I have no interest in them.
Having fewer than 10 friends, this becomes a rather high-stakes question! I think it'd also have been easier to answer back before I got Caplan-pilled about the schooling <-> intelligence mismatch...have noticed a tendency to overcorrect and dock some "intelligence" for people whose primary claim to such is education bona fides. (I think I'm also the only one in my friendgroup who's ever gotten an actual IQ test, oddly enough. Other than near-proxies like the SAT, anyway.)
Correlation would be significantly below 1. I believe that the ordinary English meaning of "intelligent" refers more to the appearance-of-smartness...The Symbolic Representation Of The Thing, versus The Thing. It's also a strongly positional, rather than absolute, scale*...more ordinal than cardinal. One might say that intelligence is in the eye of the beholder, and that there's a pervasive Wobegon Effect of people generally assuming they're more intelligent than Those People. Being able to impress, to demonstrate superiority, to do superficially intelligent things (say, crossword puzzles) - this is the stuff of "intelligent".
"g" or IQ...for that, I look at tangible results. How effective is someone at achieving their goals? Can they figure stuff out by reasoning independently? (One of my friends taught herself lockpicking by observing the mechanical properties of doorknobs, for example). How strong are they at reading, writing, math...less so in an abstract test setting, moreso in making those skills do useful things in life? (It's one thing to learn about compound interest in ECON 101, another to actually go out and open savings and investment accounts.) If they've built a computer from parts - good sign. Automobile machinations would be equivalent, if I knew somewhat-different types of people. Being able to appreciate complexity: also good. Different from __understanding__ it. There's definitely some unfortunate overlap with aesthetics here - I seem to recall you view such things through more of a class lens - but I think there's a correlation with being discomforted by What's Typically On Offer. Since it's not designed to cater to the high-IQ. At some level of "g", the cage bars become visible, and one wants...well...more. In some dimension or other.
Anyway, it'd be an interesting experiment to actually validate. Though I think too many of my friends picked up the leftist habit of tabooing IQ in general, lest the topic veers into inconveniently inequitable directions. So I doubt I could talk them into getting tested.
I think I can quite readily divide people I know into high/medium/low intelligence bands. Within those, differences are fine-grained, and I think I would want to say more definition is needed.
If you asked me who was more intelligent as between Tony and Jim, for example, I would answer that their strengths are different. Tony is really good at sizing up a situation, mastering the detail, presenting workable solutions. He built a successful career consulting in a rather niche area. He also seems to me someone who in an unpretentious way can contribute to conversations over a wide range of topics, especially in history, economics, and visual arts. Jim is an academic physicist working at a senior level at a strong UK university, seems to get published a lot as far as I can tell, and to be well connected across an international community.
I would see both Tony and Jim as highly intelligent, but in different ways: Tony is better at some things, Jim at others. If someone were to say "well, that's not how it works: you could in fact produce a single number on the same scale for both of them and it would tell you who was the most intelligent", I'd be doubtful about the value of that. At any rate, (a) T is better at X, J is better at Y conforms to everyday use of "intelligence" better than a single number and (b) fits better to the reality that different traits may be valued in different fields.
None of that is to deny that one can talk with reasonable confidence about differential intelligence: clearly, for example, Tony is more intelligent than John, who lives just down the road from us, nice guy, but just quite slow.
I am struggling to find them right now on my phone, but there have actually been studies in which participants have group discussions with each other and are then asked to rank other participants by estimated intelligence (offering estimates of actual IQ score wouldn't make sense because almost nobody has a sense of what observed intelligence corresponds to what range of IQ scores), and results show fairly large accuracies of rankings.
I'd honestly guess pretty well. People think I'm smarter than I am because I'm highly verbal; this is a mistake in my case, but as a general rule vocabulary tests are supposed to correlate pretty well to G. If the pattern of "assume someone is smart because of how they talk" holds, I'd assume most people would be targeting G pretty well in their intelligence assessments.
I think that the main way this would fail is false negatives - i.e. someone doesn't talk much, so you assume they are dumb, or they don't talk much, so they aren't that great at talking and you assume they are dumb. Overall I'd suspect it does pretty damn well compared to anything else, since there aren't that many ways people assess intelligence and by far the most common of the ones I can think of is "listening to them talk".
The Ravens Progressive Matrix Test is designed to exclude or minimalize verbal skills, vocabulary, etc. I took one and it was (toward the end) exhaustingly difficult, especially as one is on a timer.
When I was a kid and wanted to do the Mensa thing (as all children eventually do) I think they were on something like a Ravens - all pattern-match and visual, no verbal. But my understanding is you can exclude verbal from the test all you want and not get rid of the coorelation.
In studies where this has been investigated, some have controlled for how much people talk and the accuracy of intelligence judgements are still relatively high.
With pure statistical methods probably - measure how much they talked during the study, and calculate how much of the IQ-estimate correlation to IQ-measurement is "explained away" by conditioning on the amount of talking, and how much remains even after that.
Well, instinct does a lot here. Instinctively I suspect we believe the mother shoulders by far the greater share of child-rearing -- and I think this is just factually true in almost all cases for the very young years, say 0-5 or so[1] -- and so her opinion about whether it can be done is given much greater weight. Furthermore, we assume the mother is inherently more attached to the child, again at least when it is very young, which is probably also true[2] -- hormones are marvelous things.
For both reasons, we assume that if the *mother* gives up the child, it can only be because the situation is truly dire, enough to overcome attachment, while if the mother decides to *keep* the child, then it must be doable. In the latter case, if the father is not willing to do his (lesser) share, we rain contempt on him for weaseling out when it is not necessary.
I think Melvin hits on the same point, albeit a little more egalitarianly than I do, which makes it a more acceptable argument for these modern times when we decline to notice any difference at all between the sexes (which would make our grandparents stare and I suspect will make our grandchildren shake their heads in amazement).
----------------
[1] Personally I think that reverses later, around the teeen years, when the father's burden and influence seems more important. Doubtless it all more or less works out over the entire length of child-rearing, but it would be silly to assume contributions are matched 50/50 all 18 years all the time.
[2] Please note I am not suggesting at all that most fathers are ultimately less attached to their children, only that it takes a little time for a lot of them, they have to sort of discover how important this little creature is to them. And of course there are plenty of exceptions, cases in which fathers are immediately (or even ultimately) more attached than mothers, and vice versa.
2) the extremely dedicated nature of the human mother-child bond keeps being used to beat up on human males for not matching it. I think we should do more celebrating of the devotion of our women to the difficult task of raising neonate humans.
My working assumption slash stereotype is that if _both_ parents decide to give a child up for adoption then it must have been a completely impossible situation, whereas if one parent decides to walk out then the baby was probably just an inconvenience for them.
If two parents chose to give up their child for adoption just because it was inconvenient, then I think people would judge them very harshly indeed. I don't know how commonly that occurs in real life.
If people have children and then decide they aren't ready to be parents I would consider that fairly terrible. Human life is not something people should just bring into existence.
However, ex post facto, if parents are willing to just give away their kid, then that is probably indeed prudent, although the foster care system is rife with abuse, and the child will likely suffer terribly.
If a guy gets a girl pregnant and then decides he wants no part in raising the child, that's also pretty bad and shows the same casualness with human life. However, many perceive this as worse than the previous example, since the cost of participation would be lower.
In the first example, neither parent is up to raising the child, so if either parent were to take charge, they would assume the full parenting responsibility. In the latter example, one parent (the mother) has already assumed the parenting responsibility, so rather the being asked to assume the full mantle of fatherhood, the father is merely being asked to contribute...anything at all. But he still fails to do even that.
The damage of the decision is greater in the first case, but in the second case less is being asked and less is being offered. In that sense, of unwillingness to contribute even a little, the second is worse.
Minor note: AFAIK, there's a lot more people wanting to adopt healthy babies than there are healthy babies being put up for adoption, in the West. Insofar as there are children unable to find adoptive families, they're almost always older and usually have serious mental or physical health issues.
Fostering, specifically, adds another massive hurdle, in that IIUC it doesn't come with the certainty or permanency of adoption - to take in a troubled child and raise them as our own is hard, but rewarding. To take in a troubled child, learn to think of him as your own and help him with his issues, then have his druggie parents claim him back a couple of years later, is a horror story. That doesn't even have to be very frequent to put off a large number of prospective adopters, the possibility is terrifying and it only takes a handful of real stories spread widely to make it salient
This is very true. More specifically, children below the age of about 10 can fairly readily get adopted, and below the age of about 5 seem to be able to get adopted pretty easily even if they have mental or physical handicaps and/or come from very rough home environments. Kids aged 5-12 may have developed some pretty difficult behaviors and it may be harder to transition to a new home, no matter how well-intentioned and loving the prospective parents.
Teenagers are hard to deal with, and teenagers who have been through foster care and/or the types of situations that often result in foster care are much more difficult than normal. Teenagers rarely get adopted, often bounce from house to house, and deal with a long list of problems from these things (which causes them to act out more, continuing the cycle). The only situations I hear about where teenagers readily find adoptive homes are situations where they were in stable and loving households and then the parents died or something similarly sudden.
>More specifically, children below the age of about 10 can fairly readily get adopted
Just a sad little interjection here, last I looked in my state, this is pretty racial. White kids get adopted, black kids mostly don't. I *think* babies are different.
Unfortunately this is true. I *think* this is due to a perception (right or wrong) that black children are more likely to have internalized difficult situations. This may be very well-reasoned on the part of the adoptive parents, as with white children from very bad home lives. This could probably be studied with a clear conclusion by asking the question - are children from minority homes adopted less often after controlling for how bad their home lives were prior to being up for adoption? One point in favor of this conclusion - children in foster care for 2 or more years are much more likely (3 to 1) to be adopted if they are white. Though certainly not conclusive, holding the metric of multi-year foster care steady does narrow the possible confounders somewhat.
An odd confounder here, I did some basic Googling and apparently 23% of all adopted children are black, despite only making up 14% of the population. Also some other odd confounders - most people who adopt are white (well above their population levels) and black people are less likely to adopt.
I would assume it's just a normal case of accepting the consequences of actions, with the actions in this case being sex. I think your category 2 has a subset of those who want no direct part in the life of their child but voluntarily meet some expected obligations such as paying support, recognising paternity(/maternity, although that's generally hard to deny at the time of birth) and even sending presents and the like, who significantly are not generally regarded as losers even if they aren't paragons of virtue in anybody's eyes. The basic fact is that the more responsibility someone takes for the child they (carelessly?) created, the less negative reaction they get. So people in category 1, who are taking full responsibility and seeking to make things right, get respect for accepting the consequences and finding a solution. Those in category 2 are basically seen as walking away from a problem of their own making and leaving it to others to deal with, and therefore as socially undesirable.
Note this these rules are socially constructed: there's plenty of societies where at least some classes of men can disown an illegitimate child with minimal consequence, generally because it would be socially more disruptive to recognise the paternity than to ignore it, for reasons of honour or the like. And it's not exactly long ago in western countries that adoption of a child was a secret affair because of the stigma attached to the having a baby out of wedlock, to the point that the father probably never even had a say. So what we regard as acceptable now is not a universal or a constant judgement, but reflects the fact that as regards sex and childbirth our (western) societies generally believe that personal responsibility is required, and we pass moral judgement on the individual's actions, rightly or wrongly, through this filter.
I think what you are missing is an interceding, much more primary/important right:
1. You are supposed to be allowed to raise your own kid.
If mom and dad both decide they don't want to raise the kid, AND find someone to wholly assume all their responsibilities, we go "Oh, ok, no problems then - they both voluntarily gave up the uber-important right not to have your kid taken away, and they provided for the kid."
If one of the two decides they want to raise the kid, then "find someone else to wholly assume their responsibilities" in the sense that ownership of the kid is handed off isn't going to be possible to accomplish in a clean way. So the non-participatory partner is still on the hook; the responsibilities for the child still exist.
Here's some scenarios where that gets more complex, but I think fail to defeat that logic:
1. Dad doesn't want the kid, and pays child support for a time. But eventually mom gets married to someone else who assumes at least some fatherhood responsibilities (and associated perks). I think Dad is still on the hook here; mom already had to sacrifice a lot of attractiveness as a mate (single moms havei t hard), and she'd be sacrificing even more if "deadbeat dad's responsibilities will be foisted on you if you marry this woman".
2. Dad doesn't want the kid and pays child support for a time (say ten or fifteen years) and then mom dies, and he wants to dump the kid despite whatever familiarity/context has been built in that time. I'm of the opinion the kid should probably get a bit of a say here.
Anyway, for what you want to have happen in this hypothetical to come about, you'd basically have to say "you either don't get to raise your kid, or you have to take on someone else's half of the responsibility purely because they don't wanna do it". Nobody will accept bypassing the former so you can't get the latter.
So let's create a unit and call it "one raising of a child" (1RAC). Imagine it as a basket of goods and services, sort of like the consumer price index, indicating what a child is "owed". We can argue about what to put in there, but broadly these are the kinds of things we might consider while we have that argument:
1. Finances/resources. Food, clothes, and shelter; toys and games. stuff like that.
2. Educational/care. Time spent cleaning the child and teaching the child to clean itself. Lessons imparted. Habits built. Cultural traditions passed down.
3. Emotional. Love, support, friendship, companionship - things that build trust and overall emotional health/security.
But whatever we choose to put in the basket, most people agree that *there is a basket*; very few people are comfortable with a newborn in a dumpster. More-but-still-few are OK with the idea of abandoning the child to a group home or similar, to be raised by the state; it's considered a bad state of affairs.
And whether or not we would agree on what should go in the basket, pretty much anything you'd put in there would take time/resources/effort to provide. We can imagine a situation where the child isn't owed anything but category 1., but there's still a "divisible share" of that category - we can split the costs of raising the child. We can split the effort of teaching the child things or providing it a positive emotional environment, etc. Or we can say "one person handles more money/finance provision, and one person handles more emotional provision", etc.
I think that it's fairly hard to argue that raising a child takes resources *of some kind* and that these resources can either be split between multiple parties, fulfilled by just one party, or can go unfulfilled.
Your arguments all (seem to) rely on the idea that one parent should be able to say "Nope, not doing it; you have to pay out all the costs for this alone. Fuck you, fuck that; it is right that I foist this all on you." That's what it takes for dead-beat to be able to walk away - that's the assumption you need for it to be OK.
But for that to be fair in a situation where both people participated in the conception voluntarily (i.e. nobody poked holes in condoms, no rape, etc.), you need one of two bucket-destroying assumptions to be true:
1. It's reasonable for a parent who doesn't want to be involved to unilaterally force an abortion which is successfully carried out
2. It's reasonable for one parent to demand the other parent hand off the child to another party who then assumes responsibility for the bucket.
My original post was about the necessity of 1-2. It sets up these scenarios:
1. If abortion is reasonable to demand, then it's unreasonable for the other person not to go along with it, and they should be subjected to the full cost of the child.
2. If 1. isn't acceptable, but "put the child up for adoption" is both an option and reasonable to demand, and one parent doesn't go along with it, they are unreasonable and should have to pay all the costs.
The problem you are running into is that most people aren't OK with forced abortion (even if they are pro-abortion, which is part of why the "choice" euphemism is popular!) and most people are similarly not OK with a parent having their child stripped from them against their will. Since they don't find them reasonable to demand, they don't consider it to "shift" where responsibility is assigned based on what happens at those decision-points.
The only other obvious place in which responsibility can be assigned is "conception". Because of that, most people read your argument like this:
"I demand you get an abortion, or else you have to face a penalty of taking on ALL my responsibility here."
And they react poorly to that, and you get expected "a person who abandons their responsibility in this way has done something shitty and wrong" phrasing (like deadbeat) to describe how they feel about it.
If you want to get around that, I'm arguing that the only way you can do that is to successfully convince people that either 1 or 2 above is true. If you can do that, then the rest of what you want (one person can walk away free of responsibility or shame) falls into place. But if you can't, you will continue to see "he's a deadbeat" be a common sentiment.
Eh. The situation is very dynamic. There are very strong emotional interactions between parent and child, and between the parents, especially when the child is young. These change things immensely for all concerned, so assuming the emotional status quo at birth is a good guide to what it will be 5 years later is not very sound. It rarely is. Most of the time, it has improved considerably -- most people, even if they are surprised by a birth, or feel unprepared for it, resent it, come to adore the child and treasure their parenthood relatively quickly. After all, both baby and parents are wired to go in that direction, since in the primitive state *all* childbirth is a surprise, or at least not planned. There are certainly exceptions, but given the chaos and uncertainty of human history, if it was required that human parents be in a prepared and poised state, ready for a birth, in order to cherish and rear the child with affection, the human species would've gone extinct millenia ago.
It's okay for parents to feel "pressured or obliged". That's exactly how most of us feel, a lot of the time (at least when the kids are young).
Some of the time I spend with my kids is pure joy and there's nothing I'd rather be doing. Other bits are plain old obligation and I'd much rather be doing something else. It's usually some kind of combination of the two. If we only spent time with our kids when we felt like it, then our kids would be dangerously unattended a lot of the time.
It's part of being a parent that you have to spend a lot of time doing things that you don't particularly want to do. You just have to learn to hide how you feel about it.
Sure? But you've put forth a scenario where said child *can't have the good outcome*. The original situation is one where at least one parent doesn't want the kid, no matter what, with the original complaint being that they have to sort of pay into the system.
But more than that, this isn't actually a great excuse *so long as you acknowledge the dead-beat has some responsibilities here*. Like, very specifically "I'm supposed to take GOOD care of this kid, but I've decided treat him like shit, which thus justifies me leaving" is just negotiating if said person was shitty just once, or twice.
I'm not saying there's no complexity here. Like the amount it's reasonable to say "you made your bed, now lie in it" depends on how big of a deal you think abortion is/how reasonable you think it is to demand one, among other things. If you don't think the person should have any responsibility at all, then the dead-beat gets off the hook both times - he shouldn't be forced to help raise the kids, well or otherwise.
Once deadbeat has responsibility, though, "I'm going to do a *real shitty job*, so it's OK that I just fully leave and offer no support at all, and I get away with both entirely with no judgment" doesn't work anymore. It's sort of an solution in search of an appropriate problem, as it stands.
There's also the fact that if a man wants the child and the woman doesn't, she can have an abortion and the father has no say in it.
Feminists often say that feminism literally just means sexual equality, but it's hard to see how abortion rights and child support laws have anything to do with men and women being equal, because men have far fewer rights than women in this situation. You might think that's fair given X Y Z reasons, but it's certainly not something being supported strictly for the sake of "equality".
It’s not necessarily that it’s wrong for only one of them to have the attitude, but to insist on it when the other parent doesn’t indicates some sort of failure of negotiation.
Children raised by single parents face additional challenges and tend to fare worse statistically in some ways compared to those raised by 2 parents [citation needed]. When both parents give up their kid early, there’s a good chance they can be adopted by a loving, supportive family. When only one gives up, they make it harder for the remaining parent and disadvantage the kid. Hurting the innocent kid seems like a reasonable thing to disapprove of. Also, the desire to avoid social condemnation might encourage some would-be deadbeats to provide some support that can help children have a better shot at growing up well.
In consequentialist terms, either of the disagreeing parents could have prevented the bad outcome by flipping their decision, so they're both equally guilty of causing the bad outcome. Why then is there this vast gulf of moral status between the two parents when they disagree?
Some ideas:
1. Maybe deadbeat behavior is more elastic from social condemnation than than the behavior of an ill-equipped single parent who refuses to put their kid up for adoption.
2. Emotional/political baggage from mid-20th century policy overreaches in eugenics makes people reluctant to admit anyone is unfit to raise a child even in cases where it's obviously true.
Kind of related to these but different: people generally deserve the right to raise their own kids, so one parent abandoning a child shouldn’t force their partner to also do so. Shaming someone into supporting their kid doesn’t seem morally equivalent to shaming someone into abandoning their kid.
Wanting to raise your own kid and wanting to abandon your own kid seem morally equivalent to you?
Also what if my wife dies in childbirth? Your reasoning would imply that I am morally obligated to give my kid up for adoption.
It might help to note that not all adoptive parents are great, and it’s definitely possible that a single parent could provide a better environment than an adoptive couple.
A related hypothetical: if I want to play a tricky video game and my brother doesn’t, my failure rate will be higher than if he were to help. In this hypothetical, my options now are to try playing solo, or give the game away to my cousins who will play co-op. Yeah, maybe you could argue I’m morally obligated to let my cousins try, as they’re more likely to save the Princess than I am, but it’s my game, and I deserve the right to try saving the princess myself.
Parenthood is harder difficulty on single player compared to co-op (on average), but that doesn’t mean a parent deserves condemnation for giving it a try.
“Abandon“ sort of smuggles in connotations of neglect but actually there is a large surplus of couples who want to adopt, and on average they’d do better than a single parent at maximizing the child’s welfare. So you’d be trading off the child’s welfare against the entertainment of the parent. Do parents “deserve” to be allowed to make that category of trade offs? Sometimes, within reason. Stay out all night drinking and forgetting to feed the kid? Nah. Doomscrolling all evening instead of talking to your kids? Kind of shitty but legally permissible.
“Entertainment” smuggles sort of smuggles in connotations of doing something for your own selfish amusement, but actually much of raising a kid involves putting the needs of the child above your own entertainment. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist being a bit cheeky with my phrasing here).
Framing the choice to raise your own child alone as being in the same class of behavior as intentionally neglecting your child doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
I’ll also note that you’d be trading off your child’s welfare on average, but not necessarily in a specific case. It’s more comparable to letting your kid play basketball. They are more likely to get a leg injury than if you prohibited it, so on average it’s riskier. If you knew for sure that they would end up with a lifetime of painful walking due to a bad leg injury, or course letting them play would be stupid, and you should convince them to play a lower risk sport instead. But without prescience, it doesn’t seem neglectful for a parent to allow their kid to take that risk in general.
>>Children raised by single parents face additional challenges and tend to fare worse statistically in some ways compared to those raised by 2 parents
>HEAVILY confounded by the fact that the per capita majority of children raised in single parent households are black
I am interested in critiquing this statement.
I hope you notice the distinction between the statement "A majority of Black children in the United States grow up in single-parent homes", and the statement "A majority of the children who grow up in single-parents homes in the United States are Black". It is very probable that the first statement is false, and the second statement is true.
It claims to have hard numbers to answer this question, and shows them for the years 2010 to 2019. Data is said to be sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau, and its American Community Survey.
Across those years, the numbers of Black/African-American children living in single-parent households range from ~5.9 million to ~6.5 million. By percentage, about 64% to 65% of Black children live in single-parent households.
The numbers for non-Hispanic-White are ~9.3 million to ~8.5 million, (about 23% to 24% of non-Hispanic-White children) while the numbers for Hispanic/Latino are ~6.6 million to ~7.3 million (about 41% to 42% of Hispanic/Latino children).
The numbers for "Two or more races" are between 1.5 million and 1.9 million (about 40% to 42% of children who can classified as belonging to two or more races).
The categories Asian/Pacific-Islander and American-Indian come in around 0.5 million and 0.3 million, respectively.
For every 10 Black children living in single-parent homes in the U.S., there are 12 Hispanic children, 14 non-Hispanic-White children, and 3 multi-racial children.
Put another way: if you had a statistically-accurate sample of 100 children of single-parent homes in the U.S., then 25 of those children would be Black , 30 of them would be Hispanic, and 34 would be non-Hispanic-White. About 8 would be Bi-racial. The remainder would be 2 children who are Asian/Pacific-Islander , and 1 that is American-Indian.
If the social statistics show that children who grow up in single-parent homes "face additional challenges and tend to fare worse [in school/work/etc] statistics", then it looks like that is true in some way for all of the Black, non-Hispanic-White, Hispanic/Latino, and Bi-Racial children in the U.S.
This isn't to say that the bad effects of single-parent-homes are the same for all races (or economic classes). But it is worth asking whether the typical Black child (of a particular social/economic strata) growing up a single-parent home fares worse than a comparable typical White child (of the similar social/economic status) growing up in a single-parent home.
Also confounded by the fact that the kind of people who end up as single parents are statistically pretty different from the kind who don't, and some of those differences are likely to be heritable.
You cut out my [citation needed] note! I agree, it gets complicated, and that was my attempt to punt on doing an in-depth analysis while acknowledging it would be useful here.
From the article: “black children in homes headed by single parents are about 3.5 times more likely to be living in poverty compared to black children living with two parents in a first marriage.”
Obviously more caveats apply (correlation vs causation, etc).
Just to note, I usually don't read [citation needed] as a "I don't want to analyze in now, but it might be useful" and rather interpret it as "this is obvious and it would be silly to disagree." I get that you didn't intend it that way, but for the future, that's the way that I guess some people like me might read it
If you want to raise your kid, but your partner doesn't, you're stuck raising your kid alone. Adoptive parents are generally couples so they don't have that problem, and if a single parent does adopt then it's a situation that they sought out.
Is it even possible in the USA for single people to adopt? I'm under the impression that the requirements are fairly strict (arguably too strict?) and require (married?) couples.
Okay, but that's not what you asked in the question I was answering.
On the question you're asking, no, because the obligation isn't to the parent who wants to raise the child, it's to the child. That obligation can be severed by adoption, but not by unilateral disavowal by the party who desires not to be a parent. There's a moral argument that it should, but I disagree.
There's an unavoidable need for care of children, which takes time and money, this is an inherent risk of potentially procreative sex.
ETA: To clarify, I think you're assuming only a two step preference:
1) Have a partner and a child
2) Have neither
Rather than:
1) Have a partner and a child
2) Have a child
3) Have neither
And yes, child support is relevant to the sorting of (2) and (3), but our society tends to prioritize (for reasons I believe are probably just and correct) maintaining biological families and so tends to support someone who wants (2) over someone who wants (3) (at least contingent on the existence of a child, as forced impregnation/abortion are generally quite illegal).
Not necessarily. I am currently pregnant and really really really don't want to raise my kid alone, but if anything happened to my husband, I'd do it--no doubt about it. I feel a certain level of attachment to and love for the kid already, plus I have very thorough knowledge about the kind of upbringing and resources I could provide the child. From my perspective, adoptive parents would be a shot in the dark by comparison.
He seems to be in over his head, but the whole debacle is also amusing to watch while he crushes people who make the world worse. I just enjoy the ride with popcorn in hand.
The most surprising part to me was that he was willing to publicly try to renege on his deal to buy Twitter, despite presumably knowing he would probably be forced to go through with the purchase. Weird that he would voluntarily incur so much damage to his reputation.
Well, he's the richest man in the world and we're just schmos on the Internet, so....I might watch Usain Bolt lose a 100m race I was sure he could win, but I'd be hesitant to critique his technique in detail.
Nothing about Musk's life story is consistent with him being an "idiot".
If you want to argue that he's a very smart man who occasionally makes high-stakes foolish decisions then I'm right there with you. I make those myself sometimes but thankfully my bad decisions get less media scrutiny.
He's had astounding success in several fields at once. When he talks about the technical sides of his businesses, he seems to know what he's talking about, and people who have worked with him vouch that he does. On what basis are you fairly confident that he's an idiot? The possibility seems highly unlikely to me.
:- His track record suggests that he's very good at certain sorts of things, but also that he clearly has some fairly extreme mental and social limitations.
:- Running Twitter looks superficially like the kind of thing he's done well in the past.
:- What I've heard of his decisions and actions there so far look, to my untrained eye, spectacularly dumb, but this is not an area I trust my judgement in.
:- "Running a business heavily dependent on popular goodwill" vs "running a business dependent on being able to prove to experts that your products work" might be different skills, of which he has only the latter?
:- If I were a gambling man, I would bet on his purchase being bad, and probably very bad, for Twitter-as-a-business (impact for Twitter-as-a-community is more subjective), but not heavily or at long odds.
Are you referring to where a bunch of advertisers pulled their advertising even though nothing at Twitter had changed except that Elon Musk took over and woke people don't like Elon Musk?
Even a non-woke advertiser would be well advised to pull back after such a significant change in ownership and foreshadowing of policy changes. Big advertisers are inherently very conservative. What's it going to cost you to pause your Twitter buys for a few weeks until the dust settles? Basically noise. (Twitter isn't even that big an advertising platform, and you can just shift your ad buys over to Google or Youtube and reduce even the modest effect of a reduction in Twitter spend.) And for that caution you avoid any possibility of something blowing up in your face, either because of a weird new policy, or some random chaos caused by the shifts going on.
Now if 40% of advertisers stay away for 6 months, we'll know Musk has a problem.
It’s not true that nothing changed. Twitter algorithm first discourages swears and hate speech, then bans the user after
Several infractions. As soon as Musk took over he shut down that form of content moderation. Use of words like “nigger” and “kike” surged in next 24 hrs. I did searches of the 2 word to see what the tweets were like. A few just repeated the previously forbidden word as many times as Twitter character limit allowed, but many were substantive and genuinely hate-filled. — eg photos of Nazis paired with text about how sinister and sneaky Jews are
No I’m not under the impression there’s a racial slurs knife switch. Um, are you under the impression
I’m a dum dum?
Here are my reasons for thinking there was some sort of setting
for racial slurs and certain other kinds of offensive language that was changed right as Elon took
over:
-Twitter definitely has been monitoring for certain words. What was on the list seemed to be racial and ethnic slirs, some of the cruder swears, and insulting terms such as “moron.” Maybe a dozen times in the last few months I have drafted a tweet with a crass or insulting word in it: usually “fuck,” used for emphasis; one time “morons”. When I hit POST I got a Twitter screen saying something like “people don’t isually put up Tweets containing one of the words you used. Are you sure you want to post that?” When I get that screen I would remove the word, because I got banned once a couple years ago for a particularly pungent Twitter swear. So there is content moderation at the level of individual words, and don’t think it would take take long to add a word to its lost, subtract a word, or subtract *all* words. Looks to me like Elon had all
words substracted.
-I did do the searches for “nigger” and “kike” myself. Several of the tweets I saw actually referred to the fact that it was now possible to use the word on Twitter.
With one of my own I’m which I used a crass sexual swear that is definitely worse than “fuck.” (For the record I did not call the poster
an X, I used the word in reference to a politician he had mentioned admiringly.). When I hit “post” I got the Twitter “Are you sure you want to say that?” screen. Posted
anyhow and Immediately got a notice that I was banned for 12 hrs. However, the ban didn’t take effect. I continued posting for the rest of the day with no problem. Since then I have experimented with tweeting every swear
I know, and no longer even get the warning screen.
The word I used in a tweet the day I did the search was the word that got me a permanent ban 2 or 3 years ago. I have never seen it I used on Twitter. It is a very rude word. This time Twitter told me I was banned for 12 hrs, but in fact the ban did not work. Couple of years ago I was locked out of my account instantly
I have never posted a racial slur, except in recent tweets in which I have used them when commenting on the effect their use is going to have on advertisers. I do not put them in quotation marks in these tweets, and Twitter does not react to their presence.
When I did my search for racial slurs, there were multiple tweets saying things along the lines of
“Haha we can say nigger now. Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger . . .”
I really think all this adds up to a pretty good case that some change had been made in the forbidden word part of the moderation system, which seems like it would not be difficult to change.
Musk has explicitly stated that he did not change the moderation policies, furthermore there are tweets from the moderation guys saying they had a surge of hate speech that they brought under control and showed some graphs/charts
I read that he fired thousands and is seeking to re-hire dozens. And given Twitter's financials (and the fact that they agreed to, indeed tried to compel, the sale) it's hard not to suspect even Twitter's top management knew the company was seriously bloated and needed savage reform. Fortunate for them, Musk is willing to be the hatchet man, and they can float away on golden parachutes.
I skimmed the NYTimes interview you appear to be referencing here, but it seemed to me the request was for examples of code to be made available to Musk's (Tesla?) engineers who are helping advise during this process. The notion that they were looking for quantity instead of quality appeared to be an assumption made within the NYT piece.
Second, it's not clear at all that half of the engineers were fired when the teams most clearly impacted based on initial reporting were to do with "content moderation" or "human rights" (lol).
Twitter's financials were not great and so it is inevitable that cuts had to be made somewhere to turn the company around. Were the cuts reasonable? I have no idea, as I'm not even a twitter user (I think it's a horrible platform, fwiw, and Musk probably can't fix that). But I have been through an acquisition at a large company, which makes me think some of the hot takes being made on this are from people who haven't been privy to this process, which is inevitably messy, confusing, and imperfect.
Is any of this true, though? He has not let back in any bad actors (this is a thing that could happen in the future). He has not implemented a new verified user system (same). And since when has firing people (I don't believe your claim of "who had written the least code") harmed the reputation of a company? It doesn't make sense.
>He has not implemented a new verified user system (same)
He announced that you will be able to pay $8 for an icon that previously indicated a verified user. That's new.
I believe the feature hasn't been implemented *yet*, but if you see a volcano about to erupt then you don't need to wait for the lava to actually start flowing before you decide that there's a problem.
>And since when has firing people (I don't believe your claim of "who had written the least code") harmed the reputation of a company? It doesn't make sense.
Literally half of their employees. No matter how clever your scheme is for choosing who to fire (and it can't be *that* clever considering how little time Musk took to make the decision), you can't snap away half the company and expect business to continue as usual.
I've noticed that when it suits, liberals take a free market approach to things, but when it doesn't suit, they will say that these businesses need more regulation.
That's hardly unique to lefties. Look at all the righties who wanted the Trump DoJ to sue the social media platforms under antitrust law and break them up.
In think in general both left and right love the free market when they're winning in it, and find a reason it needs correction (or is being "distorted" by some conspiracy that needs purging) when they're losing.
I think "all companies must pay for ads on twitter, even if they don't want to" would be significantly less sensible than almost all existing business regulations.
"there are many working people who use Twitter to find clients"
Why or how? How do you go looking for a possible client on Twitter? Do you put up a tweet about "I'm a [doctor lawyer banker thief]" and hope it will be seen by people looking for same?
I not sure who Machine interface had in mind, but I think authors, podcasters and pundits use Twitter to maintain public visibility and promote their content — also people in the entertainment field. In fact Scott Galloway was suggesting that a reasonable way for Twitter to make money would be to charge these people a hefty sum to use it — something like 10
Or 20% of the amount of their income that’s dependent on Twitter. Seem like it could
work. There really is no substitute for Twitter if you’re a journalist, author, podcaster who wants
to keep people aware that you’re alive and thinking every single day. I mean where else are they going to post — freakin
I wouldn't necessarily say he's an idiot per se. But he seems to have fallen I to the common trap where someone is successful in one area and over estimates the transferability of their expertise. This seems to be particularly bad with rich people who end up surrounded by people whose job is depenendent on them, so don't get the normal negative feedback that prevents most people going ahead with bad ideas
Many people fall into this trap, but Elon has founded or led (or otherwise been involved in running) at least three massively successful industry-revolutionising companies at this point.
He's never bought an underperforming large company and fixed it before, so maybe that's not in his wheelhouse. But I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now. Best case scenario he fixes twitter and makes the world a better place, worst case scenario he destroys twitter and makes the world a better place.
The worry is that he could make Twitter a financially successful business whose side effect is making the world a worse place, instead of a financially unsuccessful business whose side effect is making the world a worse place.
What do you base that on? Thiel has been very successful in a whole bunch of different areas. Eg, running Paypal, palantir, becoming a thought leader, destroying gawker, etc.
If he had just stuck to one area, like most people do, he would have missed out on a lot of successes.
I personally think Thiel's opinions on STEM are mostly wrong. He believes AGI in the near future is unlikely, that the real risk of AI is surveillance by the CCP, that cryptocurrencies are the way of the future. He also thinks progress in STEM has slowed a lot.
I think these are all things that he would like to be true, as they would fit nicely with his ideological preconceptions. e.g. he believes AI is authoritarian while crypto is libertarian, so he wants the latter to succeed. The theme of stagnation of science fits into his worries about the stagnation of American government. I think this causes him to overlook the actual facts.
Why no chance that he will make very little difference in anything major at Twitter? Personally I would say that's the most likely scenario.
Maybe 10% genius, 20% overextended, 70% no major changes to Twitter in the foreseeable future. Charging for blue checks and similar administrative changes wouldn't count as major to me. For major I am talking about your "skyrocket value" or "burn to the ground" results.
My understanding is that because he bought Twitter at an overvaluation, if he doesn't make changes, then he has overextended himself. There is some middle ground, but it looks more like "Musk fixes enough stuff to get out relatively unscathed, and twitter is marginally better" than "Musk sits on twitter for a couple years and then resells it"
I'm going to presume you typed this message on your phone, because the spelling is atrocious and if I thought this was how you usually wrote, I'd dismiss you out of hand.
Okay, so you invented a religion once. And? Did you promulgate it? Did you convince any people to follow it? What did you do with it, after you invented it? Did you drop it?
If you did drop it, don't you feel any duty towards those who may have taken it seriously? Was it just a game for you, a way of "anyone can make up dumb shit and get others to believe it"?
And if so, why should I take seriously any of your undiscovered physics of consciousness? Maybe this is just another intellectual game until you get bored, and then whatever poor fool you roped in to help you will be left holding the bag when you clear off.
The fundamental problem is there is as-yet not good way to monetize longterm matchmaking. All dating apps make more money when they fail at matchmaking, because they make more money if you keep coming back to the app.
Assuming monetizing longterm matchmaking is within the social Overton window - I'm still unclear whether one is allowed to "put a price on love" these days - why not take a cue from voc-ed/apprenticeship/etc models, and reward platforms some small % of a future couple's combined-earnings-above-individual-expectations? That'd create some skin in the game, or at least start to offer alternative incentives to endless lemon market based on whales. Or a different tweak: users don't pay anything *until* they're matched up successfully.
Although I suppose securing proof in both cases would be...difficult. Though there's certainly a market for people who'd trade surveillance for companionship.
People always say this, but I'm not sure it's true. Plenty of people/companies make money by solving people's problems once and for all.
A good eye surgeon (for instance) who fixes people's eyes permanently is not going to be outcompeted by a bunch of lousy ones who keep doing a bad job so patients have to come back. Word will get around, and people will choose the good one over the bad one.
If you came up with an online dating app that actually worked really well, then you could make a lot of money even if you only saw each customer once. I don't think it's an incentives problem, it's just that building a really good online dating business is really hard.
I said what I meant specifically, not as a generalization.
You can pay to solve someone's eye problems once and for all because there's a functioning market for that service which has objective standards that are easy to verify, and simple contracts you can sign, laws defining medical malpractice, etc. A surgeon who promises to fix your vision can tell you with 95 percent certainty that your vision after the surgery will be 20/20, with a 4.9 percent chance of something a bit better or worse than that and a .1 percent chance of severely worse, or something approximately to that effect.
A matchmaker can't credibly tell you that if you pay them 20,000 dollars that you will live happily ever after with your one true love, or even have a 90 percent chance of doing so. On the flip side, a customer can't credibly tell you that if you provide them with a good match, they'll pay you 20,000 dollars conditional on them actually getting married, because people regularly renege on contracts for far less than that amount.
As I said, no one has YET come up with a good way to align the incentives such that a website can offer this service at a profitable price to a large number of people. I don't think it's impossible, but I sure haven't figured out a way to do it.
And I absolutely do believe it's an incentive problem, because there are dozens if not hundreds of dating apps that all mostly suck in the same ways because they all exist in the exact same incentive environment based on monetizing via advertising and/or premium usability features.
Speaking of Aella, I agree with her evaluation of the common failure mode of "date me" docs (it was in a tweet, can't immediately find it so I'm paraphrasing): people love the chance to introspect out loud about themselves at great length, if given the chance they will (mis)use a date-me doc to do this. Based on my experience on OkC, someone could write a long, earnest, introspective blurb about the rich intricacies of their own inner lives and dating preferences, and completely miss relevant character defects that were immediately apparent to me within 20 minutes of meeting them.
Personally I'm not optimistic about the ability of any dating site to give as much relevant information as just 20 minutes of in-person interaction, so my ideal dating site(s) would be ones that give very superficial information within as narrow a niche as possible. Like, if there were a dating site for mildly autistic Reformed Christians, then within that pool I would filter out my dealbreakers (eg outside my age bracket, lives too far away) and set up dates with whoever was left. Do the more nuanced filtering in person.
But I'm getting the feeling that rationalist dating culture tends to gravitate towards the opposite strategy (casting a narrow net within a wide net, as opposed to my casting a wide net within a narrow net). That would explain the existence of date-me docs which are otherwise confusing to me.
The problem with those docs is discoverability. If you have a high profile career or social media presence, people might find you, but for everyone else it doesn't work.
Reddit has multiple relationship-seeking forums and you can write as much as you want, but they are going to have a selection bias on who sees your profile. If you are trying to cast a wide net, its hard to beat Tinder just on name recognition.
Rationalists might be like other niche interests (childfree, etc) where, outside of major cities, there just isn't sufficient density for them to matchmaking properly.
I think a billionaire funding a dating app that operates at a loss and optimizes for number and quality of matches is a reasonable forward-looking solution. Not Musk though, has to be someone with genuine altruism.
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.
If you look at the last straw comment you’ll see that the a user said he was going to report A-H-G. So who raised the flag is not in doubt.
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 like it wasn’t that long ago when Scott fretted about low comment count. “What do I have to do to get you people to talk?”
I’ve run into Substack maintenance sometimes. Everything is just a no go then.
How fast is your Wi-Fi? This thread is a bit sluggish at times with my phone but I haven’t run into anything like a 60 seconds wait.
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.
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?
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.
So without serifs there is no way to know. Is that Wolly AEye or Woolly AL?
My 13 year old Mazda 3 has many years ahead of it BTW.
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?
It’s been good to me. The one issue I’ve had is with the tire pressure sensors. One of them worked loose and punctured a tire.
Mine has a 5 speed manual transmission. I’m going to miss the control of a five on the floor when they stop making them.
It starts every time I turn the key. With Minnesota winters that means something.
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.
As long as it isn’t consistently costing money for repairs, I’d say to hell with it, take the less expensive ride.
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.
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?
I’d like to signal boost the Brad DeLong-Ezra Klein interview. DeLong is sooo right on 99% of what he says that it is sort of scarry to see that much of this is news to Klein.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bradford-delong.html
As someone who's read a decent among of DeLong (and stuff about DeLong) my impression is that he's not well regarded outside of a certain far left bubble. Could you clarify what he's so right about and how this interview is unique from what's roughly the popular consensus economics on the far left?
Alternatively, if you accept he's a heterodox left wing economist, care to defend why he's right over the mainstream? His comments on energy were in my view particularly egregious but that's a hobby horse of mine.
I think of him as center left (what he calls a "left neo-liberal") not far left. I think he explains the way markets "crowdsource" problem solving to be well done. And while I think that many mainstream economists implicitly understand the "need" for inflation to deal with shocks requiring changes in relative prices when some absolute prices cannot easily adjust downward, I think he explains it no non economist well.
If on energy use you mean his skepticism of taxation of CO2 emissions, I agree with you. But I didn't catch that part in this interview.
As I understand it left of neoliberalism is progressivism or the far left. AOC types. So I'm not sure we disagree. Are you the type of person who thinks the most left wing politicians in the US are centrists and people like Barrack Obama are right wing?
Neither of those things seem particularly unique or the main thrust of why he's popular and seen as insightful. But I'll give it a listen anyway I suppose.
By energy I mean his insistence that global warming could not place requirements on developing nations (including, as you say, taxes but also anything else). This involved him verbally running over a climate scientist who was patiently explaining that CO2 did not respect borders. And then reduced him to some rather sputtering claims about anti-Chinese sentiment and deflection. He, in effect, twisted himself into knots to defend CO2 emissions in the developing world and specifically Mainland China. Not his finest moment.
I've never hear him on energy policy except a podcast with Noah Smith on carbon taxes.
The lowest (total global) cost way to achieve the optimal CO2 concentration the atmosphere is for all countries to tax net CO2 emissions at the same rate. To do so will have the greatest dead weight losses on countries with the most elastic demands for CO2 intensive goods. [
a tax on an inelastic good is just a lump-sum tax] Just how that breaks down by income level is probably pretty heterogeneous. The real action in the redistribution dimension is in costs of mitigation. There it seems to me that high income, historically high cumulative emissions countries ought to feel an obligation to assist countries to adjust/mitigate.
I have no idea what DeLong thinks about any of this.
Yes, I heard that too and saw the resulting Twitter fight. He was not significantly better there.
The issue with that plan, which I agree is solid in principle, is that it won't work without a global government. But that's an implementation detail of how to reduce CO2 emissions. We both agree, I think, that the rest of the world does not get to simply get a pass because they're not western or not as developed. DeLong does not. As I said, he's been quite bad on this in at least three instances.
We don't really need a world government. "All" we need to do is establish our tax on CO2 emissions an a border adjustment on imports from countries that do not have a tax on CO2 missions. Since that IS the lowest cost way of getting to any given CO2 concentration goal (and costs are coming down), in principle it should be "easy" for other countries to go along.
Now I don't think this is in fact "easy" [we have not even gotten Brad DeLong on board], but the idea that the world can get to any given CO2 concentration by different countries agreeing to reduce CO2 quantities by arbitrarily amounts is even harder, maybe even impossible.
Could you clarify exactly what you found so insightful here?
Because there's lots of things that seem...off. Not wrong but off. Like, I'm around 23:00 and Ezra asks Brad why the Fed didn't just raise interest rates during the Nixon administration. And Brad basically blames Republican collusion between the president and the Fed chair.
But this is weird because, well, the theory that monetary action by the Fed was a major factor in economic activity basically arises during the 60's. The big monetarist text, "A Monetary History of the US" by Friedman and Schwartz came out in 1963. Pre-monetarism, economists had very different theories of economic activity that didn't really feature the Fed in a central role. I'm sure they had some ideas about the role of money in the economy but asking why the Fed wasn't taking a central role here is like asking what industrialists were doing in Revolutionary America. Like, there was a bit going on, but they weren't a big thing yet.
Edit: Which again, on the wrong thing, I'm not confident Brad is wrong here, there certainly is a lot I don't know about this and Fed Chairs certainly aren't the independent actors we might hope, but this focus is weird.
I'm an economist and I already knew that Burns played footsie with Nixon; Ezra clearly did not. I agree that Brad could have been more clear about what was a mistake given what people knew then v what we know now. But the thing he got really right, the thing that is still not appreciated is that some inflation is needed, is optimal, in response to a supply shock like the two oil price increases. or the COVID shock. I also thought his explanation of how the right intertwined inflation and "permissiveness" was correct and well done. I LIVED through that period and felt I saw that more clearly in DeLong's exposition.
The necessary inflation does feel really interesting. Either in the oil crisis or the lockdown fallout now, there is just less "stuff" and some kind of inflation does seem necessary. I wish they'd developed that more because, while the concept of "sometimes supply shocks generate inflation and that's ok" is interesting, the real meat feels like in defining how much inflation, or more specifically how the Fed should react in situations where some inflation is required without losing it's credibility on inflation issues.
As for the inflation/permissiveness bit, that just kinda blended into CW because, well, this is a NYT podcast and about the most left mainstream de facto neoliberal thing there is. I dunno, I probably would have bought it from a sincere Bernie Bro but not these two.
Edit: Is there a good journal article or something that fleshes out the "necessary inflation" argument?
Is there an alternative, non-NYT link or summary?
https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-ezra-klein-show-2/episode/inflation-does-more-than-raise-prices-it-destroys-governments-208225320
Search for "The Ezra Klein Show" and you can find a link for the podcast player of your choice too.
Thanks you.
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
The Catholic Church hid the sexual abuse but didn’t believe it was “good”.
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
> 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.
I bemoan the fact that people here will ask person medical questions, instead of talking to experts.
However, generalized questions of medicine and healthcare are important.
As a cross-pollination:
https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/experts-vs-practicing-doctors?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
"In other words, the experts used eminence over evidence to make a recommendation. That is dangerous, and we have too much of it in medicine.
The practicing doctors—with their cumulative wisdom—got this one right. DCP proved that their choice of HCTZ was the correct one.
But I hope you know what my next sentence will be.
We should also not trust the collective wisdom of practicing doctors. I’ve discussed many of the colossal errors we’ve made in accepting therapies that ultimately proved ineffective or harmful."
The way forward, so beautifully shown in the DCP trial, is proper randomized trials."
Part of the reason that your own research and asking on forums is important is it broadens the space of possibilities on your radar, what to check out, what to read about. That can send you down a hypochondria hole, but it can also help you structure and prep what questions to ask a provider, and evaluate whether they're thinking or just listing off memorize Mayo Clinic articles.
Also you should generally trust-but-verify. I've had an otherwise very good doctor mess up my prescription dosages. I've had to correct a pediatrician about the age of my kids and which vaccines we were supposed to be doing that visit. I've also had a child's skin condition misdiagnosed and I had to go looking for something that seemed more correct. I've been on the phone with a medical office which was clearly using the same "guide to your child's rash" to evaluate whether we should be seen that I was using to figure out what she had.
I've also had the experience of googling one set of keywords and never happening upon a potential (and correct) diagnosis that was in the space of possibilities for the symptoms, until I searched THAT DIAGNOSIS itself, or some other less obvious combination of keywords.
I understand the instinct, but it is not clear to me that casting a wider net is actually a better strategy.
If I'm looking for needle in a haystack, is the right instinct to say get me another haystack because looking through 2 haystacks (casting a wider net) might be helpful?
Is more cancer screening always better? Not really. There can be risks (both individual and societal) to casting a wider net.
How about the problem of the curse of dimensionality? A larger variable space does not necessarily increase effectiveness of a model.
I do not think physicians are infallible, 30+ years of cross-examining them has confirmed my skepticism. But I do believe in expertise, including my own expertise at cross-examining experts.
For every time "doing your own research" is helpful, how many times is it not helpful?
It is very hard to detach oneself from a particular personal issue: your health or the health of loved ones.
There may be utility to the case study of one or the anecdote. But there is also potential loss.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." ~ Richard P. Feynman
There are two failures going on at the same time: The failure of expertise and the failure of doing your own research.
When people here have a health problem, they can't wait around for somebody to do a proper randomized trial. My doctor has NO time to discuss my health issues. She is smart, conscientious and polite, but she's got a hallway full of exam rooms with people sitting inside in johnnies waiting for her to see them. She is apparently obliged by some regulation or other to ask me certain things every time we meet, such as whether I am taking all the exact same supplements as I was 3 months ago, do I wear a helmet when I bike, and do I live with anyone who abuses me. She also has to type everything that goes on into the medical record. What she does with the remaining time is examine me carefully and tell me what to do. I can tell that she's squirming with impatience when I ask even a couple of simple follow-up questions with yes/no answers. There is no way I can spend, say, 10 mins in a brief discussion with her about my back, where I have a lifelong problem that is worsening with age. I'd really like to know whether there are any treatments worth trying, and who in town administers them well, and what results has she seen in people getting this treatment, and what is the range of possibilities for what my back is going to do over the next 20 years. She simply does not have time to do that. She pulls out a pamphlet giving generic lower back exercises, some of which I know from experience make my particular back worse. She offers to put in an order for PT.
I've got a good doctor, but that's what seeing doctors is like these days. That's why people ask smart, non-doctor acquaintances whether they know anything about the problem -- any resources, any doctors. Often you find somebody who does.
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."
Ooh, plowable snow in the forecast! I expect I’m going to have the same conversation with Mrs Gunflint where she nags me to buy her a new shovel. Every year it’s the same damn thing.
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.>>
Re moderation:
https://gamerant.com/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet-episode-3-review/
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).
Say I'm at a party and something comes up where a reference to Henry George and land value taxation makes sense. But the small groups at party have different sub configurations, i leave one group to get a drink or food and I end up talking with other people and Henry George and land value taxation comes up and I chime with a relevant tidbit that happens to be the same pearls of wisdom I previously shared.
Is my second comment unnecessary for the "party"?
Before I knew of the necessary, true, kind (2 of 3) rule, i got a 25% ban which an hour latter got edited by Scott to a 50% ban. Someone was kind enough to point me to the hidden rule.
But as I reflected on rule to me necessary seems obscure (Although your post makes it less obscure). No post is generally _necessary _, we're not first responders or brain surgeons (although some of the posts about contemplated suicide do require some necessary response - just no. don't do it!).
So I've tried to concentrate on true and kind - maybe really true and not unkind.
But I still don't even know what 25% or 50% ban actually means. Is it like a permanent record. Is there confession where it gets absolved?
Are 9 10% bans the same as 3 30% bans. A faq would help.
I've been thrown out of court by a judge, but almost all of the great litigating attorneys I know have had it happen to them. I don't want to happen again but the judge was a total jerk. I am now friendly with judge who is now off bench and occasionally an adversary.
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.
Yeah, it’s just a thing people say.
"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.
Power users on Mac or Windows probably have learned off some keyboard short cuts. There’s no need for mathematics for that. Excel is used by the people who use Excel, it’s not really math and it’s a program, it is not the OS. Nobody really needs scripting in any OS but there are ways on on all computer systems to do it. Heck the Mac could be driven as a purely unix machine. Far for being a good attribute, complexity as standard is bad for operating systems - if I’m launching the console or terminal to do a standard task then that’s a design failure.
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.
What defines a power user?
A power user is someone who is as smart as the guy who uses the term “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.
"I'll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be."
Do you know about Deming's Red Bead Experiment? (Not actually invented by Deming but used by him to teach how to understand variation and think statistically. See The New Economics (1994)
Here is a alternative version to make a similar point. Suppose you had the subscribers to ACX flip 100 coins and report the amount of heads. And then you banned those with below average heads count. Do you really think that you will have created a better head flipping club?
In writing this comment, it occurs to me that I should refresh my recollection of the history of "the salon" and consider the complications with having a money making operation (your paid subscriptions) tied to the endeavor of ACX.
> And then you banned those with below average heads count.
I think it has been stressed enough that normally acceptable but low-quality comments (whatever quality means) are deleted as content without causing a ban to the author. So no better coin-flipping club, but only the comments Scott Alexander finds deserving of a chance of replies are left there to reply to.
(It is indeed unclear what the outcome will be, which is also acknowledged)
You need to assume comment "quality" is a random variable for this analogy to be of use. That seems...unlikely.
Not really. Chebyshev's inequality applies to wide range of distributions.
But even so, Shewhart and Deming didn't base their ideas of distinguishing between a special (assignable) causes of variation and a systemic causes of variation in probability theory. See Wheeler. It is an economic choice to reduce the the two types of errors.
I have no idea what relevance you think Chebyshev's inequality has to the question. If you have an explanation, I'd be glad to hear it. Nor have I heard of Shewhart and Deming, or Wheeler[1], and nor do I care, unless you would like to explain some clever insight any of them had that demonstrates that writer quality does not correlate with writer identity, an assertion which is so strongly at variance from common sense and experience that it would take an uncommonly detached sophist to credit it a priori.
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[1] Except for John A. Wheeler, the GR theorist, a name with which I am familiar, but which I doubt you mean.
Deming probably one of the most important American statisticians and management theorists of quality. He introduced sampling theory to the Census Bureau in 1940 and and statistical and management theory to post-war Japan. (Both Shewhart and Deming were originally physicists.)
Chebyshev's inequality is a theoretic basis which supports Shewhart and Deming's (Deming's mentor a Bell Labs) assertions about methods for detecting special cause variation from systemic variation. For any unimodal distribution, about 6/7 of the data will fall within three standard deviations: a normal distribution is not required! Donald Wheeler has also shown this empirically. (no quantum foam here.) You could start with a brief paper here: https://www.spcpress.com/pdf/DJW088.pdf
If I understood you, you made a claim that quality needed to be a random variable. But that really makes no sense to me. For almost any "statistically stable" system producing data, most of the data will fall within 3 std from the mean. A truly crappy post or truly brilliant post would have to fall outside that distribution and there are statistical methods for detecting this.
The quality of posts is essential a quality control problem. It cannot be really fixed by culling the purported bottom or purported top.
The aim seems to be to move the distribution toward higher quality, for the most part since it is highly likely that this is a stable system, this can only be down by changing the systemic causes of variation that produces posts. Culling is an attempt to act on special causes causes of variation but if those posts are not actually produced by special causes it will not help and could make the system worse.
OK well maybe you're unclear about what I said. What I said is that the quality of the comment would have to be *uncorrelated* with the author of the comment for your analogy to make any sense. You're still using it, you're assuming a single random variable controls the distribution of comments, id est you have just one distribution.
But that's not at all realistic. What you have instead is a distribution which is the resultant of the sum of individual distributions for the individual writers. The distribution of writers may well be itself normal or similar, and the individual distributions will also almost certainly be normal or similar, but the overall distribution, since it is the sum of the individual distributions, will be much wider.
Now since it's the writers who are banned or permitted, what happens when that occurs is that you entirely remove (or allow to remain) the individual distributions that are contributing to the (much wider) sum of distributions that describes all comments. Clearly if you remove distributions that have means below the mean of the sum, the sum distribution will shift right -- quality will be improved.
The only way this doesn't happen is more or less if the writers all have the same distribution, so that the sum distribution is just the individual distribution scaled. In that case removing writers doesn't change a thing.
But what *that* requires is that there be no correlation between writers and the quality of their writing, and this is what I suggested defies common sense. Some people write better than others, I suggest that is an observational fact. Even if better writers have wider distributions, as long as the means of the distributions differ, we can bump the mean of the sum to the right by removing the component individual distributions with lower means.
The implied claim seems like it will be pretty straightforward to test by comparing two Wednesdays.
Straight forward test? Really?
But as I type, by "implied claim", do you mean mine or Scott's?
Your implied claim that one cannot write a comment passing the 33% test at a rate better than chance.
We can just see if someone whose comments got deleted one week is more likely to have their comments deleted the next week, right?
A sample size of 1 or 2? Could one bad post indicative of the poster's competence? Doubtful. But who knows.
We are looking for some kind of signal detection mechanism.
Now, it might be possible to use ML to create a kind of spam filter but instead of spam it would be searching for either good or bad content in the eyes of our moderator.
Without actually offering to do this, it is not an overwhelming task for ML. It is the kind of thing that could be a project assignment in an undergrad ML class.
A problem COULD be that Scott maybe is not so good or consistent himself at making the judgement. It also COULD be that the consequence of the error of getting it wrong might not make things better but could makes things worse. What if posts are like improvisation where that objective crappy Grateful Dead meandering is worth the objective great show the following day?
Maybe the ML would just label posts - bad, meh, brilliant?
Of course, people might be attracted to the bad, like "mystery science theater 3000" or "how did this get made" (https://www.earwolf.com/show/how-did-this-get-made/).
Sample size of 1 or 2 for determining whether an individual author is more or less likely to post comments that are judged to be above the 33% mark. This is iffy and also seems like it's against the spirit of the experiment.
There's a far larger sample size if we want to know whether there is generally a correlation.
Even that isn't really going to work, if I understand what to are saying.
I think the "spam" detector model is the best possibly solution.
But I really am not confident that even that kind of ML could actually detect what we'd want it to detect brilliance and crap as opposed to 90% in the middle that the system produces.
There is only one way to find out.
I'm even less confident that Scott or anyone can distinguish between above or below the arbitrary 33% cut off.
I think you mean "Red Bead Experiment"
Yes!
Ha ha, I may have been think of the toast I was eating when I typed "Bread". Edited.
If writing comments was akin to coin flipping, I'd be a lot worse at coin flipping.
And for that matter, you may well end up selecting for a group of people able to control which side their coin land on.
As a kid, I used to be able to flip pre-Euro Deutsche Mark coins (can't quite recall if 1 or 2 Mark) so they would end up with the same side facing upwards as thry started at much better than chance.
You just have to get really consistent at the force you apply to the coin when you flip it, and catch it at the same height. The tolerance is high enough that it's not super difficult; I didn't really make a deliberate effort to learn it - I just noticed it was happening, and then tested my observation. I never tried with Euro coins.
Of course I used this to get suspiciously good results for damage etc playing the Pokémon trading card game, which had a frankly unreasonable amount of things that were determined by coin flips.
(It's also how I got enough coin-flipping routine to learn this.)
So yeah, you could definitely select for a "good at coin-flipping" club. I know that's not the point, but I think it's funny.
This is of course why the other guy is supposed to call it while it's in the air.
The thing is that, iirc, the Pokémon TCG rules specified what was to happen on which face of the coin.
Not the best rules, yes.
It is funny.
Didn't John von Neumann proposed a method for evaluating unfair coins.
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.
That was a good post. 30 words.
The necessary, true, kind is not a standard for high quality as I understand it. It is a standard for getting into the club.
Quality of posts, would be how well you dance once your in the club.
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.
I read it decades ago but found it an introduction to/inspiration for many other lines of interest.
Would it be annoying ton point out that I read it all the way through when I was 17?
A little bit. When I was 17 I was lucky if I could focus on one thing long enough to read a Spiderman comic. There were 17 year old girls around after all.
IIRC Hofsteader himself poked fun at the book’s doorstop heft in the later “Metamagical Themas.” Something like “If you managed to find your way through GEB…”
Is there anything there though? Has it created new fields of enquiry? Is it a recommended text in universities? Or just a man rambling.
I enjoyed, as much as I could understand, The Emperor’s New Mind which is very technical throughout, but standard physics and math.
Penrose in TENM has a very different take on consciousness than Hoffstadter.
I read GEB when it came out and then again have relooked at it over the decades. I just finished reading I am a Strange Loop. This might be a better starting place than GEB.
I'm keeping an open mind as to whether I'm keeping an open mind as to whether I'm keeping an open mind as to ... whether Hofstadter is a one trick pony that has become stuck on recursive metaphor as an alternative to algorithmic processes as the mechanism for consciousness.
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.
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.
I can tell you what William Faulkner, who wrote a lot of dense prose recommended.
When a reader said she had read a particular passage of his three times and still didn’t understand it his advice was ‘Read it again.”
His stuff was complicated in a much different way than Hoffsteader’s though.
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.
Your responses seem unduly hopeful, but within the bounds of reality. The other two predictions seem borderline delusional.
Conventional, ordinary wisdom at this point--not my wishful thinking--says the GOP is going to win huge, to the point that SNL is mocking the president by suggesting he really wants to switch candidates right now. "Huge" in this case means they're the ones likely to pick up 3-4 seats in the Senate and a substantial majority in the House, limited only by the fact that they did far better than expected two years ago and so have fewer seats to pick up.
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.
There's an enormous likelihood--not a 60% chance but closer to 90%--that the polls are understating GOP support.
I freely admit this could end up being wrong, but all I'm doing is repeating conventional wisdom--which should at least be, you know, acknowledged in the discussion?
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.
The idea that Dodd helped Dems is easily a month old, as is the notion that the GOP candidates were losing because they sucked. Walker has been leading in the polls since the debate and is up in RCP. Oz is as well. Laxalt looks pretty certain. Kelly and Hassan are only up by 1 which, assuming the usual skew, means that Kelly and Bolduc have a shot.
So your notion of conventional wisdom is about three months back.
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.
I don't "have the opinions" of any kind of believer. I think election predictions are a waste of time, and it's bizarre to me that people are interested enough in it to give both Nate Silver and Sean Trende a living.
I merely find it amusing that someone would be so delusional as to not even acknowledge conventional wisdom.
By the way, Nate Silver has the odds of Senate winning at over 50% and, as you say, Walker to win in what he considers the best forecast. And the reason he now includes "Republican" polls is because all the "neutral" polls were wildly off for several elections in a row.
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.
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.
On the other hand, Jon Rolston just predicted despite the polls that Laxalt would lose. He's usually solid.
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.
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.
Got yeh. And eventually pushes ideological conformity. Which is fine on Reddit (perhaps) with many sub reddits. .
It would be less labor intensive but going strictly by ‘likes’ tends to enforce group think. A prevailing group ethos develops and dissenters are ostracized. Well reasoned and respectful dissent is important.
With the ‘likes’ rating system commenters tailor their responses to what they think will get ‘likes’.
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.
Liz Cheney is a huge opportunist. She assumed that the GOP would overwhelmingly reject Trump after 1/6 and so jumped out in front of what she thought would be the crowd to get a leadership position.
What she didn't anticipate was Georgia. This is where a lot of other Republicans (McConnell and McCarthy both come to mind) got lucky. They weren't happy with Trump's actions and had started clearing their throat--but the Georgia runoffs also 1/6. A lot of conservative pundits blame Trump for the Georgia senate losses, but the politicians clearly saw it otherwise, because they all flipped to radio silence after that. What they heard, I think, was a lot of GOP voters saying something to the effect of "Fuck you if you turn on Trump and impeach him and make it radioactive for us to have ever supported him." They saw the Georgia GOP voters decision to stay home NOT as pundits see it, but rather as a warning. And so they shut up. I don't think they like Trump any more than Cheney does, but they realize the voters see the 1/6 riots as no worse than the insanity of the summer. (and not I use the word riots rather than insurrection.)
Cheney's not honorable. She's not sane. She's a hack and an opportunist who made the wrong call and is now making the best of the outcome she couldn't walk back.
As for the rest of your comments, oh, well. If your position is that most of America is insane one direction or another simply because you disapprove, I suggest another theory is in order.
> Cheney's not honorable. She's not sane. She's a hack and an opportunist who made the wrong call and is now making the best of the outcome she couldn't walk back.
Once again I have to remind myself that we are all so vey different.
I doubt we're that different. I'm not saying she objectively made a wrong call in opposing the 1/6 riots. I'm saying that, had she known how Republican voters felt, she would have done with McConnell and McCarthy did. Because she's an opportunist and a hack. Her mistake was thinking that listening to conservative pundits and assuming that voters felt the same way.
I think that we are all so very different because I’m one of the people that thinks she did it out regard for the constitution. Your read is entirely different.
What makes you certain that she is an opportunist rather than placing country above party?
I’m more disturbed that there are so many like Lindsey Graham that have no principles of their own. Going whichever way the wind blows and having no fixed values seems more opportunist to me.
Sometimes you just have to do what’s right and live with the consequences.
The first time her caucus tried to remove Cheney as leader this is Adam Kinzinger’s take:
“You look at the fact that Liz Cheney, one of the most conservative members of Congress, casts a vote of conscience after a frigging insurrection that killed a Capitol police officer under the name of our party, not Antifa. . . . Maybe you should blame President Trump—who, by the way, if we don’t say a word after this meeting, is the only voice speaking for us. I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m all for unity—but not unity under the Trump banner.”
I read it more like Kinzinger.
Or Republican Freshman from Michigan Pete Miejer:
“If Liz Cheney is the person who suffers the most for what happened on January 6, we’re in a dark, dark place.”
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.
> Efforts to overturn the 2020 election were pretty bad but they had virtually no institutional support.
That will probably change next Tuesday. The system worked last time in spite of Rudy Giuliani and company.
In 2022 over 300 Republicans are running that say the 2020 election was invalid. I expect some institutional support for fantasies as a result.
We still have the courts I guess. Hope sanity holds.
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"
I wonder if your claim that “the smarter you are the harder this is” isn’t causing people to doubt themselves?
Hey. Is this a psychological test!
😤
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!
Nobody could have said that. So liar.
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.)
The trick is probably psychological. The questioner is telling you that smart people find this harder than dumb people so off you go looking for caveats and hidden variables, including yourself.
> 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.
I’ve wondered why transhumanism is it right coded and transgenderism left coded?
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.
That’s agreeing with me that transgenderism is left coded though.
Yes, but I'm disagreeing that transhumanism is right-coded.
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 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.
Yeh I thought machine interface was hard done by. Good poster in general.
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
Does anyone else feel like it’s later than it is?
In the US, excluding Arizona.
Somehow my day went uninterrupted without anyone challenging my...time bubble...until around 5pm, when it was finally brought to my attention that DST had happened and I'd forgotten to adjust my analog watch. Had spent several hours until then being all "wow, the sun really does set a lot faster in winter", "sure feels like work's passing by quick today", "man the delivery truck is hella late", etc.
This is also exactly why I don't like digital watches - the hands of DST supremacy. (And also the face, I guess.) I want the change to be as jarring as possible, to force me to update on an unwelcome and unnatural adjustment. Glad that CA is at least now legally able to abolish DST if we ever want to. One step at a time!
I loathe daylight savings time more than the smell of vomit.
Given that most of my clocks adjus automatically, would it be better if the change happened as ten minutes a day for six days?
Most of my clocks don't. The one of my phone and the one on my computer do, but the ones that get me places on time (my alarm clock, my watch, my kitchen clock, and my car clock) all have to be manually adjusted. And if I had to manually adjust them every day for six days, I guarantee that five out of those six days I would be some degree of late to work.
If you are ten minutes late to work, would it be a big deal?
At my current job, it's a bad look but not a big deal. At previous jobs, it would be a huge deal. I had a job where it was in the employee handbook that it was a fireable offense to be late, at all, three times.
Preach. The only thing more irritating than Daylight Savings Time are the fools who want it year round.
I've been waking up at 5:00am for some stupid reason for the past two months. Today I woke up at 4:00am. Yeah, the new time schedule is going to suck until my brain adjusts.
It does take a while to adjust, doesn’t it.
> 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
You can decide not to believe in IQ, but then you're deciding not to believe in one of the only fields of study whose research *doesn't* suffer from a replication crisis.
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.
Yeah, that's...a bit overstated. And as Scott himself says, even if everything Dweck unconvincingly argues is true, it wouldn't disprove the fact that high cognitive ability is better than low. You can read Scott's take on Dweck here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growth-mindset-yet/
Kind of an open-ended question, but- does anyone respect 'exercise science' as being even halfway to a real scientific discipline at all? I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people coming from the actual hard sciences.
Originally I was going to ask a more specific exercise science question- how credible is the evidence that doing random exercises 'explosively' increases one's speed or explosiveness *at a totally different athletic maneuver*. Examples would include the idea that performing Olympic weightlifting exercises, like say a power clean, would then translate to increased speed and/or explosiveness in a completely unrelated movement- say, an American football tackle, high jump, or baseball or golf swing. The supposed idea is that doing one activity fast (power cleans) makes you faster at something unrelated (a golf swing).
Personally, this sounds like not just absolute pseudoscience, but is veering into sympathetic magic. Doing one thing fast makes you faster at something else- performing the rain dance makes it rain. But then I realized that this is basically a tenet of modern exercise science and has been for a couple of decades, which lead to the question 'is exercise 'science' a real science or can we completely ignore stuff that sounds like sympathetic magic'.
I mean, as Scott has noted previously, there's lots of studies 'proving' that homeopathy works too, but we can safely ignore them. Does anyone respect exercise science?
Edit to include: Pseudoscientific frauds within the exercise science industry, just in the last 20 years, include cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, and dry needling. All were promoted by some exercise 'scientist' or another- all are fake. You can see why this makes one skeptical of the field in general, no?
I seem to remember a look into this perhaps a decade ago, by an author/site that was legit, though I cannot recall where I read it. They looked at the "evolving consensus" on one topic -- I think it was weightlifting/rest, the optimum mix or rotation of weight sets vs recovery.
Most of the information was posts on several message boards for the powerlifting community. Apparently there were two or three schools of thought, each with their own proponents and detractors (mostly proponents, there wasn't much jeering.) Since I can't point to a source here, I will just quickly summarize from memory:
-- Very few people were academics or trained scientists, though several were very diligent and produced results with methodology that seemed rigorous.
-- In the exercise community, there is the obvious "Look what this did for me!!" proof of concept. It cuts both ways: If you are promoting your "system", you had better be winning bodybuilding competitions. But also those results are just one person.....
-- There were several people driving the discussion, which spanned maybe 5 years, or even ten.
-- The remarkable thing: Over time, people of different camps were open to new evidence and results, and several changed their minds. Consensus shifted over a decade to a new rest/lift cycling paradigm. (Of course, this may have become "dogma" by now.)
-- One was reminded many times that this question [maximizing workouts and building muscle] was not academic, it was of vital personal importance to everybody in the community. You might think the personal nature would make things acrimonius; on the contrary, the chance that a different idea might be better and beneficial was what was important, and new ideas would get a hearing and some 'trials".
Overall it was very heartening to read. A small example of "science" with evidence and questions to ask/test, and open results being shared and checked.
BRetty
PS -- I will put this down here. While writing this, I was struck by how similar and yet different this example was from the last several years, with Invermectin and other Covid treatments being viciously shouted down and attacked. violently repudiated. Of course, weightlifting is not like a [barely] dangerous virus, no lives were at stake.
But the language and personas of the people in the weightlifting debate struck me as exactly the kind of "trust me, I'm just an ordinary guy" appeal that makes Joe Rogan, for example, so popular. And it is also the polar opposite of the condescending, "Do not question authority!" messaging of the CDC FDA, the entire Covidocracy. That supercilious message is also the essence of Hillary Clinton's amazing anti-charisma. To me, it seems to form the essential identity of the Democratic party, all the way back to the "remarkably lifelike" Al Gore.
Saying people who disagree with you are deplorable, and stupid, and wicked, and congratulating yourselves that you are better, is a just a terrible way to ever persuade or lead.
BR
It's just absolutely astonishing that you took a discussion about exercise science and explosive weight lifting, and made it about Hillary Clinton and your fringe views on Covid. I can't tell if this is a parody or a joke or just sad, though I suspect it's the last one. It's just mind-blowing how much politics has broken some people's brains. Good luck,
I would say that:
-- Communicating scientific and medical research to the public has not only been one of the most important things in the entire physical/political world for the last three years, but is also of the essence of Scott's writing, and hence this comment section.
-- The CDC, FDA, and various governments have failed very badly, in many ways, at that task. (Scott Alexander has written several times about the structural problems at the FDA, and his personal anger and outrage at how difficult they are.)
-- I noted, and felt subjectively, that the way "scientific" and "medical" research was communicated and understood by this particular community, [exercise community] was different and notably better than the way official government communication about life-and-death matters have been, recently, and, it seems, always have been.
-- I wrote that, subjectively, the kind of negative and condescending tone I felt from the CDC, FDA, etc, all around COVID, were Very Bad, off-putting, and seemingly calculated to alienate and anger huge numbers of people. [Zvi M______, a friend of this blog, has been forced to write of little else for the last two years, alas.]
-- The connection to Democratic Party and their politicians is essential, and valid. Hillary Clinton lost an election to Donald Trump. That requires an incredible will to alienate and piss off ordinary people. The tone and tenor of the Democratic Party seems to be one with the icy condescention of the "experts" at the CDC, whom astonishingly still have jobs.
-- I take credit for calling out H.R.Clinton's "anti-charisma". However, the description of the "astonishingly lifelike" Al Gore must be credited to David Foster Wallace, who in 2000 absolutely savaged every single candidate running for president, in harsh terms too incredible to quote briefly.
-- I'm sorry if you took offense, my intention was not to stir the pot but to find a better way to talk to each other. It seems I did not succeed.
BR
I kinda liked BRetty's post and could see the point. There's scientific dispute, which requires common interest in some kind of progress and there's belief in authorities as a more or less useful heuristic. The cited examples don't matter too much to me.
I don't have much actual specific knowledge here, but I generally expect "exercise science" to be about as good as medicine generally - which is to say, established results are usually right but plenty of junk abounds.
My reasoning is very simple - humans are really difficult and expense do do good experiments on, resulting in lots of underpowered studies and statistical noise, but eh thing being studied is ultimately both testable and important to many people, so I expect all the large effects to hold up and the uncertainty to be about the (far more numerous) small ones.
Sure, I do, and I'm trained and work in the hardest of hard (empirical) sciences. Exercise science certainly suffers from its share of incompetents and fools, like any other science -- there are physicists who are complete clowns, in my opinion, but every time I ask for their PhD to be revoked in a secret meeting of The Brotherhood the chairman gavels me out of order <shrug>. But I'm pretty convinced that it has serious scientists, who do their best to figure out what really works and what doesn't, for grant money or publication fame, or just because it scratches their own curiosity bump.
But exercise science, like medicine and economics, suffers from the twin curses that (1) its subject matter (the human body) is very, very complex, and we are very, very far from having a complete understanding of its parts and principles of operations. We know far more about how the Sun works than the human biceps. (2) its results are of intense and immediate interest to large numbers of people. Hardly anybody gives a crap if the Higgs boson is real or a data analysis mistake, but there are 5 milliion who will leap on the idea that Supplement P builds muscle 2% faster than Workout Regime Q -- even if the data are marginal and noisy to the point of near worthlessness.
It's my impression this creates a tremendous amount of "woo," which is what I call it when shamans, hucksters, Internet pundits, college PR departments, and corporate ad agencies all conspire to trowel a layer of sciency sounding facts 'n' figures over some nostrum on which they can see making a nice profit. There's just no end to the human ability to figure out a way to run a slight scam to make a quick buck, and unfortunately anything to do with health or fitness is fertile ground for this. So you have to wade through a lot of "woo" and bullshittery and hucksterism in exercise science, like you do in economics or pop medicine, and unlike you would have to do in (say) the linguistics of Old English or chemical engineering.
I don’t think the exception taking to training exercises being generalizable makes a ton of sense. Take a random NBA player who has never played golf, and take me, who has also never played golf. Who do you expect to have a more powerful golf swing on their first try?
I’m also skeptical of lots of things in the field, but there’s an extremely intuitive reason why exercises would help: they allow you to overload the muscles beyond what the activity itself can provide.
"I don’t think the exception taking to training exercises being generalizable makes a ton of sense. Take a random NBA player who has never played golf, and take me, who has also never played golf. Who do you expect to have a more powerful golf swing on their first try?"
I can provide an (golf!) anecdote to support this. My son grew up playing baseball (little league on-wards). When he was about 12, he went golfing with a friend and the friend's father. It turned out that my son could drive a golf ball about as well as his friend, but also a bit further. His friend had been golfing with dad for a few years (and also his friend was playing little league baseball ...) and my son had never golfed, but the golf drive appears to have a lot in common with a baseball batting swing.
I'd assume that the scientific part of exercise science is training people for specific sports-- that's where the feedback and the money are.
This means a lot less would be known about exercise and people in general.
Wait, you're skeptical of exercise science because high performance in one motion is supposed to build high performance in another motion? I...don't think this is an accurate representation of exercise science.
I'm no expert but my understanding is that different athletic competitions have very, very different training regimens. Normal people train for general athleticism, which works because their baseline is so low, but very quickly people begin to train their bodies for very, very specific activities. Even at the casual level, your friend who runs marathons is going to be really bad at rock climbing and vice verse. Even without getting into high performance, they're using totally different muscle groups and have totally different nutritional requirements.
But ignoring "general fitness" type stuff, if you get into a specific sport like soccer or MMA or biking or tennis, there's a very specific set of training exercises that will be programmed out and you should do those and they generally work.
In general, I trust exercise science for certain things a lot more than other fields because, at the top level, there are regular competitions between top talents with tens of millions to billions of dollars on the line. That incentive structure is fantastic for generating real results because, if you think it's bunk, there are NFL/NBA/MLB/etc sports team who will provably pay you millions if you can do better.
If the incentive structure is so fantastic, why have athletes in all of those sports at various times recently used cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, and dry needling? Every one of which is junk science.
The incentive structure is not fantastic because studies on human biology are very complex, the mechanisms of action are poorly understood, and it's tough to say what's effective and what isn't. Hence, a field with tons of snake oil. You can't replace say KT tape (which half the athletes in the last few Olympics were visibly wearing) with 'the well-known treatment that magically makes you better at teh sports', because such a thing may not exist, or there may be no way to prove that it works better than crystal healing or what have you.
If the incentive structure were so fantastic, Tom Brady would not be advised by Alex Guerrero, an 'Argentine alternative medicine practitioner and alkaline diet advocate' who has been sued by the FTC, legally barred from ever again falsely presenting himself as a medical doctor, and 'sued twice for allegedly defrauding investors in his health product business enterprises of hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment funds'
Because that's normal? Because people experiment with things and most of those things fail and that's fine?
Like, I'm not sure what you're expecting. What scientific field gets, like, a 70% success rate on it's experiments? We try lots of different stuff, sometimes something works, we record it, test it, and if it keeps working, we use it. That's science, it has a really high failure rate if you look at every single experiment.
Does the "explosive" exercise involve the same muscles as the activity you're trying to get good at? This makes a big difference in how plausible it sounds.
I'm not sure of what the target of your ire is here, but since I work in a role that involves supporting a global top-20 academic exercise science department at times, I'll offer a mild defence of that field. If you're complaining about online pseudoscience, that's a different matter, as is perhaps the question of how easy it is to apply exercise science to yourself.
I doubt any actual exercise scientist would be so ignorant of human biology to expect improving expressiveness in one action to improve it in unrelated ones. Done properly exercise science is simply a subset of biological sciences and medicine, and includes pretty well the whole field of physiotherapy, since repairing and improving physical processes are inherently related. It is also demonstrably effective. It is, along with targeted psychology, the basis of sports science, which forms a large part of many successful sporting programmes. Three I would highlight from the early part of this century (and please excuse my UK-centric perspective): the dominance of cycling's premier events by Team Sky; the transformation of Arsenal into one of the two main competitors for the (English) Premier League; and the transformation of the British Olympic team into one of the five most successful (if we ignore the snowy sports). Each of these transformed existing paradigms around training, rehabilitation, diet etc on the basis of exercise science. If you care about improving sporting performance then you likely respect exercise science, and probably invest in it heavily.
"Kind of an open-ended question, but- does anyone respect 'exercise science' as being even halfway to a real scientific discipline at all? I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people coming from the actual hard sciences."
I think that it can be real because I think that the Soviet-bloc folks working with athletes knew what they were doing (aside from just handing out steroids). Does you random exercise physiologist know much that is real and non-trivial ... I dunno.
Bonus points for the same question but about nutrition as a scientific field
>Doing one thing fast makes you faster at something else- performing the rain dance makes it rain.
What? Doing one thing fast trains your muscles and central nervous system. A priori, there's every scientific reason in the world to think this would allow your muscles to work differently during other movement patterns that involve these muscles. Whether or not this is true is an empirical question.
What exactly is your problem here? If we take two groups, one trains in explosive movements and another in non-explosive movements for some number of weeks, and we measure their performance on some different explosive move before and after these weeks of training are completed and compare them.
What's inherently unscientific about this? As long as we have samples of sufficient quality and quantity and perform the standard statistical experimental design and hypothesis testing, why would this be less scientific than any other experiment?
"performing the rain dance makes it rain"
Do you actually understand basic statistical hypothesis testing? What you've said is basically a (faulty) fully general counterargument against all scientific experiments remotely resembling the one described above, even those in the "hard sciences". We test something, see if there's an effect, and use statistics to decide how likely the effect was caused by the parameter we are investigating. And if you disagree about the validity of hypothesis testing, then again, there is nothing specific to exercise science in that argument.
>As long as we have samples of sufficient quality and quantity and perform the standard statistical experimental design and hypothesis testing
My question is- is exercise science a real field that's really measuring these things, or is it just a bunch of p hacking and weak correlations? I don't think anyone's disputing that the overall field has historically had an absolutely enormous amount of frauds and charlatans- athletes have just in the last 20 years cycled through cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, dry needling, whatever the hell Tom Brady is promoting these days.... Literally every one is a fraud with zero scientific backing. You can see why this makes one a bit skeptical of the field, yes?
I'm assuming that I don't have to mention the utter nonsense that this the supplement industry. I'm assuming that I don't need to point out the rampant fraud in the diet industry. Or, the level of pseudoscience and quackery in really any field studying the human body (acupuncture, osteopathy, chiropracty, homeopathy, naturopathy, reiki, etc.) Or the low replicability of most medical treatments in use today.
> If we take two groups, one trains in explosive movements and another in non-explosive movements for some number of weeks, and we measure their performance
Sure. With an n=15, which is what's the norm for the exercise science field, half the time probably made up of untrained undergrads (i.e. because they're untrained they will achieve positive results from literally any exercise). Add in some p hacking and you can find whatever result you want!
It's OK to discuss if some fields are less rigorous and empirical than others
I’m not an exercise scientist but I’ve read a fair bit about it. To your specific question, a power clean is based on the posterior chain e.g hamstrings, glutes. Other explosive exercises also use the posterior chain, e.g. sprinting. A golf swing is maybe a little farther but has overlap with some of the same muscle groups. Does that help clarify?
I believe kinesiology has been one of the fastest growing majors at most universities in the past decade or two. That doesn’t tell me whether it’s real or not.
I'm currently offering services as a research assistant for $20/hr! Any literature review you want performed or general questions you have I will do my best to answer. CV and work samples available upon request!
Do you have any particular research skills? Technical/specialist background at all? Hourly minimums?
Halfway through a degree in Natural sciences, with a focus on cellular and molecular biology, a couple of summer research internships in molecular biology labs and I used to do contract work as a technical writer filling in RnD tax credit applications.
(Clarification, the degree is BSc Natural sciences, so I study some chemistry, some physics+math prereqs throughout the degree but with 50% of my classes being molbio)
1 hour minimum, and I charge by the half hour.
Repeating my comment from the jhana thread as it didn't get any replies:
Like several others, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
The news reports I have seen of the 150 or so crowd surge deaths in Korea suggest authorities haven't yet identified any trigger for the panic.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/01/1133039658/south-koreas-prime-minister-and-police-admit-failures-leading-to-halloween-trage
If there really wasn't one, then I suppose this crush and panic was a spontaneous phenomenon caused by general crowding, sort of like phantom traffic jams.
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/what-are-phantom-traffic-jams.html
Any other theories?
IIRC research has been done in mosh pits to discover the 'fluid dynamics' of crowds for the purpose of designing spaces to not be crush-prone. Like phantom traffic jams and sonic booms, I suspect it involves shock dynamics, where the particles are flowing and encountering an obstacle faster than information is travelling through the medium.
I'm glad the authorities seem more willing to admit mistakes and learn lessons here than they were following Hillsborough.
Yes. Crowd crushes can simply be caused by crowds of sufficiently high densities trying to move. They are not just a function of external factors like panics. See e.g. here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/01/how-do-crowd-crushes-happen-stampede-myth-what-happened-in-the-seoul-itaewon-halloween-crush.
This.
I attended New Years 2000 in Times Square. Immediately after New Years the crowds were exciting Times Square. The police had set up dump trucks blocking most of the side streets, with metal barricades closing off the rest. There was only room for 1 or two people at a time to exit through the gates on each side of the street, but thousands were all moving toward the gates at the same time.
Before I realized what was going to happen there was a cop standing on top of the dump truck yelling at people to stop, but it was already too late for those who could actually hear him. Very quickly the crowd became more dense and soon everyone was packed so tight no one could control their own movements.
I could not lift my arms, it was a single mass of humanity weighing many tons. We basically wavered this way and that like a blob of jelly. At 6’2” and 240 lbs I’m not easy to push around, but I had absolutely no control of where I moved.
My girlfriend was crushed in front of me and lifted off the ground, it was obvious that if she had fell she would have been crushed, not by panic, but by the pressure of tons of flesh pressing on everyone around us.
Thankfully shortly after the crush became irresistible people at the front managed to lift some of the metal fencing and toss it out of the way. The extra room to exit quickly relieved the pressure. As far as I know, no one was seriously injured.
I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to be tumbled in sizeable surf, sizeable rapids, and a small avalanche. They all felt quite comparable to a crushing crowd, pressure all around and no real control of where you are going or in what direction you will be oriented when you get there.
Wow. Thanks for sharing this description, it really conveys a sense of what it must be like, moreso than the videos do.
Right. When all are standing, the forces on the crowd are in equilibrium, but as soon as someone stumbles and falls, the sudden lack of pressure means others are pushed into the void. Plus, I know those alleys. In combination with the crowd dynamics, they slope downwards towards the main street and the subway exits there by the Hamilton Hotel. You can see how there would have been a horrible falling domino effect as those at the top of the alley fell, pushing over those below them on sloping ground without the room to correct their balance.
There are some very hard questions being raised with the police response as well. In papers here there have been articles where, if you read between the lines and know Korean culture, you can get a fairly damning picture of certain aspects of the response. The fallout has been marked by some fairly strange acts and statements by those in positions of authority and it's shaping up to being a major test of the new president, a man relatively inexperienced in matters of state.
I don’t think you could stumble and fall creating a void. Once the crowd is so dense you can no longer control your own movements, there is no space to fall into
Having been in such a crowd once, what I can imagine happening is that someone can step on you, pinning your foot or leg to the ground, the movement of the crowd could then drag you down. You are correct that the void you leave will be filled by the crowd, there would be no way to get up again, several people will unavoidably be standing on you.
I initially tried to hold ground and make space for my girlfriend. I could not. And even if I could magically resist the force of thousands of people, the rest of the people around us could not resist it and would fill any void I could make.
The analogy of the crowd being like water is very good, it will irresistibly fill any void. Put a spoon in a glass and pour in some water, even if the spoon does not move it is completely surrounded by water. Such a dense crowd is exactly like that. People are the water, trees, buildings and other items attached to the ground are the spoon.
So, if this can happen easily in crowds, why aren't mosh pits killing people left and right?
Healthy mental states from physical suffering. I was musing on it the other night, commuting home by bike in an early taste of winter, thinking about how, in a strange way, I am looking forward to the depths of winter. There's a strong NW wind that blows in off Siberia and China (I live in Korea) as part of a weather pattern that drops the temperature way below freezing, and I have a 25 km (15 miles) ride home into the teeth of it at times. I characterize it as being good for the soul--good for the metaphysical self I guess--and it's something David Goggins talks about often. Anyone else value the mental state that comes of suffering physically?
Suffering means, for me, something uncomfortable not under control. The uncomfortable part signals danger and, maybe, gain. Losing control is great if survived. Most of the time I opt for "quite uncomfortable but well controlled", like biking in the cold.
I don't know about suffering __in general__, but find dry cold/heat* delightfully bracing. Inside a walk-in freezer or walking in a desert: that's my happy place. There's a certain clarity of thought that springs from the conscious and unconscious being united in affirming, "I feel alive". (Which only comes up in adverse conditions, since otherwise things like homeostasis are rightfully taken for granite.) Suspect this is part of the mental model behind Wim Hof Method and icy showers to start the day.
Wounds sometimes also have this function? The stinging sharpness of a cut, for instance. A little hurt focuses the mind, while a lot is distracting. Easier to feel an embodied connection to one's vitality when it's so visibly exposed/challenged. (Seem to recall the kid's novel __White Fang__ having a passage along these lines...maybe that's where I picked up the mental model.)
*Humid cold is just as awful as humid heat. That just feels sluggish and painful...stultifying. Trigger for hibernation.
The so-called Marathion monks of Japan practiced such austerities to reach elevated spiritual states. The Buddha himself also did. But many teachers warned against austerities saying they just wore out the body and drained/degraded meditation practice- the opposite of ones goal. When I was a young man I was attracted to austerities, thinking them a shortcut to enlightenment. Not now.
Well, but it's not really suffering per se, which it might be if you lay on a bed of nails or just stood there and let the wind freeze you. You're riding your bike into the teeth of the wind, accomplishing your desires in the face of Nature's attempt to kill you. Defying the gods like this certainly does feel good, and people test themselves against Nature's worst all the time. For myself, I like climbing mountain peaks, and if I reach the top in shitty weather when everyone softer has turned back ha ha I feel like Apollo was my father.
You're exactly right, in that it's not suffering at all. I wear sufficient clothing to be just fine and I'm not actually trying to suffer, I mean, it's a commute to and from work, but really, it's a combination of transport, exercise and recreation. I'm trying to find the word I should have used and sort of coming up short? But you're totally correct, in that it's hard work, but you are prepared, you know you will be just fine and yeah, you get through it, no one else around, you are triumphant and it's like Piltzintecuhtli's your dad. I mean, you really just rode 30 kms in the wind, but it is a triumph. Really builds you up inside when you've been through a whole season of those rides, you carry your taiaha on the inside as someone once said.
I agree! About 16 years ago (when I was in my late fifties and still could) a friend and I ran all the way around Mt. Hood in Oregon in one day (early a.m. start at Timberline Lodge, running counter clockwise to make the Whitewater Glacier stream more doable). It was hard but no suffering involved and the feeling of achievement at the end was overwhelming, emotional and incredible. The memory of that day has never faded.
As a side note, my running partner was much the better runner and had to slow and stop often to let me catch up. She was a well known ultra runner in the Oregon community, having been the first to complete the annual Hood to Coast relay, SOLO! I couldn't have completed the circumambulation run without her.
Cold water swimming is gaining in popularity. Aside from the supposed health benefits there is a certain zen feeling that comes from the physical pain of cold. And the pain from the cold might release endorphins. For me very cold temperatures force me to live in the moment, and there is a distinct before and after to being very cold and then warming up.
There is a distinct before and after, I agree. I always have a balancing act of too warm or too cold on the bike. You have to start cold, so that by the time you warm up, you are not overheating. Then stopping becomes an issue, in deeply subzero weather that is, because you do not want to get too cold. Coffee outside on some of those mornings becomes a quick small cup or two before racing off to stay warm.
Even the raw physical pain itself can be enjoyable. Many people enjoy minor gum pain and perhaps similarly, many enjoyment eating very spicy, seemingly "burning" foods.
Of course, the cold can also have other effects, like helping you focus on something - like your own metaphysical musings themselves.
If you live in Korea your philosophy fits well with the Korean geist. As you know they very much value hardiness and endurance. The monks took great pride in wearing thin cotton work clothes even in winter. Hard to get drowsy in prolonged meditation sessions when you're at the verge of shivering.
The gray winter clothes are slightly thicker, but not by that much; they're certainly not padded. My favorite thing is their absolutely balling Nikes, though. "We seek enlightenment, but nothing says our feet need to be uncomfortable while doing so." The combo of gray clothes, shaved head and badassed big ol' Nikes is a Korean classic.
Well you get a padded quilted outer robe but the tough guys eschewed wearing them. The cotton work clothes were worn by most except during the monsoon season when some switched to hemp material, almost indecently transparent. I didn't see the Nikes, but I was there a long time ago and the monks were never allowed to wear leather shoes so they would travel wearing sneakers.
Oh, I just got it. Leather's an animal byproduct, sneakers are synthetic. That makes so much sense, considering the temple food philosophy etc.
And thinking about it, I think there are padded jackets. I should be better with this stuff, I used to live next to a temple.
Seoul city slicker, I warrant 🙂. Even the padded winter robes had a prestige ranking based on how beat up and patched and stuffing coming out they were. All my fellow monks had nice neat tidy ones. I was given the most beat up one in the monastery! But it was nice and toasty in the Arctic winter.
I've lived in a few places, but yeah, close to Seoul in the greater metropolitan area. It's funny, in that martial artists are the opposite. The older and more faded the outfit, the greater the prestige.
Yes, very much so. There's nothing like going for a run in a thunderstorm and taking a moment to let the cold wash over you. I think it's just good for neuroticism, immediate physical stimuli that draws attention away from whatever's happening in your head. I used this to teach myself to become a sexual masochist when I was 16.
Nothing says 'top' like a bolt of lightning.
Speaking as a recently warned poster, the moderation policy here is not based around what posters want or are OK with, but what Scott wants his own comment section to be. Fair enough.
There's a lot to be said for benevolent dictatorships in contexts like this one.
I feel as if what is acceptable for the left-of-center is not acceptable for the right-of center.
Liberal viewpoints are assumed to be 'norms'; conservative viewpoints are suspect. I know it's a sad old tale: my values have largely remained the same for six decades. They have become unfashionable and possibly dangerous.
Liberals insist they want to hear other points of view, but when we speak with half the frankness they're happy to use, they can't handle it. Scott's just responding to the new 'norms'.
There are definitely places like that online, lots of them. And you are right that the Overton window shifted, in many areas to the "progressive" side. I don't know what your values are, but something that is, or can be easily misconstrued as racist or sexist is definitely less tolerated now than it used to be. On the other hand, there are places and areas where discourse shifted to the "right".
Your comment was just "Gross." which is a perfect example of low-quality and high-temperature comment that Scott doesn't want here. Quite a few people got warnings and bans for similar infractions.
In absence of voting, how are people supposed to express dislike? If a comment that is disliked by 20 people always received 20 angry replies, this would become a horrible place.
So it might seem like Scott is randomly banning people no one actually disagrees with, but I think it is usually people familiar with this style of moderation exercising self-control and assuming that Scott will ban the author if things get sufficiently bad.
You can always see the comment that got someone banned. I assume that if people disagreed with Scott's judgment, they would write it. I probably would, if something seemed to me very unfair. Seeing no such comments is for me evidence that people are happy with moderation.
Specifically, I am pretty sure no one would get banned merely for asking politely why someone else was banned. Yet, people are usually not asking; and it's not because they are afraid to ask.
Do you need to express dislike of other comments? If you have something interesting to say in response to a comment then you can reply, if it's rule-breaking then you can report it. If it's bad in a boring way (ie isn't conducive to interesting further discussion) then I guess you just scroll past it.
If most people decide that a comment is bad in a boring way, and just scroll past it (which is a good thing), and later Scott bans the author, it may then seem like Scott's moderation policy is unrelated to what readers want to see (because it may seem like silence is consent, or at least indifference).
The confusion would not happen on a website with votes, where people would downvote a comment first, and then Scott would ban its author. There we would probably see that most banned comments were downvoted first.
This feels incorrect, or at the very least self-correcting over time. Why should the comments section be made up of people that don't want to follow Scott's and the community's posting policy?
I think the strongest point in favor of Retriever's point would be the sheer amount of time that MarxBro was not banned from this substack. A decently large portion of the commentariat pretty strongly hated marxbro, but Scott took a very long time to ban him, since marxbro usually managed to only be outright rude to Scott, and otherwise just pushed the line very hard. I think that if Scott was optimizing for "do commenters like this sort of comment" marxbro would've been banned very quickly, but instead he was not banned for a decent amount of time
Not a criticism. It's a deontological ethic instead of utilitarian. Moderation is intended to instill virtue rather than maximize happiness.
Fair enough, I did misinterpret the tone a bit. But I still challenge that perhaps a preponderance of readers and posters may indeed support the moderation policy currently in effect. And remaining here and reading/commenting is a tacit endorsement.
I'm new to substacks as such, where can I view rules for this blog?
I mean, I guess there are rules, as other people have pointed you to. If you go looking for rules for how to be part of productive conversations because you might be too close to being a dick, then it really may be that you’re too close to being a dick.
From https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-210
"Remember, ACX rules are that comments should be at least two of polite, relevant, and plausibly-true-according-to-me. This means I do not generally delete comments for being false (ie “misinformation”) unless they are also rude or irrelevant. However, I may also unprincipledly delete comments that bring shame and/or negative media attention upon this blog, depending on how much shame and negative media attention I’m up for that particular day. And I may occasionally delete comments I think are stupid and lowering the average level of debate."
As I recall this is not specified anywhere for new readers, and it would help to have rules in the 'about' section.
Historically, Scott has expected commenters to make a good-faith effort to make comments that are at least two of the following:
1. Kind.
2. Necessary.
3. True.
I suspect that "kind" is the most obvious, least controversial and enough to avoid issues with moderation on this blog, even if the other two are missing. Of course some people would insist that their harsh criticism of someone is them being "kind".
Of course, there's no objective definition for any of these terms (I mean, whether something is true is literally the very thing being debated in most arguments!).
But you can generally make arguments based on true facts to support either side.
I think usually "obviously true to most" subs in for true. most of the time, and has to: very few things are unquestionably true. So something like "the reason they are called 'amputee models' and not just 'models' is that people understand that non-identical beauty standards are likely to be in play here" is going to be necessary sometimes (when someone says "why did that article say 'amputee model'?") and true (since it's a different, smaller candidate) but probably misses kind (which would probably be "just not explaining" in this case).
I'm not sure as a general answer for Substance, but this blog is essentially a continuation of SlateStarCodex and you can find the comment policy of that here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
Short version, a comment must be at least two of "necessary", "true", and "kind".
Would like an outside perspective on this idea: I weight the upper bounds of what is possible for a super intelligence to achieve based on the Fermi Paradox. Looking for hole pokes, other than
Some examples below as to what conclusions /questions this leads me to.
If paper clip maximizers were possible and inevitable on an intergalactic scale wouldn’t I be able to see a large portion of the sky as paper clips? What could the paper clips of the things that I do see and why isn’t the universe homogenous?
This in general leads me to strongly fall into the camp of weak orthogonality. I think maybe you can build something able to simultaneously 1. Want 2. Achieve 3. Self Propagating enough to paper clip maximize your solar system but probably not you galaxy or your universe. My guess is that it would evolve itself out of the maximalist position fairly quickly on cosmic time scales.
Perhaps dark matter is just lots and lots of alien paperclips.
I have wondered that.
1) Maybe intelligent life is just rare enough that paperclippers are too far away for us to have seen them yet (because, for example, when the light we're seeing left the galaxies where they are, their creators hadn't evolved yet).
2) Maybe the first major thing any galactically-capable intelligence does is to artificially induce a transition to a lower-energy vacuum state, which spreads at a speed basically indistinguishable to light so you can't see it coming, instagibs anyone who's not prepared for it, and has the nice effect of making the other galaxies stick around longer for you to be able to get to them at slower-than-light speeds. The reason we're still around at all is quantum immortality, but we see a "natural" universe and a Fermi paradox because we're only around at all in branches where there's no major evidence of alien life to be seen.
Depends on the density. If the average number of paper clip maximizers is less than 1 per galaxy, the sky could readily contain billions of galaxies made of paperclips[1] and yet there might happen to be none in our galaxy.
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[1] We would not be able to tell the difference at several million or billion light years between a galaxy made of paperclips and the usual type.
I think that’s interesting because it limits what kinds of paper clips are interesting to build and also seems to imply some insurmountable travel limit.
>If paper clip maximizers were possible and inevitable on an intergalactic scale wouldn’t I be able to see a large portion of the sky as paper clips?
Well, it would have been a star maximizer, right?
Right. That is the type of question I sometimes ask myself. Like when there is a mysteriously empty spot in the field of galaxies much larger than it should be, is that natural or does it only appear natural because something did it a really long time ago?
This previous work of Scott seems relevant here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/fiction/2011-yvain-fermiparadox.html
I like this but I think I should have added a few more pieces to my thinking.
For this kind of thing to be true, there can’t be instantaneous travel or communication because then the agents could all know for sure if they were the strongest without first having to give away their position. So that restricts the field of play in that sense.
Also, just in general, I my intuition is that being able to reprioritize and restructure your values is at the core of the “general” in general intelligence. When you see a skyscraper or a space shuttle you can reduce the reason humans built those to the desire to have children. Except it’s “have children by a really long, circuitous route that is necessary because of intractable obstacles.”
depending on what anthropic principles you use and assumptions about speed of space colonization, you'll get different results.
See, for example, Robin Hanson's theory of grabby aliens. Any grabby alien civilization could very well be an AGI spreading across the universe. If an AGI was turning the universe into paperclips at near the speed of light, you wouldn't expect to see evidence of it until shortly before it reaches us.
Nothing currently more than about 16 billion light years away can ever reach us, even traveling at the speed of light, because of the expansion of the universe[1]. Since the universe we currently observe is already much bigger than this, we can conclude no alien species can conquer more than a small portion of the visible Universe no matter how fast it moves, unless it started almost literally at the Big Bang, and even then there is likely to be a huge amount of universe beyond its event horizon it cannot reach, which statistically speaking probably includes us.
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[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misconceptions-about-the-2005-03/
This is definitely interesting and I agree with the gist of it, but I would expect there to be a few glaring exceptions that make it obvious. Also, in this scenario are we assuming instant transformation/optimization of whatever the variable is that the AGI is trying to maximize such that it can travel and maximize at the same speed? To me that is where this things start to get really tricky because I would expect there to start to be significant signal that proceeds whatever agent is causing the change if those mismatch at all. And also selection pressures as mentioned previously for Von Neumann type scenarios.
"Lazarus(I assume he'll return)"
I see what you did there.
One interesting phenomenon right now with the midterms is that betting markets all seem to rate the Republicans much more highly than 538 does. (eg giving them about 70-80% chance of taking senate, vs 538 saying its a toss up).
Based on past performance I feel like there is a pretty high bar to saying that you are smarter than 538. So is this all dumb money? Or is there some good reason to think so? ("polls get it wrong" is insufficient since 538 already models the relative accuracy of pollsters and considers other factors)
The money is absolutely dumb money. Everyone sane who follows PI closely knows that. That doesn't mean they are wrong necessarily. But they aren't doing a principled and unbiased study of the data. There are just a tons of Trumper Pumpers with money to burn, for a variety of reasons.
Basically prediction markets and *especially* PI just assume the environment is +5 more for Republicans than it is. That is the reason behind basically every difference between PI and forecasters. If PI existed in 2012 they'd have been Romney poll unskewers and been dead wrong. As they were in 2018.
Prediction markets are more attractive to "red grey tribers" than any other demographic. The markets are tainted by the composition of the userbase.
I am in favor of "dumb money" hypothesis. Zvi Mowshovitz has noted that in the past, prediction markets repeatedly overestimated Republicans (here: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/weekly-roundup-3).
I would say that 538 thinks there will probably be a medium to high difference between "the polling averages" and the actual results, and prediction markets agree.
Prediction markets believe it will almost certainly be the Republicans who outperform polling if there is a medium to high difference, and 538 disagrees.
Interestingly if you look at the different models on 538 the pills only model has dems at 53% to win senate, the"classic" model (which incorporates fundamentals, incumbency, etc) has them slightly less favored, and the "deluxe" model (classic+expert opinion)* has republicans slightly more favored. (Though these are all close enough to 50/50 it's probably insignificant.) so 538 is assuming some degree of poll unreliability. But the betting markets seem to be expecting it to be massive. You'd need a correlated error of several points across all polls I think to get it into 70% range.
*(Personally I dislike the "deluxe" models approach, as expert opinion seems to just encourage herding, and be there for risk aversion. So I'd consider "classic" the real 538 prediction.)
In the past two presidential elections, there were correlated polling errors that led to the media in general including 538[1] overestimating Democratic chances. So people have learned that these kind of systematic errors are possible, and perhaps even expected.
The challenge with that position is that in 2018, 538 was spot on and if anything the polls were slanted towards Republicans. Also the markets were substantially wrong on Trump's chances to retain the presidency, both via lawsuits and more nefarious approaches, and lots of people around here managed to do well by fading the chance that Trump would stick around as president.
Fundamentally the basic problem is that polls can't get a good sample of voters due to systematic differences in who responds to polls on various platforms. So what they do is weight responses to try to correct for that. The problem is that there are many degrees of freedom in how they do that, and they are susceptible to some extent to groupthink, and so weighting errors can all be pointing in the same direction. 538's approach does a great job of correcting for idiosyncratic or pollster-specific errors, but has trouble with systematic errors.
My personal take is that probably Republican chances are a bit overestimated due to the pollsters overcorrecting (they all shifted rightward more or less at the same time a few weeks ago), but even ex post it's going to be really hard to tell what's going on, especially since we've been voting during a voter shift rightward.
[1] Actually in the 2016 election 538 was basically the only site that gave Trump a reasonable chance at all, so that should update us towards believing them over other sources. However the betting markets did better.
My assumption is that the "shy Tory" effect was especially strong for Trump due to the amount of hatred/shaming of Trump voters that was going on at the time.
I would expect it to return to historical norms for the mostly generic boring Republicans who are up for election this year.
My suspicion is that right now pollsters have more incentive to lean on the side of overestimating GOP votes, given the negative press around them underestimating them in the past. And the reputational consequences for overestimating and under estimating are asymmetrical. So I'd suspect an overcorrection is more likely than under correction.
"Polls don't catch GOP voters 'has become conventional wisdom to the point of cliché since 2016. So is probably overestimated in how people bet. Especially in the low information end. (The markets for individual races seem closertto 538 results than overall control bets, which would make sense if it's a question of information level).
There’s definitely big media vibe on the Republicans side right now, and people remember that 2016 and 2020 were both correlated misses on the Republican side, so I suspect a lot of people are betting on that. It’s definitely possible, but its also not out of the question that the miss will be on the other side this time, like in at least some of 2018.
https://interessant3.substack.com/
I write a newsletter where I post three things I find interesting, once a week.
I've decided to supplement NAD+ but am confused about Nicotinamide riboside and Liposomal NAD+.
Which is more effective and which is cheaper for its effect?
Does anyone have more insight into that?
Liposomal NAD+ comes in 750 mg pills (500 mg + 250 mg Trimethylglycine) for ~30 cents per pill.
Nicotinamide riboside comes in 300 mg pills for $1+ per pill.
(prices from amazon)
Sources I consulted for NAD+:
Reprogramming to recover youthful epigenetic information and restore vision: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4
But Why - We Can Reverse Aging: https://youtu.be/cY25i_bkUys
Book Review - Lifespan: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan)
Comment form the review: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan/comment/3835048
It depends on factors including (but not limited to) age, gut microbes and flux.
For a graphical representation of factors in NAD+ metabolism, see Figure 1 in this paper:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcp.2022.114946 "A systems-approach to NAD+ restoration". In short, if old, inhibit CD38 (extreme NAD/NMN consumer) with, for example, apigenin ($0.26 for 200mg).
NAD+ flux is greatest in the small intestine, pancreas, liver and kidney. Oral intake will hit the high flux areas. No one has any data on efficacy for getting NAD or precursors into cells, mitochondria or nucleus mostly because there isn't a way to measure it yet.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2018.03.018 "Quantitative Analysis of NAD Synthesis-Breakdown Flux" There's a section titled "Tracing the Fate of NR and NMN" which covers oral supplementation. In mice.
NAD+ has a circadian rhythm and influences the circadian cycle directly through BMAL1/Clock so keep any dosing at the beginning of the active interval (ZT12-16 so morning for humans).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.semcdb.2021.07.008 "Circadian NAD(P)(H) cycles in cell metabolism" Great summary graphic of NAD/H central position in metabolism, circadian rhythm and aging in Figure 3.
Anything taken by mouth is going to see some influence by microbes even with the relatively lower levels (10^4-10^6/ml) of microbes in the small intestines. NR, NAM, NMN, nicotinic acid (B3), nicotinamide or tryptophan are all going to get some microbial metabolism to the NAD+ cycle and contribute to host levels of NAD/H.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2020.02.001 "Bacteria Boost Mammalian Host NAD Metabolism by Engaging the Deamidated Biosynthesis Pathway"
Tyrptophan and grape seed extract (GSE) will do a very decent job of producing NAD+ and is very inexpensive (1000mg tryptophan $0.30 plus 500mg GSE $0.39)
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep24977 "Dietary proanthocyanidins boost hepatic NAD+ metabolism and SIRT1 expression and activity in a dose-dependent manner in healthy rats" Rats have some differences with humans in tryptophan metabolism so this one may not carry over the same way.
There may be value in using a little of all the different NAD precursors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9316858/ "NAD+ Precursors: A Questionable Redundancy" (2022) From the abstract: "Here, we discuss the possibility that the conservation of all of these biosynthetic pathways through evolution occurred because the different NAD+ precursors might serve specialized purposes."
There is a lot of hype and marketing. It's probably not useful to do NAD+ precursor supplementing if below ~35yo because of youthful homeostasis mechanisms. Supplements will get shunted to MeNAM (methylated NAM) which influences epigenetics through methylation and histone modifications. Probably not something necessary if it isn't broken. Aging will shift the homeostasis. Apparently, so far, no evidence of harm from youthful supplementation of NAD precursors... so far.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7277745/ "Possible Adverse Effects of High-Dose Nicotinamide: Mechanisms and Safety Assessment" (2020)
Thanks a lot for the very in depth answer! Do you want an ACX subscription for a month?
Thank you for the acknowledgment of value to you in my sharing the work I've been doing for myself wrt NAD+ precursors, pharmacokinetics, etc.
I'll take the "good feels" that would come from your donation of the subscription cost to your favorite EA charity, if that would work for you.
Do you have more analysis on supplements you can share? I'm trying out a few things but going on your post your research is of higher quality than mine.
Sorry for the delay... I just saw the reply notice when checking today's Open Thread.
I think this review article is an excellent way to think about supplements when the basics are under control. "Basics" being what you'd expect: sleep hygiene, sufficient "healthy" food, stress management, physical movement. The "basics" also assume getting out of toddlerhood healthy such that healthy structure and enzyme function was demonstrated and healthy intestinal development happened.
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_1583936/component/file_1583935/content "Regulatory crosstalk of the metabolic network" (2009)
I've stopped thinking about individual supplements having a single target (the right side of Figure 2 "specialized reporter"). I'm now considering that the health degradation that happens with aging comes from a diminution of network connector or global reporter molecules (the left side of Figure 2). The first six I think the network biology research area have identified are: NAD(H), ATP, SAM, alpha-ketoglutarate, FAD and Acetyl-CoA. See Figure 3 in this review for the example of NAD(H).
So, NAD(H) supplements as above, D-ribose -> ATP, SAMe -> SAM, OKG/AAKG/CaOKG -> alpha-ketoglutarate, 5-R-P -> FAD and Ca-Pyruvate -> Acetyl-CoA/CoA. Glucose -> pyruvate -> Acetyl-CoA/CoA but we all already eat too much glucose.
scholar.google search with "network metabolic genetic" is a fruitful search sequence. The idea of "network medicine" seems to be gaining some traction and it's about time. However, it's going to be hard to overcome the regulatory capture of "standard-of-care" medicine.
Your question is very broad and I've been doing biology research intensely for almost 10 years so pointing at the network nature of biology is probably the best summary I have. Mass transport would be the next area of attention so a search around the "Understanding Gastrointestinal Absorption-related Processes (UNGAP)" would be useful. UNGAP is in support of addressing pharmaceutical bioavailability but I'm sure you can see the corollary with food and supplements. Transporters (influx/efflux), diffusion, lymph, portal vein, etc. apply. The NAD papers above regarding microbes and flux applies to anything taken by mouth.
Thanks for another high quality reply.
After having read this post on discount rates yesterday I donated to Deworm the World:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JvEHiKWWwtvT3YanA/givewell-misuses-discount-rates
Great choice.
I'm not sure which is more effective (if any are) but they are different chemically. NAD+ has an extra adenosine on it. NAD+ will end up being hydrolyzed down to nicotinamide riboside, and then just nicotinamide: https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/113.2.412
Not very related but I might be doing some work this summer with Joseph Baur at UPenn on NAD metabolism and aging, so I'll let you know what I learn!
Hey Anna,
did you do research on it and what are the results / your current position?
Looking forward to it! I've put a reminder in my calendar.
Cribbing from Austin, I'd like to make a gentle plea for fellow feeling and maintaining good naturedness in this election week. There are only a few real bad guys just people with competing visions of the good. Let's reestablish community in this country!
How did that old Rationalist saying go..."Almost everything is broken, almost no one is evil".
It's still nice to dream about, at least in a Pascalian fashion. Always get kinda depressed when lefty friends work themselves into a towering rage over the "hateful" Others; sometimes I wanna just kinda pop the bubble and be like, hey, I dunno about those Others, but see someone right in front of me who's *definitely* consumed with hate right now. I guess this is why being genuinely ambivalent/dispassionate about politics has become framed as another insidious form of #privilege. (Righty friends I at least expect to get angry, so it's less dissonant.)
Hostility against neutrals is yet another innovation in the meme arms race.
Man, I long for people I disagree with but respect anyway. I can think of a few examples in electoral politics of the last 30 years where I heartily voted against the candidates I disagreed with, but where I could have seen plenty to respect and appreciate had they been elected. Do you honestly think that’s the name of the game today? I can’t speak to the dirty and dishonest tricks my team is up to these days— those aren’t very salient to me— but I can point to lots of ways that the guys I don’t like aren’t just embodying a different idea of the good but are in fact doing whatever they can to subvert any of the pluralistic ideals we all claim to hold.
Is unilaterally stepping back from an arms race a tenable strategy?
This particular space is usually a pretty good one to find people to heartily disagree with AND appreciate listening to. In the actual power competition, though, I perceive such significant — and immoral — threats to the body politic that politeness and respect seem woefully inadequate approaches.
I used to spend way too much time thinking about politics. I still do, but I used to do it even more.
Eventually I managed to convince myself of this: over the course of my life, roughly half the elections will be won by the idiots I oppose, and the other half will be won by the idiots I oppose less. This has been happening since before I was born, and will continue to happen after I'm dead, and it never seems to actually change my life much at all. Getting worked up about which party wins any particular election is a total waste of time and emotional energy.
I think your statement is true for regular people, but not true for politicians. Bryan Caplan argues that the vast majority of politicians are basically evil. They mostly act out in their own self-interests with little regard for what is best for the populace. Decisions politicians make have extreme consequences in the real world, including having major effects on people's lives, or even ending hundreds of thousands of lives in the case or wars or policy on some matters (disease, drugs, etc.).
Such consequential decisions demand extreme caution by politicians who are morally bound to investigate the consequences of their decisions extremely carefully. But they mostly don't do that.
For a discussion of Caplan's book, see here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2022/10/17/how-evil-are-politicians-this-book-says-very/.
You jerk, get your namby-pamby good feelings out of this blog! You're the problem!!!
(Scott, are sarcastic negative comments allowed? Asking for a friend.)
Sure they are. You just made one! Call me Doctor Pangloss if you must, but fluffy bunnies and rainbow unicorns are coming back, mark my words!
Heh. I’m in favor of staying good -natured too, but do not agree there only a few real bad guys
Well, maybe more than a few, but I can't count that high.
Let's take as an axiom that some people are more intelligent than others, with IQ acting as one proxy for that intelligence.
Here are two possible meanings of "more intelligent" I can think of:
Option A) Being more intelligent means that you just absorb stuff faster. These are the kids who are always bored in school, don't need as much time to pick up new ideas, etc. They are more likely to get more education credentials because as time goes on the pace of learning to earn a credential gets faster and faster, and they can keep up. There isn't a ceiling to how much someone can learn, it just might take a long time.
Option B) Being more intelligent means you have a higher ceiling for what you can learn. Everyone can learn addition and subtraction, most people can learn basic algebra, some people can learn calculus, a few people can learn engineering, and only a tiny minority can learn the standard model of particle physics. People learn more or less at the same speed, but some people have a much higher ceiling for what they can learn.
Now I think it's almost certainly a mix of the two. But I'm curious if there is any evidence for Option A vs Option B, and in the absence of evidence, do people think it's 50/50? 70/30 toward one side or the other? Is there another option I'm not thinking of? Etc.
From experience tutoring people (mostly math and programming), I lean towards option B. There are people who just get things as soon as they are explained, see the connections, quickly get a bird's eye view of the context and so on. There are also people you can show a bunch of easily connectable concepts and they'll struggle to do so.
I think part of it is trainable, as good mental habits and attitude, but the training takes place in early childhood and rewiring it takes multiple years. The rest might indeed be genetic potential.
I suspect B is real. I feel like I hit a wall in certain math and physics classes beyond which I could not pass. It seemed I just didn't understand it, and no amount of studying seemed to help clarify. Perhaps it was my study methods - I don't know. But I certainly heard other classmates explain how easy some of it was for them, and I was at a loss to understand why we were even looking at a problem in a certain way.
It’s probably real, but there’s another relevant variable too, which is how you react to not “getting” something in math. I used to get really obsessed
with math puzzles and just things
I didn’t understand in math. It had nothing to do with grades or competitiveness Not understanding just bugged me, like having something stick between my teeth! I remember rumenating for weeks in high school about how conic sections worked. For instance when you slice the cone on an angle you get an ellipse. But how come one end of the ellipse isn’t fatter than the other, given that it comes from lower down on the cone, where its circumference
Is greater?
Why not use the general intelligence factor? Why create an entirely new definition without reference to the more standard one?
Why not? Imho this is a more interesting tack than a tired iq discussions.
Is intelligence really about learning ability? I'd start by questioning that. I tend to favour something more like "ability to figure things out". That would include figuring out _what_ the teacher and/or text book is trying to convey, and sometimes even what strategy to pursue to attain better grades, but not be limited to academic pursuits.
Possibly related - number of factors the person can consider at the same time. Can they figure out complex things, that can't be broken down into a few independent components - or do their minds drop relevant detail, leading to persistent error.
I think at a high level, (B) is the main barrier. I used to think it was (A) because I had never personally run into a learning barrier, so assumed anyone could learn anything if they were taught carefully enough. However, I eventually got to a mathematical subject in college that was extremely difficult for me. I could do the homework problems, but it felt like I was manipulating meaningless symbols.
I think anyone can experience this to an extent by considering a sentence like 'I thought that he thought that I thought that he thought that I thought he was thinking'. It's hard to understand as a statement about what the speaker is experiencing rather than as a word game. To progress, you either need better abstraction capabilities or to be able to pick up heuristics about how to play word games. Neither of which can easily be taught.
I think B is mostly down to memory. At some point you hit a limit of how many things you can remember at once, and problems that require more parts than that are impossible.
(Part of the problem with that sentence is there's no clear difference between the second and third layer; thinking you think they're thinking at least informs us they think they're looking clever, but what does thinking you think they think you think they're thinking do differently?)
Interesting, that's certainly possible. With respect to the sentence, to be honest I'm not sure what the difference is, but there are lots of somewhat-analogous examples in math where you have to deal with several nested quantifiers. For instance, the Fields Medalist Peter Scholze describes here (https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2020/12/05/liquid-tensor-experiment/) that "In the end, one formulates Theorem 9.5 which can be proved by induction; it is a statement of the form \forall \exists \forall \exists \forall \exists, and there’s no messing around with the order of the quantifiers. It may well be the most logically involved statement I have ever proved. " So I think this sort of capability of mentally dealing with nesting might be one of the most valuable skills when doing (at least, parts of) higher mathematics.
I think this is the (a) wrong way of framing the question - intelligence is not a rigorously-defined term, and trying to make it one won't work.
Humans have a wide range of mental capabilities. Many of these are correlated, but not perfectly. intelligence is used to gesture broadly at aggregates of them, but does not refer to any specific one.
Your A) and B) are both recognisable abilities; they're correlated, but not perfectly; people who are good at either are more likely to be called intelligent, but trying to be more precise than that is building a castle on sand.
You have a point, but.... Maybe, what if there were a handful of recognizably characteristic types of "smarts?" We have the Big 5 personality traits as a useful approximation/aggregate of the subtle and virtually infinite range of emotions and drives within any given individual. Oversimplifying certainly lends itself to psuedo-scientific "what Harry Potter house are you" typecasting, so that's not desirable.
But it might sometimes be useful to classify peoples' intelligence in broad (but not unidimensional) terms along the lines of:
"Quick study: A+ / Big ideas: B- / Perspective: B+"
vs.
"Quick study: B / Big ideas: A+ / Perspective: A-"
I think it’s likely that the degree to which somebody has A is highly correlated with the degree to which somebody has B.
Yeah, I'd likewise distinguish "being a quick study" from "capable of grasping advanced concepts," with plenty of room for overlap. The former is more quick/clever/bright, while the latter tends toward the pensive/absent-minded professor type.
I'd suggest one more: an eye for the telling detail. So much of thought involves distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information. It's a bit like mental rotation of imagined objects: turning until one sees the most useful angle, or like the goal of "carving nature at the joints." This type is good at coming up with "insight porn," and it often overlaps with high social/emotional functioning (charisma).
As for relative percentages, I'd expect a lot of variation between individuals.
This is a fascinating question!
I have no idea what the answer is, but reasoning from first principles, "A not B" should be more common than "B not A." It's easy to imagine someone who grasps introductory material quickly, but then plateaus early. Conversely, it's hard to imagine someone who is slow to grasp new concepts but then can learn complex high-level topics.
There are also various domain specific talents - Ramanujan and math, Einstein and physics, various talented artists, etc. And of course, there are lots of further details - someone might have a talent at math that means they pick up the basics almost instantly, don't pick up the advanced stuff any faster, but have a much better 'skill ceiling', so to speak.
I also think an extremely important factor is enjoyment - that is, someone who enjoys learning math will find it much easier to get good at it than someone who finds it worse than pulling teeth, even if they have the same innate ability at it.
Also also, I think 'skill ceilings' should generally be understood more as a rate of diminishing returns. I think you could teach most people the standard model in it's full mathematical glory if you were willing to hire enough tutors and spend enough time and resources on it.
>There are also various domain specific talents
Intelligence is general. It's called the general intelligence factor. There is a very strong correlation between cognitive abilities in different domains. It's weaker for some than others, obviously this is the case for idiot savants, but in general they're not close to being independent abilities.
Caveat: not sure if this passes the threshold for a high-quality contribution (apologies if not, in which case I'm happy for this comment to be promptly deleted).
I've been working on a series of posts/essays concerning the question of whether large language models (LLMs) understand language, and how we'd even go about trying to adjudicate that question. I wanted to share a summary here because of the back-and-forth between Scott and Gary Marcus, which I think is quite relevant. My intended contribution to the debate is to try to clarify some of the different views and ultimately to connect this to our understanding of how humans understand language (I'm a psycholinguist by training).
Broadly, I think much of the debate can be boiled down to two opposing camps:
1) The “duck test” view holds that if a system (like a large language model) behaves as if it understands language, then it probably understands language.
2) The “axiomatic rejection” view holds that behavior alone is insufficient––that true language understanding requires some foundational property or mechanism, such as grounding, compositionality, or a situation model.
In this post (https://seantrott.substack.com/p/how-could-we-know-if-large-language), I come down more on the "duck tester" side. For one, I think that for a question to fall under the domain of scientific inquiry it should be something we can empirically test, which sort of makes me a duck tester by definition––it's just a question of getting the "right" tests. Further, the axiomatic rejection camp often makes somewhat under-specified claims, and it's amenable to a "moving the goalposts" problem.
All that being said, I think there are some merits to the axiomatic rejection view (which is sort of akin to an anti-functionalist account), and so in the remaining posts I'm planning to explore some of the axiomatic criteria people have referenced (e.g., Marcus references compositionality) as being necessary conditions for "True Understanding".
I'm curious to hear more about what people in this community think about the debate.
nostalgebraist has done a bunch of good posts on transformer-based LLMs specifically, including probing their understanding.
I also think people tend to underestimate the level of understanding of, in particular, GPT-like ARs. Some of them exceed human performance at next-token prediction, which means that some of their infelicities in sentence completion come from having to work on a small horizon, and encountering coincidences where the best couple of completions don't begin with the most frequent next token because a lot of low-probability completions all start out the same, thus leading the model to corner itself into bad completions. (I think this is a common source of the excessively repetitive completions, for example, because I think statistically it can always be the case that natural text would be likelier to break the repetition *after* the current token than *at* the current token even though it's overwhelmingly likely to break eventually.)
Related to your second point, there's some interesting work comparing how much LLMs copy their training data relative to humans: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09509
I've also done some work (with collaborators) showing that even with simple next-token prediction, GPT-3 does pretty well on the false belief task, a common measure of Theory of Mind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.01515
One mistake people repeatedly make is to judge the LLM by its ability to replicate the appearance of human agency under adversarial questioning. For example, if you ask an LLM an absurd question, it will generally respond as sensibly as it can as if the question was legitimate (unless explicitly prompted to display incredulity). A human will respond with some form of confusion or incredulity. People frequently use this as an example of LLM's lacking understanding since its response isn't what we expect from the perspective of an intelligent human agent. But the mistake is expecting a human-like response.
The difficulty in evaluating LLMs is that we have a hard time translating our intuitions from the context of human agents to the context of sentence completion. The function of understanding will look very different in the context of a system trained only to complete sentences. If we want a good answer to the question of whether LLMs understand, we need to do the conceptual work up front, we can't just rely on our behavioral intuitions.
For my part, I don't think "understanding" is a binary and LLMs are very far along the understanding gradient.
> If we want a good answer to the question of whether LLMs understand, we need to do the conceptual work up front, we can't just rely on our behavioral intuitions.
Yeah I agree with this as well, and I think your point about expecting a humanlike response in the face of nonsensical questions is a good one.
Also worth noting that humans often treat nonsensical input as if it's sensible. In psycholinguistics the notion of "good enough parsing" was developed to get at this idea. E.g., if I ask "How many animals of each kind did Moses bring onto the ark?", most people just say "2" without realizing the issue.
> For my part, I don't think "understanding" is a binary and LLMs are very far along the understanding gradient.
Agreed that it's not all-or-none (which is also a point I made in the blog post).
I'm in the field, work closely with LLMs, subscribe to your duck test view, and believe that LLMs don't really "understand" language very well at all right now.
They've improved immensely over the previous best tech for understanding language, and for the first time feel like we're getting close to human understanding. But it's still very easy to get them to make mistakes that no reasonably intelligent human would make. The returns to scale don't seem to be flattening out much yet, so they'll get better, but I think we're still at least one breakthrough away from exhibiting true understanding.
The great thing about LLMs is that they're so *useful*. We can improve tons of products, and create new ones, based on their power. So in that sense they're awesome.
What I think they are showing on some of the benchmarks/tests they've more or less solved is Goodharting -- the test isn't as good a measure of NLU or reasoning as we had hoped. That makes this sort of question very hard to test; we don't have a way to verify that our tests test for true understanding or intelligence or whatever, so when a system passes them, we just turn it into an argument about whether the test is valid. This has a long and glorious (?) history in AI, so in that sense it's nothing new.
But for now the answer is the same regardless of whether you buy Searle or not: by the duck test or the axiomatic rejection test, LLMs are not yet human-level understanders or reasoners.
> But for now the answer is the same regardless of whether you buy Searle or not: by the duck test or the axiomatic rejection test, LLMs are not yet human-level understanders or reasoners.
Yeah I think I basically agree. That is, I think observable behavior makes sense as an evaluation criterion, but I also think that the observable behavior LLMs exhibit right now are not at the level of human language understanding.
> What I think they are showing on some of the benchmarks/tests they've more or less solved is Goodharting -- the test isn't as good a measure of NLU or reasoning as we had hoped.
This is one of the main tensions I find too (and I'm conflicted about how I feel about it). So many benchmarks are susceptible to a kind of clever Hans effect. Yet goalpost-moving is also a real problem.
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A short video essay from historian Jon Meachum. (about 3 minutes) You tell me, TDS or earnest sober warming.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/lincolns-example-and-our-task-to-protect-democracy/#x
Neither?
This smells like bullshit and I mean that in the technical sense (1): something communicated without regard for truth or falsity. It clearly isn't TDS; TDS is frantic but it's also earnest. People, sometimes people we know personally, genuinely believe that Trump is a Russian asset who tried to personally lead a coup. You can hear real fear in their voice, real concern. Whatever TDS is, it is not insincere.
But this sounds so generic. The tone, the presentation, the word choice, it's all so formulaic, so PSA, so...not vulnerable. This sounds like a guy reading from a script; both literally and in terms of Democratic messaging, over stock images of Washington DC to save on cost. It's rote, generic.
This is not a man who has made any significant changes to his 401k or his lifestyle in general based on what he's saying.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
Somewhere in the middle I think. Certainly I think Meachum really believes what he is saying.
Had to look up the guy since I don't know who he is. Former speechwriter for Joe Biden, amongst other things. So yeah, hyperbole. Especially as he's got a new book out.
other things include a Pulitzer, official biographer of George H Walker Bush…
Anybody can get a Pulitzer these days, so that is less of an achievement than it might once have been. He seems to do a lot of presidential writing, so I'm not surprised he's selling his Lincoln book on the back of "Orange Man Bad" for this go-round.
For what value of these days? His Pulitzer was 2009 for American Lion, which was about Andrew Jackson. And was well regarded, IIRC. Also pretty decent, IMO.
What time is it in Ireland?
Can anyone here steelman the view that consciousness doesn't exist or that it is an illusion? It seemed immediately evident to me that there was a hard problem, and I currently would even be much more open to idealism or solipsism (even though both seem implausible to me) than to believing consciousness is illusory. However, it seems that many philosophers believe it might be an illusion, so I feel like I must be missing something.
I am a strange loop, Hoffstader (2007)
The best argument goes like this:
1. For a concept to be meaningful, it needs to cash out into some way that it changes the world or makes predictions about the world. Otherwise we can invent all kinds of ideas (ether, invisible pink unicorns, whatever) that don't lead to more understanding.
2. Whether or not someone is conscious doesn't seem to make any predictions about the world. (See the hard problem of consciousness.) I have no way to verify that you are conscious, just as you can't tell that I am. We could be behaving in the same way, including claiming consciousness, and be p-zombies.
3. (Not actually required but may help as an intuition pump.) There are tons of ways in which we are mistaken about our own experiences. You can think you're angry at someone but actually are tired or hungry. We are systematically mistaken about our perceptions (e.g. we think we see much more detail than we do, don't see blind spots as holes in vision, tiny focal area, etc), memories, motivations, and reasons for making a decision. Being mistaken about mental properties and subjective experiences is the default.
4. Consciousness isn't a meaningful concept because it doesn't predict or cause anything. It's therefore an illusion, and a plausible one because basically our entire sensorium and set of beliefs about ourselves and indeed the world are also illusory.
1. Treats consciousness as something to be discerned in others, which misses the central point, that one is aware of one's own consciousness becaus one is conscious.
As for 2, there is no evidence that consciousness is causally idle ,.or tha p zombies are possible.
Thanks for writing this out!
For (1), isn't this making some assumptions about what is meaningful? You could alternatively say (as idealists might say) that the only meaningful things are the facts that we experience or could experience, and consciousness is one of those facts, while science allows us to come up with other such facts.
For (3) and (4), usually when we claim something is an illusion, there is some truth that exists in its place. For instance, as you said, we might think we're angry but in reality it's hunger. We might see an oasis in the desert but in reality it's a mirage caused by refracted light rays, etc. What would be the 'true' thing which would replace the false idea of consciousness?
The true think would be, I suppose, the harsh fact that free will is not compatible with physics, that our neural networks have inputs that cause outputs but there's no magical way to generate something from nothing, no creativity that doesn't come from stimulus, and that experiences are merely sequenced firing of sets of neurons in response to firings of other neurons.
Or something, IDK I'm not a philosopher. :)
Fair enough! Thank you for steel-manning this point of view! I agree with everything you say in this comment. Free will being a (probable) illusion does make me a little more skeptical about saying it's obvious that consciousness isn't an illusion. Although I do think it's also possible that we will end up revising our laws of physics to accommodate consciousness. Plenty of food for thought...
I don't see how the p-zombie notion is anything other than a fully general argument against explanatory theories. How do you distinguish objects affected by gravity from g-zombies, which aren't *actually* affected by gravity, but happen to always move towards other objects in exactly the way that gravity *would* cause them to? How do you distinguish animals that evolved through natural selection from ns-zombies, which are immune to natural selection, but always have exactly the traits natural selection *would* select for? "Your theory is wrong, but everything still appears exactly as your theory predicts it should for no clear reason" is not a proposal that merits serious consideration.
>How do you distinguish objects affected by gravity from g-zombies,
P-zombies and analogues require that there is a conceptual distinction between two phenomena and a lack of bridging principles or arguments connecting the two concepts. For example, the morning star and the evening star are two conceptually distinct phenomena such that we can intelligibly imagine them having separate sources. But given a heliocentric model of the solar system and an explanatory framework that entails the identity of the morning and evening stars with the planet venus, it is unintelligible to accept this explanatory model and also imagine that the morning star doesn't exist or is something other than the planet venus.
On the other hand, it is intelligible to imagine an explanatory model for human behavior, including all the things we think and say about consciousness, without there being any consciousness in the system. This is because our physical theories lack an explanatory role for consciousness. The physical dynamics without consciousness can, in principle, provide a complete explanation for any possible set of behaviors imaginable for a person. That this "p-zombie" is conceivable highlights the limits of science to explain consciousness, at least given our current conceptual machinery and notions of explanation.
I absolutely don't find it conceivable that non-conscious people would spend so much of their time writing down arguments about p-zombies, unless they were chatbots written by conscious people instead of evolved creatures. Evolution produces a lot of weird tics, but not ones like that.
I agree that its far-fetched. But the point of the p-zombie argument isn't that we're possibly p-zombies, but that there is a conceptual gap between the typical explanations science offers and consciousness. The challenge of the p-zombie argument is that science seems ill-suited to bridging the conceptual gap between descriptions of behavior and consciousness. This suggests that we need something "more" to solve the problem of consciousness, either new conceptual tools or an expansion of what is considered proper science (e.g. fundamental consciousness).
It doesn't seem to say to me that science is ill-suited for anything. In the absence of other explanations, talking/writing about consciousness is evidence that consciousness exists and is part of the same causal circle of 'things' as the air we breathe and the paper we write on.
I think the difference is that, afaik, proponents of consciousness don't have a theory about how being conscious affects anything either.
(But note that I was steel manning. It's hard to argue hard for a position I don't hold!)
No not all believers in consciousness are epihenomenalists.
I think 2 is missing the point. The hard problem of consciousness is allowed to be agnostic about whether anyone but me is conscious or not. Whether everyone is conscious, or it's just me, the hard problem remains the same: how is it that I am having experiences? My own consciousness is impossible to deny.
“ There are tons of ways in which we are mistaken about our own experiences”
Who is the we here?
Humans.
What within humans is causing us to have these experiences in a way that, say, a rock can’t.
The only thing I can think of is that evidence that others are conscious are their behaviors such as saying I'm conscious, and these behaviors can be explained in terms of reductive materialist conceptions of behavior.
I feel like whatever attempt I take at steelmaning depends on what you mean by consciousness - can you please define it first so that others know what to explain?
I guess something like-- 'the first person experience of existence and of awareness of the external world'. I'm not sure whether this is the best definition, though.
The strongest i can steelman that view is that the continuation of consciousness is an illusion (i.e every night you die and a new person awakens, just every second instead). That is at least believable since the feeling of the continuation of consciousness is only backed by memories, and we understand they can be manipulated.
But consciousness itself not existing i can't understand. Maybe at certain abstraction levels you can say it doesn't exist (at the level of atoms, a rock doesn't exist it's just a collection of atoms, for example), but at some level consciousness seems very much to be real.
I could believe that continuity of consciousness is illusory. I actually do feel like a very different person in some respects than who I was several years ago, so this doesn't seem altogether implausible.
Totally agree with your second paragraph.
I asked thus question on a philosophy forum once.
If consciousness is an illusion who or what is is suffering the illusion?
Consciousness doesn't have to be a synonym for personal identity.p. In particular, qualia have nothing to do with personal identity.
Who or what is feeling qualia?
An illusionist is more likely to deny qualia than personal identity.
It escapes me how a person with (presumably) qualia could believe that qualia do not exist. Or what it could even mean for anything to be an illusion if qualia do not exist, as what is an illusion but a qualitative experience failing to reflect an external reality? I haven't found the attempts to steelman this position on this thread any more satisfying than the naive statement.
It's not obvious that you have qualia if you are a naive realist, IE you think you see things exactly as they are.
It's also not obvious if you think qualia are necessarily non-phyisical.
Exactly! This is what always confuses me.
Looking for practical advice:
For the last three nights, I've suffered from sleep maintenance insomnia.
It's reasonably easy and quick for me to fall asleep at first, but at any point from 1 to 4 hours after falling asleep I wake up and it takes me a *long* time (anywhere from 3.5 to 7 hours, very roughly guesstimated) to fall asleep again. Even when I do fall asleep again, my sleep is light and fitful, with many repeated awakenings. The next day, I feel horrifically exhausted and basically can't do anything productive.
I've struggled with insomnia before, but only for a day or two at most.
I've already started doing all the standard sleep-hygiene things (no caffeine late in the day, cool and quiet bedroom, turning off the lights and putting away electronic devices early, etc.). Maybe, in your experience, they take more than a few nights to start working?
I do think a significant part of the problem is a current medical issue that causes mild stomach pain. But it's mild enough that during the daytime I can easily ignore it, and in the past I could easily ignore it at night as well, sometimes with the aid of an Advil before bed. These last few days, though, it's been driving me crazy when I'm trying to sleep, even taking Advil every four hours overnight.
What do you do after waking up in the night?
For me, reading (on a backlit e-ink reader, if you don't want to wake your partner) is far superior to attempting to get back to sleep while tossing and turning, and ironically makes me fall asleep faster. It's one of those "don't think about the pink elephant" things.
The stomach issue really sounds like something you should check, especially given that some NSAID painkillers will give you stomach ulcers when overused.
If you're able to use tylenol/paracetamol/acetaminophen maybe try that instead? Advil will make you feel the stomach pain less but probably makes the pain itself worse.
That sounds like a worrying increase in stomach pain that should probably be taken seriously.
No expert, but I've heard elsewhere that two 4-hour sleeps are on par with one 8-hour sleep, so you could try that.
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/what-is-segmented-sleep
When you say that the stomach pain is a significant part of the problem, I doubt that anyone who doesn't share that particular symptom has comparable experiences. The standard sleep-hygiene things might just not work given the pain. That being said, what you describe is exactly what I experience when I try to go to sleep more than 2 hours before my usual bedtime, save for that it only takes 3 or 4 hours for me to get back to sleep, but there's nothing that might be disturbing my sleep otherwise. However, melatonin is a good reset button: it makes my sleep worse but I'll take 6 hours of bad sleep over 3 hours of good sleep. It might work for you, but your best bet is to try to address whatever is making your pain worse.
I’ve dealt with insomnia involving repeated awakenings and while it’s taken me less time to fall asleep again I can attest that my resulting wakefulness and energy was severely diminished.
This was also concurrent with an ulcer/acid reflux which made sleeping extremely unpleasant. Like yours, it was mild at first but escalated to gnawing, burning pain. I was prescribed antibiotics and PPI for the ulcer, but they gave me said insomnia as a rare side effect (along with horrific migraines).
I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but my sleep gradually got better after solving my stomach issues. And by solving I mean there were underlying issues beyond the initial ulcer/acid reflux; the ulcers and reflux were just the most visible and pressing symptoms, and insomnia persisted even after the acute pain resolved. I can only speak for myself but my sleep did not fully recover until my gut issues were addressed, thus I will weight my answer more towards gastrointestinal interventions than sleep interventions.
Unfortunately for me, there was no one silver bullet that fixed the issue, and it did not happen overnight, but here is everything I did. While my stomach symptoms sometimes recur after periods of unhealthy eating (such as vacations and other people’s parties) they and my sleep issues are largely in remission. Also note that while I hope this helps, this is not intended as substitute for diagnosis by medical gastrointestinal professional, nor is it a blanket rant against antibiotics/PPIs. Apologies in advance for typos and brevity bc mobile.
-DGL licorice, 1000-1500mg per day. Chewable tablets as it needs to interact with your saliva for gastro protective activity.
-Korean cabbage juice extract of the kind you get on amazon (I bought AllJeup). No, you are not drinking it for the taste. 2-3 packs daily when symptoms flare, 1 pack for maintenance.
-Gastricell (probiotic). 2-3 sachets when symptoms flare, 1 sachet for maintenance.
The above three reduced severity of symptoms and improved sleep about 40-70% after a couple of weeks, in conjunction with a more vegetable centric diet and regular (non vigorous) exercise, about 10000 steps per day. NSAIDs such as Advil were an absolute no no for me due to blocking prostaglandins which make mucus for the stomach lining and I pretty much always had horrific rebound symptoms after taking them.
What really cemented the recovery/remission on top of the above were the following:
-you may already be aware of these, but Andrew Huberman’s sleep toolkit, particularly the part about exposing self to natural sunlight regularly every morning, helped noticeably. Vitamin D supplementation (I took 1000-2000 iu, more is overkill) with a light therapy lamp is an imperfect but acceptable substitute.
-im not sure how well it works for general gastritis and nonspecific stomach issues, but regular zinc carnosine (75-150 mg per day) improved remission rate from 40-70% to 75-95% after about two weeks when used in conjunction with all the other stuff above. I found and used the book Ulcer Free by Georges Halpern MD (free on internet archive library) as a source for its safety and efficacy. Had I known about it sooner I’d probably have used it from the start. Anecdotally but frankly, it works better for me long term relieving pain than PPI/H2 blockers which have awful rebound effects.
-go to bed at the same time every night, not too late. If I stay up late just an hour I feel off the next morning even if I sleep in an hour for the same time. Two hours late and I might as well pull an all nighter. This is already on many sleep hygiene lists but was important enough for me to repeat.
TLDR: zinc carnosine, morning sun, regular bedtim, other gastroprotectants/diet change as necessary, NO MORE NSAIDS.
Again apologies for typos due to mobile. Best of luck to you and hope all goes well.
Forgot to mention this in the original post but CBT-I therapy can also be very effective. As Laurence said the sleep issues will probably not go away without cessation of the stomach issues, but a good CBTI therapist can work with you to provide advice and empathy on those (as an example, another thing contributing to my insomnia and another side effect of my antibiotics was severe bladder/pelvic irritation…like running to the bathroom every 15 minutes bad…and though I finally found relief through some massages and marshmallow tea, my therapist also had mega cystitis issues with her pregnancy and was able to provide really good advice and consolation on non-sleep issues as well.)
Time to see a doctor
> An especially common offense this time around was “low-content high-content comments”
Did you mean low-content high-conflict?
I'd love to see more experimentation with aggressive moderation (where stuff that's not strictly bad, just dull or low-quality, also gets deleted), it's a very underappreciated tool. In a high-volume comment section, free time becomes a participation filter; as free time tends to be inversely correlated with skill and experience, that's not great. Clearing out the low-value comments makes more space for high-value oned, in a way. (Of course it's very time consuming for the moderator.)
Old-timer forums used karma systems for that, it's sad that that's not very popular these days.
I agree with your 'high-conflict' characterization of comments with that received warnings, including my own (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party/comment/9904984). But, I think there's an unsolved problem. The problem is this:
1) Imagine some set of at least somewhat productive comments at a top level
2) Then imagine there's a low-quality branching, that invites higher-conflict comments
3) Eventually, someone calls a particularly awful comment
4) That call-out is (in and of itself) low content and high conflict, but in the context of the thread may be more meaningful. For example, a prior request for clarification was ignored, or rules of argument were repeatedly ignored.
5) the call-out receives a warning or ban, but the low-quality precipitates do not.
This invites a hazard of endless low-quality content that a) cannot be called out without extensive re-hashing of what's been said, and therefore b) appears to be high-quality because no one has the time to write extensively, over and over again, about why it is low-quality content.
I check the context for every comment I moderate, and I try pretty hard not to punish mild escalations of terrible threads. That is, if we rate comment badness on a score of 1 - 100, and my usual thread for banning is 50, if a thread goes 0 -> 10 -> 20 -> 30 -> 40 -> 50 then I'm much less likely to ban than 0 -> 50. There were a few cases where I punished both participants in a terrible thread.
Remember that my usual policy is that a comment has to be be 2/3 of true/kind/necessary. Some unkind comments will get through because they are both true and necessary. But these are both really subjective, and I agree that you are throwing yourself on the mercy of my subjective judgment if you write unkind things (which are usually more objective to judge).
Ah. I did not remember a necessary aspect.
Yes, sorry, I don't know how I keep getting this kind of thing wrong.
1. Substack could benefit from giving moderators the ability to highlight good comments, so I can read those first, like setting a threshold of +3 on Slashdot. I don't have time to read most of the comments otherwise. But I don't want a comment voting system to degenerate into reddit where people are just pandering to the ignorant masses to collect karma.
2-4. A lot of shitty comments are from newbies who don't know any better. It might help to link to something like the rules at r/themotte at the bottom of every open thread. There are also some shitty comments from people who do know better, but temporarily forgot or are being lazy or something. They might also benefit from the reminder.
8. shoutout to Oliver at Redwood Research who was my buddy at CFAR I in Prague last month.
My ideal moderation system is where I can upvote or downvote comments, nobody else can, and your overall lifetime score corresponds to the probability of your comment showing up on any given thread - maybe each user has a 50% chance of seeing it usually, but it could be 100% if your comments are always great, and 1% if they're always terrible.
This might lead to an okay experience for casual lurkers who just skim comment threads once in a while, but it sounds immensely frustrating for regulars who have (e.g.) 90% scores and are just trying to have conversations with each other and get their comments randomly dropped.
I hope this is not unkind but I actually laughed out loud.
You are seeking a precision which is not possible nor meaningful.
It is the problem with ranking.
This will be the 3rd post this thread where I mention Deming. Maybe it would be useful for you to review his The New Economic (1993).
I don't mind the idea of yourvranking comments and that changes the order they are presented to people but i want all of them to be visible even if they are at the bottom of the thread. You or any person might not like a comment, think it repetitive , etc., but others might find it interesting.
Is there a way to "gray out" comments as a way to make it clear you find them less compelling but still leaving them readable to those who are interested?
Do people know their own score? I think it would be wrong to let people comment thinking people would see their comment but actually no one does.
There is a bit in the series mythic quest where they have to deal with censorship/moderation. They don't to be against "free speech" but they don't want to allow pedos and nazis to be associated with product. So they secretly create a second game space where they put all of the people that are undesirable (banning without banning). I can't really remember what happened in the end.
I had a semi-similar idea that Substack should allow bloggers (substackers?) to assign custom badges and titles that appear only on their blog. So for example, you could give everyone who migrated over a SSC badge or a "SSC Refugee" title. You could also give people good commenter status or temporary ban status. The system already kind of does that, wouldn't be too hard to implement.
It also seems a pretty obvious feature in that it'd allow bloggers to give different badges based on subscriber level.
Based on some experience I had elsewhere, I don't like awards or badges or such systems.
I think if I were writing "how can I get the most people to like and upvote and award and badge me?" comments, that would be very different from how I write presently (mostly, blorking up the brain contents that resulted from stimulation of reading a post/other comments like a cat with a hairball).
Now, maybe I should be restricted to a litter tray and not be getting hairballs all over the floor here, and that's a fair judgement. But once a system of "pats on the head for being the goodest boi" is introduced, that is going to have a definite impact on how people write, what they write, and how they slant it.
I don't mind a Reign of Terror. I do mind a Reign of Sugarplums, because they end up being worse for the health.
You misunderstand, I think. I'm not suggesting a reddit like system. Such things would be at Scott's sole discretion.
I think that still would be open to "writing to please Scott/catch Scott's eye" and moulding opinions and style accordingly.
But if The People want a system of ups and downs, who am I to stand in their way? I definitely won't be getting the sugarplums, anyhow! 😁
As a programmer I think it would only take 1-2 programmer days to implement that moderation system (but possibly an extra order of magnitude if the technical debt is bad or the programmer is bad).
Substack's revenue from you is probably more than a programmer's annual salary, so it seems reasonable to ask for that moderation system.
How likely is this to ever happen? (As in: your ideal moderation system realized)
Unlikely: I don't think Substack wants to spend the programmer time it would take to try this, especially since I might decide that I hate it a week in. Maybe one day they will add user plugins like WordPress used to have, and I will beg/pay one of you to implement it.
Do they ever solicit feedback from you as an influential voice? Can’t imagine they don’t have a scrum team with a backlog to make small enhancements like this.
Yes but this doesn't seem like a "small" enhancement. My guess is I have enough political capital with them to request maybe one thing like this per few years, and I want to save it for something else.
Have a sense that the utility of replying to this may be fairly low because there’s lots here I’m assuming but just in case:
Fair point on the conservation of political capital. That would trump any of the below.
The specific reasons I think your ask here might be relatively low effort is because substack already seems to maintain permissions to comment and like comments based on subscriber/not subscriber so adding in owner in there as an option seems achievable and I would guess those fields probably exist somewhere on the same table since you can see the author swag in the comment itself.
As to the ranking piece for order and historical ranking, if you just did a very simple rule of comment creator who has the most author likes in their activity history popping to top followed by runner up and so on and so forth that doesn’t seem too hard. Again granted, I don’t know how well activity history and ranking are integrated so this is the one I’d guess would be slightly more difficult, but again it might not be since they do seem to keep an activity history and you can see number of likes and things on a comment itself.
But most importantly you still might hate it after a week.
Does anyone know where I can find datasets on weather forecasts and outcomes? For example, a dataset on forecast rain probability each day and then the corresponding outcome of whether or not it actually rained?
I'm working on a project to report forecast performance metrics for as many possible datasets as I can, including the ones usually discussed on ACX like election predictions (538, PredictIt, etc), as well as other kinds of forecasts like sports betting and weather. So far finding a good weather dataset with outcomes has actually been kinda hard.
I can't point you to any datasets, but I remember reading in Nate Silver's book that weather forecasters intentionally overstate the chances of precipitation because if they say it will probably rain and it doesn't, people will be happy. But if they say it probably won't rain and it does, people will be pissed off. I can't confirm the veracity of that, but it seems plausible.
The main models do their own verifications as far as I know. Here’s a paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299350734_Weather_Forecast_Verification_of_the_Global_Forecast_System_GFS_model_for_the_Ceara_State
There is a British forum called netweather full of relatively friendly weather nerds ( just don’t hate on snow). It’s got a forum where you can search or ask that question.
Thanks! I'll check it out.
A similar forum for US: https://www.americanwx.com/bb/
I'd like to encourage people not to use the word "meritocracy", and not to fall into the ways of thinking it implies.
Scott uses the word to mean "selecting applicants for competed-for, desirable jobs based solely on how well they'll do them". And I think that's a good thing, and find his arguments for it compelling, but I think that referring to that as "merit" is both misguided and offensive.
It's absolutely true that, all else being equal, if you work harder you'll do better than if you work less hard. But it's also true that, with the same level of effort, someone with rich, educated, supportive parents and genes conducive to academic study will acquire far more ability, and do far, /far/ better, than someone less lucky but equally hard-working.
And while I think it's defensible to use a word like "merit", with its strong connotations of virtue and moral worth, not just of ability, to refer to "hard work", it clearly shouldn't be used to refer to those forms of luck.
If you want a genuine "merit"ocracy, you should be doing.. not the opposite of, quite, but something orthogonal to, the thing we call "meritocracy" - doing your best to give out jobs based not on achievement but on effort. That would unquestionably be fairer, but the cost in terms of everything worse would be far too high.
Hiring lazy people with upbringings and genes that let them turn effort into accomplishment efficiently in preference to harder-working but less able people is clearly the right thing to do - it's unfair, but a) it benefits a lot of people a lot, and b) "hire the person who will do the job best" is a useful Schelling point that avoids squabbles about how the handicapping system should work. But pretending that it's fair, or that you're hiring based on "merit", is unnecessarily adding insult to injury.
"Abilitocracy" is obviously an ugly word, and no-one will understand what you mean if you use it. But try "hiring based solely on ability"? Or, if you must use "meritocracy", please add a caveat pointing out that you recognise and explicitly reject the connotations and subtext of what you're saying.
1. "Selecting applicants for competed-for, desirable jobs based solely on how well they'll do them" is not something anyone meaningfully disagrees with. It's also not an actionable standard unless you can literally see the future.
2. "Meritocracy", as originally defined, is pretty much synonymous with "credentialism", i.e. Goodhart's law as applied to signaling of merit/ability/whathaveyou. Credentialism being bad is not a controversial position either, including among proponents of meritocracy (Scott being among them, I believe).
3. Whatever actual scope of disagreement exists is about a concept of meritocracy that lies somewhere between those two extremes. That concept would indeed probably benefit from being called something else than "meritocracy". (But I think at this point people are aware of the potential semantic mismatch and can just take precautions to avoid it.)
4. It's probably still wrong, however, because "is most qualified/able to do the best job" and "will actually do the best job" are not the same. My go-to example: superhuman paperclip maximizer AGI. It's better qualified to do a better job than any human. It just won't, and will optimize for paperclips instead.
Also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/14/addendum-to-targeting-meritocracy/
1. Most university admissions are extremely far from being optimized for selecting the students who will perform best in their chosen studies. Ceteris paribus an Asian needs >300 more SAT points than a black to get into the same school, and this creates a predictable huge disparity in post-admission outcomes.
2. Credentials are more confounded by class than test scores. Compared to the present, the original meritocracy was more about test scores. The shift to credentialism happened because of the disparate impact doctrine making it harder to use test scores.
My understanding is, this is not a change of meaning as it was originally conceived, but of worsening historical circumstances. As in, the people using meritocracy as a pejorative have always seen it as a tool of enforcing class barriers. Since there was no elite overproduction back then, the barriers used to be fairer and more welcoming to commoners willing to join, but it's a difference of degree, not kind, and the framing makes the change perfectly natural and expected.
This is not to argue against differentiating between the two. It's to point out that much of the "how can people possibly oppose meritocracy?" genre could avoid ending up in strawman territory by realizing that said people operare within a framework that does not diferentiate between them.
Meritocracy was originally seen as exactly the opposite of a tool for enforcing class barriers. Any lower class kid who did well enough on a test could go to a fancy school and get a fancy job. Before that you needed connections and class markers instead of test scores. Now you need extracurriculars and essays instead of test scores. The current US approach to college admissions seems way more class-loaded than using test scores alone. Extracurriculars cost time and money that a kid doesn't have if they're working part time to help their mom pay rent. Essays are way more susceptible to paid help than test scores.
Now some misguided people see the use of test scores as a tool for enforcing class barriers. But there isn't any inexpensive alternative to testing that's less class-correlated while having as good predictive validity for school/job performance. "test scores correlate with class because partly because innate ability correlates with class" is a tough pill to swallow for many on the left. They blame it all on preparation instead. Would be nice to see an RCT of some expensive SAT prep program's effect on test scores. Personally I improved my original score of 720M/640V to 790/800 using only self study with a few cheap books that I got from amazon (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1438000324/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) but could have gotten for free from a library or as a handmedown from an older friend. I doubt having an expensive human coach shouting at me during that process would have added anything.
I thought meritocracy (at least originally?) meant using tests to determine who gets the good jobs.
The problem is that there's direct-to-mind signal of who will be good at a job, even assuming such a signal is wanted.
Tests are, by definition, not the job itself, they're a hopefully useful shortcut. Tests can be biased or faked or examining a feature which isn't actually relevant.
Subjective approaches have a large risk of selecting for cultural markers more strongly than tests do.
I'm not saying people should drop "meritocracy", but it would be good if they say what they mean by it.
Not only this, but the term was first coined as a pejorative, "simply the centuries-old class system in sheep's clothing."
https://web.archive.org/web/20221022065858/https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/25/world/michael-young-86-scholar-coined-mocked-meritocracy.html
I'm with you here. I found W E Deming's insights into understanding variation and statistical thinking to be very useful. The New Economics (1993) is very accessible, even if I first came to his thoughts reading out of the crisis in the 80s.
There is so much life where a red bead experiment is passing itself off as meritocracy.
It is not only the measurement problem but it is the meaningful distinction problem and the disregard for systemic influences on outcomes.
I submit for your consideration 'symptocracy' - rule/privilege/preference accorded to those for whom effort, ability, and luck coincided to maximise the results.
This smells to me like the term "merit" has changed its common meaning since it was incorporated into the compound term meritocracy, where it was all about giving poor-but-talented boys a chance at the things that were automatically given to the children of the upper classes.
On the one hand, this was about giving them more schooling than boys of their class normally got; on the other hand, it was about promotion based on ability, rather than whether the candidate was the "right sort" (Eton, Oxbridge, etc.)
And yes, I believe (without checking) that the term is old enough that my gendered terminology is entirely appropriate. Also that the sense of the term I got from non-recent authors I happened to read is correct for their time. I could of course be wrong about either or both.
Also note that "aristocracy" means "rule of the best".
All that is meant by merit is how good a person is at a particualr job/task. It's not some moral claim about whether they "deserve" to have a job based on how hard they work. That would be a particularly useless definition.
Who should be hired for a position? The person who is extremely hard working? Or someone smarter who is more effective at their job without needing to work as hard? Hiring the latter person would be hiring based on merit because that person is literally better suited for the position. THAT'S what makes a successful society, having effective people in the positions they are best suited for, not rewarding dummies for trying.
And by the way, do you not understand how flawed your conception of merit is? How 'hard working' somebody is subject to all of the genetic and environmental influences that e.g. intelligence is! Conscientiousness is literally a (partially) heritable trait! It's also obviously effected by environment. You seem to conceptualize it as something that is external to the law of physics and arises through sheer force of will. It's more malleable than intelligence, but the idea that how hard working somebody is is independent of the chance cirumstances of their life is rudimentarily wrong.
>Or, if you must use "meritocracy", please add a caveat pointing out that you recognise and explicitly reject the connotations and subtext of what you're saying.
You're the one applying those connotations. You should be the one to deal with it.
We either hire somebody who is most suited for the role based on their ability, or we hire on some other factor. The former is meritocracy, the latter is something else. Period.
I would only accept this if I saw people advancing the same argument when conservatives and libertarians argue, as they often do, that redistributive taxation is unfair because it's taking money away from people who have earned it and giving it to those who don't.
Since those arguments are common and often go unchallenged, I conclude that those people are - at least when it's convenient for them - using merit in precisely the sense you say they aren't.
And as far as I can see, the best way to attack that bailey is to go after the motte.
>I would only accept this if I saw people advancing the same argument when conservatives and libertarians argue, as they often do, that redistributive taxation is unfair because it's taking money away from people who have earned it and giving it to those who don't.
Seems like a non-sequitur to me, but vOv. Redistributive taxation is unfair because, ceteris paribus, it selects against one speficic time-preference (making money) against all others (and it's evil in addition to unfaire, because it selects against a time preference that benefits others, instead of oneself).
Consider A and B. They're the same persons, but A spends his week-ends working a side-job. A will have a higher income, but B will have more free time. Why redistribute A's additional income (which comes from being useful to someone else), but not B's free time & leisure?
"But what about extreme income disparities? Abstract identical persons don't adress the fact that billionaires makes absurd level of money", one will ask. Which drives back to Edwardoo's argument: their superior usefulness, not harder works, enables that. Not some inherent moral virtue.
There are two arguments here, and I hope to not motte/bailey this, but I think it's necessary to understand.
There are definitely people who try to make this a moral argument, on both sides. Instead, it's a matter of effectiveness. If you reward people for doing what society wants/needs them to do, they will continue doing it. If you take away the reward, it will be less successful or potentially even fail.
Let's use a generic common example: doctors. Doctors are generally very smart and quite capable. In order to become a doctor there are many years of hard work and grueling schedules. Society generally pays doctors very well, to compensate them for the unusually hard process of becoming and being a doctor.
Now, we could take away the wealth of doctors, and could use that money for good causes. What would happen very shortly after that is that people who would otherwise become doctors decide to do something else that requires far less effort and time. Existing doctors may decide to retire or switch to something more lucrative, if they are able. This will result in a net of far less doctors, which pretty much everyone agrees would be bad.
Redistributive taxes is one way that you can take away the rewards society gives to people in a way that makes it less likely they will do whatever it is that we want them to continue doing. Higher taxes affects people on the margins, and maybe slightly higher taxes would affect too few people to matter, or that the net benefits outweigh the costs, but these are not a given in any particular situation. When someone is making the argument that "redistributive taxation is unfair because it's taking money away from people who have earned it and giving it to those who don't" they are signaling that the proposed tax increase is enough to change at least some people's calculation about whether it's worth continuing to be effective at something society values.
If we don't want someone to do something (cigarettes, thievery) we tax it or criminalize it. If we want people to do something, we need to incentivize it. We can't forget about this basic tenet of society when we're trying to solve other issues (like poverty, which should still be addressed).
When talking about rewarding people with money, most commentators seem to ignore the logarithmic utility of money for humans. If we want to take a "flat tax" in terms of experienced motivation, or even a somewhat regressive one, our tax rate in dollar percentages should still have an asymptote at 100% on the high end. ("Flat" would be keeping a fixed, <1 power of your income, modulo lower-order terms.)
That said, probably paying off investments like student loans should be completely tax-deductible.
Hiring the useless saint is unfair to the customers who expect you to provide them a good product for a good price. Hiring the efficient devil is unfair to the useless saint. Unfairness is inevitable either way. But fairness is not a very useful frame here. Better to think about what the consequences would be of universalizing the rule of hiring people according to alleged moral worth instead of productivity. The USSR tried that (in terms of giving party loyalists and proletarians the good jobs) and it was a disaster.
I think you're defending the thing, when I'm challenging the word, and your defence doesn't work as a defence of the word.
I'm entirely happy with the idea that fairness/unfairness isn't a useful frame here - that's essentially the thrust of my post! - but what I'm saying is that the word "meritocracy" smuggles in a claim of fairness, and should be rejected on that ground.
I'm only challenging this part of your post:
"If you want a genuine "merit"ocracy, you should be doing.. not the opposite of, quite, but something orthogonal to, the thing we call "meritocracy" - doing your best to give out jobs based not on achievement but on effort. That would unquestionably be fairer"
I don't agree that it would be fairer to hire the hard-working incompetent person, if your conception of fairness is expansive enough to include the effects on customers etc.
But also I kind of got sidetracked mid-paragraph into defending meritocracy the thing.
Fairness is an annoyingly ill-defined word too.
Another problem with "hard-working" is that you can end up incentivizing people to wreck themselves to prove they're hard-working, while not actually doing better at the work. At some point of exhaustion, a person can actually be doing worse work.
Or the appearance of hard work, which can take on many forms. Being in the office 80+ hours a week or never taking a vacation day, even if you aren't doing anything productive, can appear to be productive.
Much better to measure results, rather than Goodhearting the inputs to those results.
This argument seems to hinge on "merit" meaning something like hard-working and virtuous, but I'm not sure that's the case in this context.
Consider the sentence, "we'll judge your argument on its own merits". It just means we'll judge argument by how good of an argument it is.
Similarly, "we judge applicants on their merits" just implies you're judging applicants by how good they would be for that job.
I guess if you support meritocracy, you feel the people who get jobs by merit "deserve" it in some sense. But this seems kind of unavoidable. If you support abilitocracy, you're saying we should give jobs to people with ability for the jobs. In other words, they deserve the jobs, in some sense.
>If you support abilitocracy, you're saying we should give jobs to people with ability for the jobs. In other words, they deserve the jobs, in some sense.
No! I am saying that we should give people with superior abilities the competed-for, desirable jobs /even though they don't deserve them/, because the positive consequences it has in terms of jobs being done better outweigh the harm done by the unfairness.
(Also, as a corollary, elsewhere in the thread I am saying that we should take that unfairness into account when deciding how redistributive tax policy should be).
The confusion is over the poorly defined word "deserve". Deserve is commonly used to mean "the person who should get it". People who argue over who deserves something may give different reasons. One may argue person X deserves something because they're a kind person, or because they're legally entitled to it, or because they'd make the best use of it, etc.
You're using a particular version of "deserve"; I think your version is something like people deserve something for effort. If we avoid the word deserve, I think you're saying something like we would ideally strive to reward people for effort, however, for pragmatic reasons, we should give people jobs based on ability.
But the word obfuscates your point of view because the word is not well defined. Everyone has a different idea of what it means.
And importantly, not enough people draw the distinction between deserve meaning "the person who should get something" vs "the person who should have gotten something if not for some practical concerns". If the word "abilitocracy" became popular, it would suffer the same problem you're perceiving in meritocracy. It would adopt the connotation that people with ability deserve the job. Which is a correct usage. That's one of the meanings of deserve.
So, if you have two children and one cupcake, and only one child wants the cupcake, they deserve the whole thing, but if they both want the cupcake they each deserve half? Or if it's something too small to split like a smartie, the winner of rock paper scissors deserves the whole thing and the loser deserves nothing?
I contend that your proposed meaning of "deserve" does not exist.
I have no idea what meaning you think I proposed. I said "deserve" is commonly used to mean "the person who should get the thing".
Yes, that is the meaning I am arguing against. There are a lot of situations, including in my comment above, where some method is used to determine who gets a thing, and the method is even recognized as fair (!), but nobody would use the word "deserve" in place of "should get" or "should have". In order to "deserve" something, it is necessary not only that it is best for you to have the thing, but that it would be unjust for you not to have it ex ante.
Clearly your work should be redistributed, not your pay. The companies want work, not pay, otherwise they would work and you would be paying them (i.e. you would be a customer).
It's an interesting thought experiment. I would argue it's more interesting in the "partnership" sense since there we can't just say "companies don't deserve things, only people do".
I think there actually is an answer, if a somewhat unsatisfying one: most of the things people deserve are messy, un-fungible things that have built-in tradeoffs with other people's deserts, such that even if we recognize the world is full of unfairness and injustice we can't always do anything about it in any practical way. But money is super fungible--being fungible is its entire purpose! So economic injustices like "a lot of people deserve a better paying job and a few people deserve a worse paying one" can actually be somewhat corrected, at least at a broad societal level.
I agree with this comment.
More technically, I think *all* discussion of desert fails in some sense; even if you get a job by working very hard, you lucked into the genes/environment/etc that made you a hard worker. I think every analysis of desert has to stop at some point and call the remaining unexplained factors "deserved" even though there's an ultimate sense where that's false, I think it's pretty clear what level the meritocracy discussion is stopping at, and so I think it's okay.
If someone praises me and rewards me for working hard, I’ll work harder.
If someone praises me and rewards me for a high IQ, I can’t do much of anything to make myself smarter.
It makes sense to reward malleable things to reach a positive outcome. I think this has something to do with what we mean when we say “deserve.”
You can build habits that will let you work harder, or make better use of your intelligence. You cannot do much to make yourself smarter, you can do a lot to work smarter.
The point is that the ability to 'work hard' in and of itself is often considered a genetic predisposition, similar to having a high IQ. If both are innate, then neither should be praised (nor condemned).
While I do credit this to a large extent, for the sake of personal well-being I choose to believe (and act) as though it were not true.
Genetics and environment may be necessary (I have my doubts, but that's a different discussion), but are certainly not sufficient. By praising positive social behaviors in socially beneficial directions, we can help create a better society.
Even beyond "works hard" and "high IQ" is the effective means by which they are used. Just about nobody praises a very smart and hard working scammer. Martin Shkreli is about universally loathed, despite being both smart and hard working. Someone using their intelligence and hard work to play video games very well is of limited social utility, and deservedly receives little praise.
“You want to hire someone that’s honest, smart, and hardworking. You want to look for those traits in that order because if they’re dishonest, you’d strongly prefer that they be dumb and lazy.”
-Warren Buffett
Even if it's genetic, the ability still has to be cultivated, and the same is true for "converting" IQ into useful skills and knowledge. One might object that it's unfair that genetic luck makes some people respond better to cultivation efforts (which might include praise), but the alternative seems to be to just throw your hands up and give up on cultivating anything (a reasonable description of the state of education in much of the First World, I'd say).
This depends on what you mean by hard work.
The thing that I think of as "merit" or virtue or what have you is, roughly, sacrifice (of any form) for the benefit of others. How many hours of work you can do before it reaches a given level of unpleasantness for you is obviously determined by genes and environment and practice and so on, and different for everyone. But I think that how much sacrifice different people made is probably something that can be used to apples-to-apples comparison.
The reason why I think this matters, and why I don't agree that when people use the word "meritocracy" they understand that they're only talking about ability, not about anything to do with desert, is the frequency with which I see it being cropping up in arguments opposing economic redistribution, from people arguing that because we're a meritocracy the rich deserve their wealth and it would be unfair and morally wrong to take it from them because they've earned it through merit.
I think that the prevalence of arguments like this proves that people /are/ associating it with moral desert, and makes this an argument with meaningful material consequences.
(I think I'm probably reiterating a lot of what Freddie deBoer has said in "The Cult of Smart", but I'm reluctant to just cite it because I haven't read it and I don't know for sure that he doesn't say "and therefor we should start using babies as condiments" on page 217 or something).
I sacrifice nothing, I come to work to shoot the shit with my colleagues and work on interesting problems. If I couldn't, and I lived off UBI, I'd probably find something else to work on out of boredom. According to your criteria I should be paid $0, despite creating value for my employer?
I suspect that people are going to make similar arguments no matter what word you use. If you have a system where you've agreed that the people with trait X are going to receive Y, then those people are going to start looking at Y as their right rather than their privilege, no matter what X is.
Then if you try to take Y away from them, they're going to get upset, and they're going to conflate "the previous rules said I should get Y" with "I deserve Y" in order to make their objection seem more justified (both to themselves and others).
I don't think the words that you use for X have *zero* effect, but I don't think they're a very powerful lever to use to influence this dynamic.
Why does it seem like you're interpreting merit as being chiefly about hard work? Usually I see merit used to refer to either ability/skill or achievements.
But perhaps most importantly, why wouldn't it be fair *if* those most able were preferentially hired? Surely unfair is the word we use for situations where that isn't the case?
I'm not, exactly, but I'm trying to steelman.
What I'm actually interpreting "merit" as being about is virtue and moral desert (consider what you would believe was being told of someone if you were just told that their behaviour was "meritorious").
But of the things contributing to getting hired in a meritocracy, I think that "hard work" is the one that it's most defensible to relate to that, so I'm taking without challenge the idea that working hard is virtuous/meritorious, and even granting that I'm saying that that's far from the only thing "meritocracy" rewards.
In terms of "fair/unfair", they're obviously very nebulous words, but what I see as "fairness" in this context is rewarding good deeds - effort and sacrifice for the benefit of others - and not much else. And that obviously has nothing to do with ability.
In a game people have entered voluntarily, I'm happier with using the word "fair" to refer to giving the prize to the fastest runner rather than the one who tried hardest - I think because the unlevelness of the playing field has in some sense been abstracted out when you zoom in on just that game (different people having different bodies is outside the scope and context of the game). But when we're talking about who gets to have a nice life, nothing is out-of-scope.
Isn't merit about quality or value, as in "this approach has merit"? Moral desert isn't really central here.
It seems to me like, when you zoom out of the game under scrutiny to the point where you're considering the "loaded dice" of genetics, the concept of fairness is pretty much meaningless. You're basically working at the level where there is no free will, trying to apply a concept meant for a level where agents can make free decisions - which we can clarify on a fairness scale. Sure, at some level the guy who achieved the most had no control over it and in a sense didn't deserve it, but then of nobody gets to decide what they do what does fairness even mean? Plus, hard work is not unlike intelligence in this respect - capacity for it can also be reduced to biological (and probably genetic) constraints. Why should these traits be treated as the sole determinants of moral worth?
Effort, being hard-working, being willing to sacrifice, these are all traits subject to the same genetic and environmental influences that intelligence is.
Black kids in the US spend less time doing homework than Asian kids, which seems like as good a quantititative measure of being hardworking as anything. Are you going to say that it is fair that black kids have worse outcomes in life related to academic ability and career? Or are you going to selectively offer environmental explanations for why black kids are less hardworking than asian kids?
I think you might like the essay "Bourgeoisie Virtue" by Dierdre McCloskey. It's relevant to your post because it contextualizes the "hard working = virtuous (meritorious) " against a broader backdrop across which "meritocracy " operates.
the last sentence here is too conflicy-theory-y for me. There are some crucial mistakes in the worldview of many in the anti-meritocracy camp.
1. Believing that historical wrongs cause outcome gaps that persist instead of automatically regressing towards ability in a few generations or less. (e.g., US jews have 50% above average household income despite the fricking holocaust).
2. Believing that reverse discrimination is an effective or efficient way of of reducing income gaps
3. Massively overestimating the importance of shared environment
4. Underestimating the utility of free markets and letting decisions be made by people with a stake in the outcome (e.g. leaving employment decisions up to employers who know the business and have a financial stake in the outcome, instead of judges that don't know the business and have no stake in the outcome)
I find myself having the same argument with smart people over [1] and over [2]: is it reasonable to consider that things without brains might feel?
It think it's quite reasonable to hypothesize (but not assume!) that e.g. plants can feel pain. Other people seem to think that, without some kind of sophisticated information processing, pain makes no sense.
What do y'all think?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ymxpgf/barbara_mcclintock_on_scientific_mysticism_and/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/xxegzn/comment/irc92na/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Well, do you "feel" when you're asleep (and not dreaming)? Because presumably that's the closest analogue you can experience to not having a brain.
I also think ego death/dissolution is probably the closest analogue to not having a brain, or at least not having the recursive/self-aware aspect of human experience (which almost certainly requires a brain)
Good question! I think you do, but there's no memory formation.
I base this on a few experiences (especially taking Galantamine) where I've transitioned from wakefulness directly into REM sleep, presumably through a brief NREM stage (which feels *super* weird)
I’m not sure I would use the word “feel” or “pain”, but I think it’s highly plausible that particularly complex plants and fungi have intelligence and experience of their own forms, hard to compare with those of animals.
I use the word "feel" as the simplest form of "have experience". Having "qualia" seems to be the philosophical term-of-art though.
That's what I'm after: the simplest form of feeling. The atomic feeling. My working hypothesis is that it's simple harmonic motion--moving in circles.
What definition of "intelligence" are you using here? Explanations of plant behavior are fully specified by non-cognitive causes.
I’m using the idea of taking in information from you’re surroundings, processing that information, and using it to engage in behaviors that do a better job of achieving your goals.
I’m not sure where cognition in particular is meant to play a role (or how we know whether cognition is going on in most human behavior or any plant behavior).
I can very much believe things without brains may _suffer_ (but i hope every night they cannot), but i don't believe they can feel _pain_, since pain means something pretty specific and without the complex pain-sensing setup brains have it would be so different that calling it pain would be incorrect.
Interesting! I usually define pain and suffering the opposite way. Pain is the raw sensation, and suffering is its recursive analog (which involves memory/expectations about pain).
I think the distinction is a good one regardless
It's not unreasonable to hypothesize that plants can, on some level, have experiences, but if anything like that were true then it'll be so far removed from ours that the concept of 'pain' is completely inapplicable. I did enjoy that piece on Barbara McClintock, and I have no trouble believing that empathizing with plants made her a better scientist, but I don't think the experiences of plants are in any way conceivable to us.
When I think of things that cannot have experiences, I think of jellyfish, nematodes, and other things that just do not have the necessary complexity to support something like that. But trees are massive complex organisms that interact with and process information from their environment in a myriad of ways, many of them poorly understood. It's certainly possible that, on their timescale, this results in experiences.
Very interesting that you think trees are more likely to experience subjectivity than jellyfish. I find most people think the opposite.
I think most people are probably basing it on visible movement in human-relevant timescales. That will privilege animals over plants. But if you watch plants on time lapse, some of them seem to engage in much more goal-directed movement than some animals -I’m thinking particularly of tendrils and roots that explore, move, and sense their environment searching for what they are looking for.
Totally agree! Some of the Planet Earth time lapse shots completely disabused me of the impression that plants are just static things. Growing my own has helped a lot too.
It's interesting to think of sharing the world with a slow-moving consciousness, and what that might look like. You might enjoy this short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOPwXNFU7oU
These can be explained entirely without anything thinking or feeling on the part of plants.
So can your behavior! You're just a bunch of electrical signals and chemical gradients, same as (albeit more complex than) the plant.
Time for me to pull out the quote from "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" again:
"And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
So far, the evidence is that organisms with nociceptors (pain receptors) can feel pain. The Wikipedia category page for nociception only has a subcategory for "pain in animals", not one for plants.
I don't know about kinds of feelings that don't involve specialized sensory organs or organelles. I don't think anyone does.
But we have a huge anthropomorphic bias here. We only know about pain receptors because we're able to correlate people's self-reporting of pain with the activation of those receptors. If there's an entirely different kind of pain receptor in jellyfish, how would we know it's a pain receptor? We can't ask the jellyfish what it's feeling.
So of course we don't know about any kinds of feelings that don't involve human-like organs--there's no way for us to know about them!
No; insects have nociceptors. Since evolution imposed that energetic cost on them, we can be sure they're feeling pain, even if they experience it differently to the way we do.
Can we really be sure they feel it? *I* think it's pretty likely, but many people seem to think the feeling requires a prefrontal cortex--that without symbolic self-representation the pain receptors just trigger a mechanical aversion. And I have no good argument against that.
*That* seems pure anthropocentric mysticism to me. Clinging to the belief that some old dude with a white beard made humans different to the other creatures of the earth, or some such. No evidence for any of that.
Whatever insects do with the input from their pain receptors I'm going to call "feeling pain". It sure looks like it. I have no way of translating their experience to my own, but that's true of every being besides me. If it waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, etc.; and "nullius in verba" (take nobody's word for it).
I think that because you're using words like "might" and "hypothesize", I can't say outright that you're wrong, but if you I think that the odds on plants having any kind of subjective experience are infinitesimal.
We don't understand the mind at all yet, so I can't claim certainty, but everything we know about it very strongly suggests that it is generated in some way, and closely linked to the physical structure of, the brain, and that makes me extremely confident that nothing without a... not necessarily similar, but equivalent along some axis we haven't identified yet that almost certainly requires structural complexity... structure will have anything recognisable as a mind.
Right--this seems to be the general argument. No one reasonable makes a strong claim one way or the other, but people like me think it's highly plausible, while others (like you) think it's highly implausible.
The argument you're making here seems analogous to the idea that "thinking" and "feeling" go hand-in-hand. I wrote a bit about this hypothesis here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/a-different-kind-of-ai-risk-artificial#%C2%A7thinking-and-feeling
I think a large part of my belief comes from having experienced mind states that are both extremely simple and extremely intense (via meditation and drugs). It gives me an idea for what it might mean to have "experience" with out a lot of information processing going on.
Were these experiences "simple" in a biologically relevant way though? This might be a LMFGFY comment but how "simple" is meditation at various scales of measuring neuron activity
No, they were *phenomenologically* simple. For instance, a sensation of throbbing at around 2 Hz (probably the feeling of my circulatory system).
I should also point out that even though most of my attention might be absorbed in that throbbing sensation, there's often some background static. So I imagine you'd still see a whole bunch of noise on an EEG.
Interesting side note though: some very intense mind states are associated with a *drop* in neural activity, specifically in the default mode network. I would have suspected that intensity of feeling was heavily correlated with the level of electrical activity in the brain.
I don't really understand how phenomenological simplicity relates to the potiental of plant experiences.
Good question!
Prior to those experiences, I saw "thinking" and "feeling" as kind of the same thing. I couldn't imagine feeling pain without thinking "man this sucks I'm in a lot of pain." I couldn't imagine sensation without a sense-of-self, and that (presumably) requires a sophisticated system of representation.
After those experiences, it's trivial for me to imagine pain by itself, without any thought or symbolic representation.
I don't think plants have a sense-of-self or a sophisticated system of representation the way mammals do. So prior to those experiences, I doubted that plants could feel anything.
So your distinction between "thinking" and "feeling" isn't quite the division I'd draw. I don't really have a good vocabulary to discuss this, but I think that there are two things one might talk about:
1) Having a cognitive architecture that, if you input a complicated problem, outputs a solution.
2) Having subjective experience, qualia, cogito ergo sum, what have you.
These seem similar, but not identical, to your "thinking" and "feeling".
The first is simple and measurable and not particularly profound; the second is the thing we're interested in but can't measure, identify, or even define.
A P-zombie or a computer capable of passing the Turing test with a lookup table clearly have the first but I guess they don't have the second.
An anchovy or a shrimp probably has the second but only a tiny amount of the first.
A plant clearly doesn't have the first, and I guess it doesn't have the second.
My /guess/ is that the only organisms on earth with the second are those with structures that permit at least some of the first, but a) I can't prove that and b) I can't rule out wholly alien structures with the second but not the first.
Yeah I think we're on the same page in terms of definitions here.
Sounds like you believe "thinking" is a prerequisite for "feeling". Tononi's IIT says they go hand-in-hand--feeling and information processing are two sides of the same coin. I suspect that feeling is much more pervasive than thinking, but like you say, I can't prove it. I can't even imagine what proof would look like!
I don't think this is true. Most people will (finally) admit that cows and pigs have feelings, but the political agenda is mostly focused on reducing suffering (e.g. making sure they have enough room to turn around in their pen, not separating kids from parents). Very few are trying to ban farming entirely.
And if we decided that plants had feelings, we wouldn't just ban eating! We'd hopefully make sure our agricultural practices were humane. But at the end of the day, you have to kill *something* to fuel yourself.
Jainists do have some rules in this regard, but it's not strictly about pain. From Wikipedia: "Jain monks, nuns and some followers avoid root vegetables such as potatoes, onions, and garlic because tiny organisms are injured when the plant is pulled up, and because a bulb or tuber's ability to sprout is seen as characteristic of a higher living being."
Its interesting that banning people on Substack must be much more powerful than banning them from the old blog, since your account here may be tied to other subscriptions. At SSC being banned meant losing name recognition (probably desirable for many people banned there) but probably just making a new account. If you have many paid subscriptions on Substack, if you're banned here but still want to comment it means either maintaining two accounts or switching all your subscriptions from the old to the new. Thanks, network effects.
Really? Are you sure it is not just from Scott’s own Substack? Has to be, right?
Sorry, maybe wasn't fully clear. Yeah, his bans definitely only apply to his Substack. But if you're a person who has subscriptions to multiple Aubstacks, and get banned from this one, then either (a) you keep using your old Substack account and can no longer comment here, (b) make a second Substack that you log on to exclusively to comment on ACX, or (c) make a new Substack, switch all your subscriptions from the old one to the new, and have that be your primary account.
So, banning on SSC just imposed the cost of name recognition / switching time, while banning on Substack can be a lot more inconvenient because you have a multi-community identity. Putting it more on the level of other forms of social media.
You mean for ban evasion? I'm not quite clear about what you are saying. If I am subscribed to multiple Substacks and Scott permabans me, I can't comment on here. I can still read it, I can still read and comment on my other subscriptions, but I'm banned here.
So yeah, if I want to evade the ban, I will have to spin up a new account. It needn't be a paid subscription, but it has to be a new one. I don't see where the extra effort comes in, this is what people did all over if they wanted to ban evade (or have sock puppet accounts or the like). If I'm not paying for a new subscription, then all the effort is sign up with a new email and a new moniker to a new Substack account, then come back here and continue on.
Assuming you want to keep commenting under your other name too, the extra effort comes in when you need to log out of one account and into another to comment on other substacks.
Most forums try to track the ip of the banned account. Not sure about Substack.
But if you’re logged in to other paid Substacks with your account that is banned here, then it means you have to switch accounts when you go back and forth. When it was its own blog, you would just be signed in as your relevant account at each blog and never have to switch.
Because to comment here you'd need to log out of one and into the other, and to read there you'd have to do the opposite, so there's a switching cost you have to pay continuously. Versus on SSC where you'd just discard the old account.
After feedback I think I'd replace the word "much" with "marginally."
Or just take the ban? It’s a ban on commenting not perusing.
I casually have to do a lot of operations to string data, on 1M+ rows datasets, and am constrained to Python (mostly by skill, but also by the entire tool stack that the rest of my team uses). How do I make my workflow not suck? Because right now it's an almost daily occurence that I do "pd.read_csv('file.csv')", go for a cup of coffee, and come back to a dead kernel because Pandas tried to load it all into RAM and never managed to. And if lo-and-behold it managed to ingest the file and create a dataframe, anything I do to it like basic loc's or pivots/reshaping runs the same risk and also takes mindboggling amounts of runtime.
I heard a lot about Arrow/PyArrow, but IDK if it's workable already. I also tried Modin, but my laptop got hot enough that I couldn't comfortably keep my hands on the keyboard, and froze dead after a few operations, to the point I had to do a hard reboot.
1M+ rows is... not much, really. If your datasets are really taxing for Pandas for some weird reason, maybe try R? It has surprisingly good Python interop. I'm pretty sure that's not necessary, though.
I assume you have a machine with 16+ GB of RAM, ideally 32? Your problem sounds like memory usage running into swap space and thrashing.
Um....something is wrong here.
For reference I just took a few minutes and tested a 2 million row dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository (1). This isn't instantaneous to load, I timed it at ~3.8 seconds, but that was with R. If Pandas is failing or you have time to go get coffee, something is really wrong. 3.8 seconds is the time for an old beater laptop with R, Python with a modern work computer should be killing this because a million rows or more is...nothing. Like, most companies will record tens of millions of transactions a month and data analysts and other usually do basic analysis with those in basically real time.
This is not something that should require advanced tools. Doing greps and string manipulation should be...probably a few seconds but even really intense analysis shouldn't take more than a minute. Something is fundamentally wrong here.
Do me a favor. Download the dataset I linked, test it on your work computer, then test it on literally any other computer. Something is off here.
(1) https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Individual+household+electric+power+consumption
This was my instinct, too. I remember the late 80s and early 90s, when you would go get a cup of coffee or leave a machine on all night to crunch something.
Load it into a SQLite database, then use something like sqlalchemy. Then the dataset doesn't have to live in memory, and you can batch your operations / use built-in aggregation that should be memory friendly.
- you might want to try dask
- you don’t have to read all columns and/or rows, just process a million rows at a time
- get a beefy ec2 instance for a few hours
You'll probably want to use Apache Spark instead of pandas. There, you can choose to read the dataset incrementally without crashing your computer
If you're using .loc, you should also be using Parquet files instead of CSV since parquet is columnar based storage
If you have access to Copilot, you can get basic jobs to run, although it's no good for more advanced transformations and you have to look it up yourself.
This website is helpful, as well as the Learning Spark textbook
https://sparkbyexamples.com/
Reposting from the mid-week open thread where I received some great ideas, but I'd also like to see what the Sunday crowd says.
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
ADHD meds shouldn't make your tachycardia worse at minimum doses, and these are already very noticeable mentally. You can also try increasing your cardiovascular fitness (e.g. running) to lower your RHR, which honestly sounds like a good idea either way for long-term maintenance of your body.
As for rewards... just stop having to decide every time. If you have to wash dishes after dinner, get up and do the dishes, every time, out of habit. Or create a timebox for home maintenance tasks every day / N days / whatever. Ironically, people with ADHD get extreme benefits from scheduling, despite being the most reluctant to do so.
I do have a bit of running (well, treadmill running) in my rather weak exercise routine, which may or may not be helping. I also take a very low dose of metoprolol, a selective beta blocker, which helps level me out and reduce my heart rate a bit.
My main concern is 1) the sudden and out-of-proportion spikes in blood pressure or heart rate with even a small stressor and 2) the fear of long-term damage caused by a heart beating too fast for decades on end. You may rightly ask if I could try mixing beta blockers and stimulants, but using a medication to treat side effects of another medication feels too "the woman who swallowed a bat" to me.
Probably I just need a more thorough cardiac workup, as the sudden spikes thing is probably harmful even if I don't take stimulants.
It feels to me like my brain has a higher than warranted temporal discount rate. I might intellectually know in the moment that if I eat this big bowl of ice cream right before bed I won't sleep well and I'll feel awful, but something in by brain says, "It will taste so good right now, and it won't be that bad later." From experience I know that it always is that bad later. Or, for another example, "I'll extend my lunch break to browse and comment on this ACT Open Thread, and I'll just catch up on work a little later."
Yeah, I think the part of the brain responsible for doing stuff is one that's quite a bit older and never really got the concept of long-term effects that well.
I am reasonably sure that the answer is "you can't, at least not fundamentally", but that doesn't mean that you should stop trying. The expected reward that is the direct result of doing the task is only one thing that enters into the calculation. The direct reward for doing the dishes might be clean dishes and nothing else, but there are several indirect rewards that you could consider: the satisfaction of a clean, organized kitchen, being able to cross something off your to-do list, and having your place appear more welcoming to guests. It's not easy, but easiER to increase the expected rewards by adding indirect rewards to the calculation, for example by making a to-do list or inviting a friend over for dinner (even if you're just going to order pizza to eat in).
Then there's habit and prediction error. I'm sometimes surprised by how much my behavior is driven by my predictions: last week I had completely run out of food except for a small block of feta cheese, and yet I couldn't bring myself to go to the shop even though I had ample time to do so. Then, on Friday, I made the plan to go directly to the shop after work before going home. Then a) it was raining by the time I got off and b) something happened that necessitated stopping by home after all. But it didn't take an act of will to go back into the rain and to the store. In fact, it would have taken effort NOT to, since I'd get a substantial prediction error if I didn't go after planning to all day. I think you can leverage this with detailed daily plans: set a calendar reminder for something if you need to do the dishes, and plan to actually do so once that time comes around. I think you'll find it becomes much easier.
That leads into habit. Habit is the natural mechanism by which we save cognitive effort that we usually need to spend on doing things we're not fond of. If you're highly limited in the amount of cognitive effort you can spend, you can cut that down by building habits. This is easy by adding one thing to anything you're already doing: for example, when cooking, you wash out the pot immediately after you're done, so it's easier to clean. Or, if you spend too much time scrolling your phone in bed, add 'turn on airplane mode' to 'plug in my phone to charge'. Also keep track of how many times you've done this consecutively, and if you do break your streak, note down your record and try to do better next time.
Those are some of the things that helped me, so I hope you benefit from them too.
Taking advantage of prediction error sounds like it could be quite helpful! I do have a few small tricks, too, that help a bit - I try to leave my phone out of my room and I do a bit of dish-rinsing to make it easier later on. It's always nice to start a task that's already half-done.
I appreciate all the comments everyone left! They gave me a lot of interesting angles to work with and Frankenstein together into something neat. Thanks!
It's usually the latter - can't start tasks, do something else - though I am also easily drawn away from stuff I'm currently doing, too. Environmental triggers are quite useful to me and have worked well in the past, but my current situation is very self-directed and suffers a chicken-and-egg problem; I need environmental triggers to get me to set up environmental triggers.
Switching from expected reward to triggers/cues is quite an interesting angle, as is maintaining focus for the first few goes - much easier than making myself focus for every task forever!
“ delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.”
This is going to be a bit hard to judge well. I wasn’t sure you even were reading all the comments.
It’s also going to delete follow on comments, which might aggravate more people than the ones with the disappearing posts. Might be worth a try for a week or two though.
Britain is possibly the world’s most famous monarchy. Maybe less well known is the decade it spent as a republic after executing Charles I. Executing the king had never been the plan and for the next decade Britain struggled to try to find a way to make it all work. A revolution in a deeply conservative country. Anna Keay was a great guest on the podcast. Subscribers to this blog may particularly enjoy the story of the scientist William Petty (google him - amazing guy). And Anna has a beautiful English accent of the kind so loved by Americans! Can’t recommend Anna or her book The Restless Republic highly enough.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503?i=1000585248320
The English Ciivl War was the first example (the French Revolution was the second) where the established power made a negotiated or compromise settlement impossible. The execution of Charles I was a purely practical choice, because as long as the King was alive, he could keep raising armies from those who remained convinced that he was a King by divine right. On the other hand, one serious defeat for the Parliamentary side, and that would be it, because the Royalists would certainly have executed their leaders. There had been no plans to create a Republic, and indeed it wasn't obvious how to move towards one, any more than it was in 1789-92 in France. In each case, (and arguably in Russia in 1917) an established power that could not compromise precipitated a civil war that it lost: a lesson perhaps to bear in mind for other contexts.
The issue (per my understanding of Anna Keay) was not whether or not to have a King. People were fine with that. The argument was about what were the limits on the King’s powers and Charles was too arrogant/foolish to compromise. By the time he was finally ready the radical elements in the army were in charge and they decided on execution. The country as a whole was appalled.
I don’t really agree with what you say about the danger the King would keep raising armies. By this stage the Parliamentarians were completely dominant militarily.
I wouldn't disagree with your overall point, but on your second paragraph we know that despite military dominance proponents of a divinely-inspired supreme monarchy would keep rising up in Britain. The Jacobean attempts to retain/seize the throne(s) is a wonderful proof of this.
Charles I's immediate predecessors, Elizabeth I and James I, were every bit as despotic as him in their way, if not more so, although their power had dwindled over the decades as Parliament became more assertive. Elizabeth I acknowledged this, by saying "I sit not so high as my father (Henry VIII)"
The big difference was that Charles I made promises he couldn't or wouldn't keep, a vexing fault he had in common with one or two other sovereigns who came to grief such as King John.
One moral of the story is that it is better to say a task will take two weeks, and then complete it in one week, than to say it will take one day and take two days!
Interesting! We didn’t spend long on this and I don’t know a huge amount about the subject independently of what Anna told me. But her take on James was that he was better at the politics and knew how to do deals etc.
I really like new substack app (especially on iPad). It’s great for keeping track of read and unread posts. My biggest pain point is that there’s no “download for offline” feature. I love reading my substacks when flying for example. The app at least keeps the text but loses any images or embedded tweets. This can have varying importance depending on the content. Sometimes I can load the full post whilst on Wi-Fi and then the images stay loaded when offline, my success with this has been spotty. If anyone can escalate to the substack team it would be greatly appreciated, it seems like a small fix!
Or, perhaps more regularly than flying, taking the underground to work! Agree that this would be useful.
What do you think the effects are of the large number of different strains of Christianity?
Given the huge number of doctrinal issues that various churches might disagree on, i suspect that most people's understanding of, and beliefs about "what christians believe" is calibrated to whichever strain of Christianity most was predominant where they were.
What kind of second order effects does this have?
When Neal DeGrasse tyson says, "even the pope believes in evolution, can you even get more christian than the pope?", for example, i found myself surprised/not surprised. The rough impression i have is that the simpler an idea, the more likely it is to go viral, for example. So what i would expect is that most people have no idea how much complexity goes into the thinking of someone like Aquinas, or the continuity between classical thinkers like Socrates. From what I understand, catholicism has tried to walk this really fine line between 'the hereafter is what really matters', but 'this life matters as well.' It makes me think catholicism is an anti-meme which is more easily outcompeted by simpler belief systems.
Well, it does make it even easier for non-Christians like me to come up with the most noxious possible stereotype for the Christian members of their outgroup. It may be that no Christian sect believes in/does *both* bad thing A and bad thing B, and vanishingly few self-identified Christians opt for both of them, but I can cheerfully attribute both to my outgroup stereotype.
> The rough impression i have is that the simpler an idea, the more likely it is to go viral, for example.
My view from the outside is the Catholicism *is* a simple idea. The idea is that whatever the church leadership believes is probably right. Worshippers learn the basics and for the rest it's "I don't know, ask the priest."
(1) At this stage, I wouldn't take deGrasse Tyson seriously if he said grass was green, he's had a few too many blunders showing off on social media
(2) The effect that annoys me is that people seem to think the Rapture is a Christian doctrine, or at least a mainstream one. This is something peculiarly American, although it has its roots in a particular Anglo-Irish clergyman, and it's not something the majority of Christians worldwide believe or have even heard of. But it seems to have made its way into pop culture that all Christians believe we will be Raptured. I only heard of it when discussing issues with Evangelicals on a now-defunct site, and I had no idea if we Catholics even *had* a position on Millennialism (seemingly we do, we're agin' it).
Blame this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nelson_Darby
Catholicism is the biggest Christian denomination, hard to say it is outcompeted for now (although it can be locally).
Are there parts of the world where Catholicism is growing? My understanding is that in Latin America it’s losing out to various strains of Pentecostal/evangelical Protestantism, as it also is in the United States, and in Europe it is at best stagnating but likely losing out to unaffiliation. Maybe it’s growing in Africa or Asia?
https://dornsife.usc.edu/iacs/global-christianity/
Top line is that the Church added 16 million in 2020 to a total of 1.4 billion, keeping pace with population growth, so the percentage of the world that is Catholic, about 18%, neither grew nor shrank.
In America, i think it is outcompeted locally, in most places.
By breakdown, it's the largest single denomination. By local breakdowns, the major Protestant denominations are the Evangelical churches, with the Baptists the largest grouping there.
2014 poll by Pew Research Center:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/
Rounding off figures: All Evangelical Protestant denominations - 25%; Catholicism - 21%; Mainline Protestantism - 15%
Interesting forecast is the rise of the "nones" and the decline of Christianity:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/
A conjecture I have not one shred of evidence to support: the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Europe was more conducive to the development of scientific thought than either alone maintaining a cultural hegemony would have been, because it brought the idea of challenging and arguing more into prominence.
I cannot stress enough that this kind of Just-So-Story untestable unquantifiable thinking is a terrible way to understand the world, and should not be used for any serious purpose, but it's a fun idea to consider.
Well, but then wouldn't the effect have been most intense in Germany, which suffered the greatest conflict, and much lower in England, which hardly suffered at all? Yet England towers above Germany at the start of the Enlightenment. (Arguably the Germans catch up by the 1800s though.)
Do you mean the UK rather than England? I say this because of the critical importance of the Scottish enlightenment to the whole movement.
https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/ryFwd0pWZVzF
Yes that's a better way to put it. The Celts did at least their share.
I don't think it's reasonable to put those conflicts in the same category as the Thirty Years' War. They were at most only in part driven by Protestant-Catholic conflict, and I think had a lot more to do with (rapidly) evolving English attitudes towards the respective power of monarch and parlaiment -- its very signifiant France was evolving toward absolute monarchy at the same time. And FWIW Wikipedia asserts the Thirty Years' War knocked off 5-8 million people.
My feeling is behind all of this, the Protestant revolutions, the Catholic counter reformation and the rise of science lies the printing press.
It depends how you understand earlier protesting movements though, with the obvious case being the Hussites in Bohemia, who staged an earlier attempt at reformation with similar public support before the spread of printing.
The western-European church was actually prone to attempts at reformation: papal primacy itself was for example primarily the result of the Gregorian reformation in the eleventh century. What is notable about the Protestant Reformation is not really a conflict between reformers and those supporting an existing system (often with their own reforms in mind), as that was and arguably still is part of the life of all organised churches; rather the Protestant Reformation stands out because the debate it involved was never resolved, unlike earlier reformations where there was (eventually) a clear winning position be it one of the parties or a compromise. We might attribute this to printing, but I'd like to see what the mechanism for this would be.
I don’t think my point is a controversial opinion. The earlier divisions in the church didn’t have the capacity to spread. And Protestantism’s dependancy on the printing press was predicated on more than just spreading propaganda, but also on spreading the bible; giving every family a bible in the vernacular, disregarding the build up of Catholic doctrine over the centuries.
Even now even hardline Catholics rarely read scripture, while hardline Protestants devour it.
The effect of the printing press on science is obvious.
I think this is likely. What do you think of the claim that the internet is having a similarly disruptive impact on existing political structures?
Definitely, but like the French Revolution from the point of view of Chinese politicians - it’s too soon to tell.
I don’t think that’s a bad analogy either. And yeah…. next few decades will likely be wild.
> Just-So-Story untestable unquantifiable thinking is a terrible way to understand the world,
Can you say more about this?
This sort of untestable, unquantifiable hypothesis seems to be the Jungian shadow of the lesswrong community. I can understand saying, "hold onto this kind of hypothesis lightly', but the idea of 'reject any hypothesis that isn't testable" seems to me to be more of a recipe for self-denial than anything else. If you identiy as 'someone who only believes things which are testable,' i would ask, "How can you test whether or not that is true? What would it look like if you had lots of unquantifiable thoughts that you couldn't consciously assess and re-evaluate?"
Sorry, "this kind of" is doing more work there than is obvious. There are absolutely some domains where untestable, unquantifiable thinking has value.
But when you're trying to explain, for example, why humans behave the way they do, it's incredibly easy to come up with plausible-sounding explanations like this for pretty much any observation, and the corollary of that is that they clearly aren't a useful tool for understanding the world.
For example, ask yourself:
:- Why is it that that in more martial cultures the largest and ornate headgear tends to be worn by men, whereas in more peaceful ones it is worn by women?
:- Why is it that progress in military technology Western Europe slowed down so markedly in the early eighteenth century and then picked up steam again in the 1770s?
:- Why were "plough cultures" more prone to bone cancers than "hoe cultures"?
:- Why are far-right political parties finding more success in those parts of Europe that were never conquered by Napoleon than in those that were?
Obviously, none of those is true - I just made them up - but I'll bet you can think of good reasons they might be without trying too hard!
Are you sure the headgear one isn't true? I can't easily disprove it, not that is what to posit a theory why it might be the case.
I think that Catholicism works at many different levels, from the simple historical post pagan “peasant” beliefs in local saints which are replacements for pagan Gods, from
the spiritual to the practical, and the rational too - like William of Okkam.
It’s all a bit inconsistent though and hard to keep under one church, even a broad one.
I am not that familiar with the details of catholic teachings, but are you saying this is an official part of them??
My experience is that with all or almost all human groups / movements heresy is punished worse than non belief in practice if not in theory...
Most Christians don't believe in different levels of Hell (and quite a few even disagree about whether Hell is actually a place or something else, such as being cut off from God).
What you're probably alluding to is that the Bible contains several passages speaking against heretics in ways that go beyond how it speaks about pagans. That is, pagans are potential converts, but heretics are actively undermining correct teaching. This doesn't mean they go to a worse Hell or even that they necessarily go to Hell at all.
I support the idea of a challenge open thread.
I do note that very few top level posts are of horrible quality, even if they garner no replies. More often when (we) members of the commentariat post crap comments, they are nearly always in response, and frequently as part of a downward escalating spiral.
I would like to note that David Freman does a repeatly decent job of disagreeing strongly but politely.
Just voicing a bunch of support for this Challenge Mode experiment (and doing so here, since a vague "yay X" comment might not make the bar on Wednesday!). I'm a fan of easy-to-access wide open content spaces, but there are already plenty of those, and the environment of "someone with good taste ruthlessly culls every subpar comment" is much harder to find and so correspondingly more valuable to have around on the margin IMO. Much like Groucho Marx didn't actually say, I can't wait for this club to be good enough that I don't qualify as a member.
More or less exactly my thoughts.
I'm not opposed to the idea of challenge mode but I think if you're going to do it you should pick examples, both long and short, of opening comments and replies you consider good and would like to see more of. Otherwise you're just asking commenters to guess what you think is valuable.
More broadly, I think your previous blog had a fairly high quality comment section though not without issues. However, your commenters got mixed in with the Substack median which caused a reversion to the internet mean.
This comment would go really well with a side of Reign of Terror.
Though that is a harder sell when a significant portion of those terrorized would be paying subscribers. Though... I do wonder what portion of the internet mean people (in both senses!) are paying subscribers, maybe it's almost none, in which case it would be a clear positive.
Yes, I think the main problem is that I'm kind of soft and hate banning people for less-than-clear-cut badness. Most of this experiment will be about my psychology and whether giving myself permission this way makes me better at actually deleting stuff.
If you thought you could do a good job vetting someone to apply similar standards to yours (with an appeal process you are involved in) this might be a thing which could be outsourced fairly inexpensively. Outsourcing areas of comparative weakness makes the world a better place!
Maybe a word of warning. I once was a mod of a forum of relatively small interest, but it had, nevertheless, fairly decent traffic. We were, like most of the internet back in the day, the Wild West for a while. Then we brought in a banning system that banned the most egregious posts. That solved some of that.
Then there were posters who were more than occasionally posting badly, off topic, or being abusive. So we added a warning system. Basically yellow cards would be given and after a certain number lead to red cards, similar to your partial ban percentages. Besides that a red could also be given at any time.
Problem one is that after a while even relatively decent and good posters would get banned as they accumulated yellow cards over many years on the site. We set it to be automatic, so a mod in a sub might yellow card Johnny Interesting who was perhaps provoked by Johnny Troll (also carded) and the decent poster would be banned as he reached the limit of 5 cards over 5-10 years, and the second - being newer - lived on.
This system doesn’t reward people for getting better either. We decided that Yellow cards needed to get removed from the system after a certain time limit. So we added that.
But people **really** didn’t like warnings. The software used to show a permanent yellow card on the post, which was like a permanent scar.
Often we would get more anger at warnings than the immediate red card (banned posters could appeal for a while), I suppose because the latter were obvious breaches of etiquette and the former, by the nature of subjectivity (we also had a Be Kind posting philosophy) were not.
I think, therefore, that deleting comments may aggregate people more than you might suspect.
This is an excellent cautionary tale.
> even relatively decent and good posters would get banned as they accumulated yellow cards over many years on the site
Surely the obvious solution to that would be to make yellow cards time-limited, so they expire after, say, a month.
Yes. We did. My wording was unclear so I’ve rewritten that.
What are the best antonyms for Always, Coming, From, Take, Me, and Down?
thesaurus.com gives us
at no time, departing, [no antonym], drop, [no antonym], above
But it's probably sorting in alphabetical order rather than by quality.
Well. You haven’t been Rick rolled. 🤷♂️
Now I've got the song stuck in my head, thanks a lot :)
Bravo
(Good job this isn’t Wednesday).
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion (I want to argue that we need to build more of it into rules, not less). Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian whose rule it was to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book. Thanks for those who submitted in previous open thread.
It sounds like reddit would be the perfect place to find this, particularly r/maliciouscompliance.
I went to this reddit and everyone there made it clear I was in the wrong place to look for this, so I deleted!
Actually, I was more suggesting that you read the posts there rather than make a post of your own, since a common factor in these stories is arbitrary rules made by people who don't know what they're doing.
In Challenge Mode, how often are the 33rd&below comments going to be deleted? Is it within 5 minutes of posting, every hour on the hour, once at the 18-hour mark, etc? Knowing this will help me informally make odds that a comment I just read won’t be there later today/tomorrow/etc. Or will the timing be at Scott’s discretion?
Why do I get the feeling someone is going to open a betting book - I'm sorry, I mean a prediction market - on who is getting banned when? 😁
(Also can I bet on myself and will Big Money be involved?)
I can't help but think there's an incentive mismatch if you can bet on yourself getting banned for a comment. For enough money, I'm sure any of us can manage a banworthy comment on ASX....
It wants to happen. It will almost certainly not be me doing it but I think someone should, haha. There are a few other awful, hilarious permutations of this which I couldn’t bring myself to post. We’ll see, there may be a large enough mass of mature people here, or neutrons I suppose. I think keeping the delete-timing a little vague is smart.
I expect it to depend on my schedule. I'll probably be checking once every few hours for the first day, then maybe once daily for the next few days.
Anyone here have experience with POTS (tachycardia)? The wife who is a super low anxiety person recently came down with it out of the blue. No new stresses, actually pretty low stress time in an overall low stress life. Beta blockers have been helping, but as with most “syndromes” kind of frustrating for an otherwise super healthy person to come down with weird illness at 38 and for there not to be a clear physical cause. At first they thought it was for sure heart valve issues, but that has been ruled out.
Luckily her case seems pretty mild, but any advice is appreciated. Seems kind of related to the past discussions around historic fainting sickness among women and such, but I don’t think that type of social contagion is what is going on here.
My wife had a kind of (probably) post-viral syndrome after a bad case of the flu a few years ago that was like this--for about six months, she had occasional episodes of tachycardia, low fevers, and fatigue, for no reason that her regular doctor or the ID doctor, cardiologist, or couple of other doctors she was referred to could identify. Eventually, it just stopped happening.
Unless you imagine that this forum is a collection of physicians, why would you seek information about a medical condition affecting a loved one from a bunch of internet randoms?
Talk with doctors.
How does your wife, the actual patient, feel about you discussing her condition on the internet? And that you would even bring up history of women and fainting (which is in part a history told by men to justified the notions of a "weaker" sex) perhaps requires some soul searching and discussion with your spouse.
[Tongue in cheek] my spouse of over 3 decades would hit me with her frying pan if I investigated her condition with a bunch of randos on the internet.
A) Patients with a condition and their familes often have helpful experiences and have done research and know about things new sufferers have not. This is a rarish condition, so you need to cast a wide net, but I asked somewhere like her becuase it is full of relatively intelligent rational people who are less likely to talk about crystals, or how Spiralina solved all thier issues.
B) >why would you seek information about a medical condition affecting a loved one from a bunch of internet randoms
We have talked with doctors (on 5 separate visits now including one to the emergency room that concluded with 36 hours in the hospital)...
but you have WAY WAY WAY too much respect for doctors, they are just people. Smarter than average, but not generally A LOT smarter than average, and in fact I find a lot of them I see rather unimpressive mentally and basically just good for a few specialized tasks.
The diagnosis part of their job doesn't really seem to perfrom any better than making a clear specific list of symptoms and using the internet. Certainly in this relatively odd rare condition (that the doctors themsleves seemed unsure of in a cardiology department of a good hospital), it was the main diagnosis I suspected assuming her heart was fine. Eventually when her heart turned out to be fine it was the diagnosis to caridologists made.
I would also point out that this third time seeing a dcotor (when went to the emergency room), she gave them a clear list of symptoms and our previous interactions on 2 doctors visits, are we informed them "she needs admission to a cardiology department and an echocardiogram (in large part based on infrom from previous two docotr's visits)". We were rewarded with about a 12 hour wait and about 3 or 4 different confirmations that she didn't have diabetes, and wasn't pregnant, and 6 other things which had already been established earlier that week (I think at one point she was tested for pregnancy 8 times in 1 week!). She weighs 125 lbs, she clearly isn't diabetic in the way they were suspecting (inspection of feet).
After the 12 hour waiting to see a cdoctor, doctor is like "you need an echocardiogram", really no other information we didn't have from previous two appointments. Thanks! After 12 more hours we get one, it suprisingly detects a perfectly functioning heart (before that the main diagnosis that seemed likely was a valve malfunction that had suddenly worsened (also a diagnosis which was clear from googling and the shape of her EKG (which is something you can easily interpret with googling too)). Anyway, so 24 hours for them to follow the basic guidance we came in with. Then 6 hours later cardiologist came, and you guessed it...hadn't even looked at the echocardiogram yet. So another hour of delays, by this point I was pretty sure it was going to be a POTS diagnosis due to the good echocardiogram (and my 7! hours to interpret and research what that might mean), and then they eventually came back and basically read me the same Clevland Clinic page on POTS I had previously found. Nearly word for word.
Now providing and interpreting the echocaridogram was a real value, that is something I cannot do. And if she needed heart surgery or whatever, well you obviously need a doctor! For 90% of the day-to-day medical shit, (colds, flus, intital disagnosis, guidance on cost/benefits of various treatments (something they are often shit at), giving people some symptom reducers to give their body to heal and telling them "rest and fluids"), they are borderline worthless and basically only maintain their position because they are a legalized guild/proteciton racket that gates access to therapies and drugs. "nice body there, would be terible if something were to happen to it, now where is my $500?".
Anyway doctors, aren't magic, they are people with some specialized training but in an extremely broad subject, so if you are dealing with something at all odd or anomalous, they aren't really going to perform better than random intelligent person who understands human anatomy and physiology (I took adv. chemistry and human anatomy and physiology 20+ years ago and am almost certain I could still nail an MCAT today). The probably 3 biggest medical events that have happened to me personally in the last two decades, doctors failed horribly and performed pretty poorly. If you want to get in a debate about docotrs I will get into the specifics of those.
C) "How does your wife, the actual patient, feel about you discussing her condition on the internet?"
1) She could not possible care less that I am discussing it, she is open to whatever good sources of information we can find. It is not like I used her name, though I doubt she would even care about that.
2) Why the fuck would anyone care, stop being so precious. You are trying to "gin up" harms where none exist. Concern trolling.
3) >And that you would even bring up history of women and fainting (which is in part a history told by men to justified the notions of a "weaker" sex) perhaps requires some soul searching and discussion with your spouse.
Nope just the reality of something to mention when there is a syndrome that is basically "young relatively fit women of child bearing age who get high pulses and faint when standing or exerting themselves without a clear physical reason". You would be a fool not to draw the connection.
Once again stop it with the creation of harms and concern trolling, you are big part of what is wrong with social media. I mean literally the syndrome is "fainting or lightheadness but we cannot find a reason". Because when there is a clear reason it gets filed under that.
D) >My spouse of over 3 decades would hit me with her frying pan if I investigated her condition with a bunch of randos on the internet.
I am sorry you have such a shitty untrusting relationship with your spouse. My spouse of 15 years deeply respects my judgement and does not phsyically or mentally abuse me, nor does she have outbursts when she disagrees with my judgement. And I also know her and her wishes well enough to stay in good alignment with them. What she wants is help with her fucking condition, not internet white knights worried about her "feelies", because they make a sport of finding "problems" with whatever post they can so they can feel better about themselves and who "enlightened/feminist" they are.
If you are going quote me you should do it correctly: you left out "[Tongue in cheek]" which began my sentence in part D)
Does using the fuck/fucking make your response necessary, true or kind or even better in any way?
"Concern trolling". What does that even mean? It is not rational, in my judgement, to be seeking medical information by posting here. "Rationality" is supposed to be a theme or so I thought.
I have been cross-examining doctors for 30 years; I don't hold them in a special high esteem. But, would a engineer post: I'm building this bridge: any randos have some thoughts?
To me what is wrong with social media is your first post (which ignores the virtue of "right forum, right question, etc") and then this second response - which is just upsettedness.
You are obviously concerned about your wife. I hope she gets better.
>Does using the fuck/fucking make your response necessary, true or kind or even better in any way?
Absolutely, it conveys how frustrated fed up and angry I am with your shitty attitude. It means "I am asking a specific question about needing help for my wife, and you are looking for any little edges in the phrasing or situation that allow you to speechify on how maybe I have somehow harmed my wife simply by asking questions" instead of you know, providing an actual repsonse (or no response if you don't have anything helpful to say).
>But, would a engineer post: I'm building this bridge: any randos have some thoughts?
No because engineers have more useful specialized, specific expertise than doctors with more clear answers and settled methods. Granted a lot of that is because engineering is a wildly simpler problem than doctoring.
Doctoring a lot less far from the "bloodletting" stage than it likes to portray, despite its massive advances in quality of care and outcomes. Civil engineering on the other hand is quite settled, with most advancements being incremental, and the methods and answers being pretty pat.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery for your wife.
I'm middle aged and have been dealing with tachycardia for a long time. Never been diagnosed with anything though. Eating a lot of food makes it worse, alcohol makes it worse. I have been borderline hypothyroid a few times and took medicine for that but it made it worse so my doc took me off. I also have reynauds and "non pathological abnormalities" on my EKG.
The only thing that consistently improves it is fairly vigorous aerobic exercise (swimming in my case). Even so, after doing that my heart is often racing for hours, but after it settles down I can have long periods of 60 BPM or less.
Obviously need to consider caffeine and other stimulants as well, I only take caffeine with L-Theanine now, but even so I have to limit the amount of tea (I don't drink coffee anymore).
Hey, sorry about that. I'm 26 years old and I've been dealing with tachycardia for the last few months although I don't think it's POTS. My doctor thinks it could be long covid since I got sick with something in August. I know there is actually a lot of research connecting POTS to covid although that probably doesn't change treatment options.
There's research showing that fish oil can slow your heart rate so I've started taking that.
You might get something useful out of this video. Ignore the question of connection to the Covid vaccine. https://youtu.be/vTJsn5UBkjQ
Oh yeah she has started a conditioning program. Though she wasn't in terrible condition beofr ethis (5'7" 125 and a rock climber).
And she is going to be seeing an autonomic specialist.
I think this is a re-stating of the Median Voter Theorem. Parties will adjust their stances until they are competing for the median voter.
So does the dunning for campaign contributions stop after today?
https://www.theonion.com/democratic-fundraising-email-states-james-carville-is-w-1849717661
I probably had ADHD in the 70’s but it hadn’t been invented yet. Back then we just called it being a spaz.
I assume Trump will keep asking for money.
I have paid zero attention to Musk antics since I don't use Twitter, still read this to get up to speed and it was a surprisingly great summary of what it's all about and what can be useful to know about it. Thanks!
I assume I should have continued to read Zvi even after I stopped being interested in the covid roundups?
He doesn't post very often and he posts on such a wide variety of topics that it feels like there may be one post a month that I actually want to read. Still, he's a decent writer and very thorough in his analysis, so I end up reading most of his others posts as well, even though I have no interest in them.
He's started separate non-covid roundups.
Having fewer than 10 friends, this becomes a rather high-stakes question! I think it'd also have been easier to answer back before I got Caplan-pilled about the schooling <-> intelligence mismatch...have noticed a tendency to overcorrect and dock some "intelligence" for people whose primary claim to such is education bona fides. (I think I'm also the only one in my friendgroup who's ever gotten an actual IQ test, oddly enough. Other than near-proxies like the SAT, anyway.)
Correlation would be significantly below 1. I believe that the ordinary English meaning of "intelligent" refers more to the appearance-of-smartness...The Symbolic Representation Of The Thing, versus The Thing. It's also a strongly positional, rather than absolute, scale*...more ordinal than cardinal. One might say that intelligence is in the eye of the beholder, and that there's a pervasive Wobegon Effect of people generally assuming they're more intelligent than Those People. Being able to impress, to demonstrate superiority, to do superficially intelligent things (say, crossword puzzles) - this is the stuff of "intelligent".
"g" or IQ...for that, I look at tangible results. How effective is someone at achieving their goals? Can they figure stuff out by reasoning independently? (One of my friends taught herself lockpicking by observing the mechanical properties of doorknobs, for example). How strong are they at reading, writing, math...less so in an abstract test setting, moreso in making those skills do useful things in life? (It's one thing to learn about compound interest in ECON 101, another to actually go out and open savings and investment accounts.) If they've built a computer from parts - good sign. Automobile machinations would be equivalent, if I knew somewhat-different types of people. Being able to appreciate complexity: also good. Different from __understanding__ it. There's definitely some unfortunate overlap with aesthetics here - I seem to recall you view such things through more of a class lens - but I think there's a correlation with being discomforted by What's Typically On Offer. Since it's not designed to cater to the high-IQ. At some level of "g", the cage bars become visible, and one wants...well...more. In some dimension or other.
Anyway, it'd be an interesting experiment to actually validate. Though I think too many of my friends picked up the leftist habit of tabooing IQ in general, lest the topic veers into inconveniently inequitable directions. So I doubt I could talk them into getting tested.
*https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
I think I can quite readily divide people I know into high/medium/low intelligence bands. Within those, differences are fine-grained, and I think I would want to say more definition is needed.
If you asked me who was more intelligent as between Tony and Jim, for example, I would answer that their strengths are different. Tony is really good at sizing up a situation, mastering the detail, presenting workable solutions. He built a successful career consulting in a rather niche area. He also seems to me someone who in an unpretentious way can contribute to conversations over a wide range of topics, especially in history, economics, and visual arts. Jim is an academic physicist working at a senior level at a strong UK university, seems to get published a lot as far as I can tell, and to be well connected across an international community.
I would see both Tony and Jim as highly intelligent, but in different ways: Tony is better at some things, Jim at others. If someone were to say "well, that's not how it works: you could in fact produce a single number on the same scale for both of them and it would tell you who was the most intelligent", I'd be doubtful about the value of that. At any rate, (a) T is better at X, J is better at Y conforms to everyday use of "intelligence" better than a single number and (b) fits better to the reality that different traits may be valued in different fields.
None of that is to deny that one can talk with reasonable confidence about differential intelligence: clearly, for example, Tony is more intelligent than John, who lives just down the road from us, nice guy, but just quite slow.
I am struggling to find them right now on my phone, but there have actually been studies in which participants have group discussions with each other and are then asked to rank other participants by estimated intelligence (offering estimates of actual IQ score wouldn't make sense because almost nobody has a sense of what observed intelligence corresponds to what range of IQ scores), and results show fairly large accuracies of rankings.
The only study I can find at the moment is this one looking at teachers judging their students intelligence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1747938X16300276
I'd honestly guess pretty well. People think I'm smarter than I am because I'm highly verbal; this is a mistake in my case, but as a general rule vocabulary tests are supposed to correlate pretty well to G. If the pattern of "assume someone is smart because of how they talk" holds, I'd assume most people would be targeting G pretty well in their intelligence assessments.
I think that the main way this would fail is false negatives - i.e. someone doesn't talk much, so you assume they are dumb, or they don't talk much, so they aren't that great at talking and you assume they are dumb. Overall I'd suspect it does pretty damn well compared to anything else, since there aren't that many ways people assess intelligence and by far the most common of the ones I can think of is "listening to them talk".
The Ravens Progressive Matrix Test is designed to exclude or minimalize verbal skills, vocabulary, etc. I took one and it was (toward the end) exhaustingly difficult, especially as one is on a timer.
When I was a kid and wanted to do the Mensa thing (as all children eventually do) I think they were on something like a Ravens - all pattern-match and visual, no verbal. But my understanding is you can exclude verbal from the test all you want and not get rid of the coorelation.
I've heard the same!
In studies where this has been investigated, some have controlled for how much people talk and the accuracy of intelligence judgements are still relatively high.
Out of curiosity, how do you control for something like this?
With pure statistical methods probably - measure how much they talked during the study, and calculate how much of the IQ-estimate correlation to IQ-measurement is "explained away" by conditioning on the amount of talking, and how much remains even after that.
Is this as likely to be wildly arbitrary as it sounds?
I guess use prompts to make them talk to each other? Or you could normalise each one with the word counts of each person speaking somehow?
Well, instinct does a lot here. Instinctively I suspect we believe the mother shoulders by far the greater share of child-rearing -- and I think this is just factually true in almost all cases for the very young years, say 0-5 or so[1] -- and so her opinion about whether it can be done is given much greater weight. Furthermore, we assume the mother is inherently more attached to the child, again at least when it is very young, which is probably also true[2] -- hormones are marvelous things.
For both reasons, we assume that if the *mother* gives up the child, it can only be because the situation is truly dire, enough to overcome attachment, while if the mother decides to *keep* the child, then it must be doable. In the latter case, if the father is not willing to do his (lesser) share, we rain contempt on him for weaseling out when it is not necessary.
I think Melvin hits on the same point, albeit a little more egalitarianly than I do, which makes it a more acceptable argument for these modern times when we decline to notice any difference at all between the sexes (which would make our grandparents stare and I suspect will make our grandchildren shake their heads in amazement).
----------------
[1] Personally I think that reverses later, around the teeen years, when the father's burden and influence seems more important. Doubtless it all more or less works out over the entire length of child-rearing, but it would be silly to assume contributions are matched 50/50 all 18 years all the time.
[2] Please note I am not suggesting at all that most fathers are ultimately less attached to their children, only that it takes a little time for a lot of them, they have to sort of discover how important this little creature is to them. And of course there are plenty of exceptions, cases in which fathers are immediately (or even ultimately) more attached than mothers, and vice versa.
1) yes, esp for boys.
2) the extremely dedicated nature of the human mother-child bond keeps being used to beat up on human males for not matching it. I think we should do more celebrating of the devotion of our women to the difficult task of raising neonate humans.
My working assumption slash stereotype is that if _both_ parents decide to give a child up for adoption then it must have been a completely impossible situation, whereas if one parent decides to walk out then the baby was probably just an inconvenience for them.
If two parents chose to give up their child for adoption just because it was inconvenient, then I think people would judge them very harshly indeed. I don't know how commonly that occurs in real life.
If people have children and then decide they aren't ready to be parents I would consider that fairly terrible. Human life is not something people should just bring into existence.
However, ex post facto, if parents are willing to just give away their kid, then that is probably indeed prudent, although the foster care system is rife with abuse, and the child will likely suffer terribly.
If a guy gets a girl pregnant and then decides he wants no part in raising the child, that's also pretty bad and shows the same casualness with human life. However, many perceive this as worse than the previous example, since the cost of participation would be lower.
In the first example, neither parent is up to raising the child, so if either parent were to take charge, they would assume the full parenting responsibility. In the latter example, one parent (the mother) has already assumed the parenting responsibility, so rather the being asked to assume the full mantle of fatherhood, the father is merely being asked to contribute...anything at all. But he still fails to do even that.
The damage of the decision is greater in the first case, but in the second case less is being asked and less is being offered. In that sense, of unwillingness to contribute even a little, the second is worse.
Minor note: AFAIK, there's a lot more people wanting to adopt healthy babies than there are healthy babies being put up for adoption, in the West. Insofar as there are children unable to find adoptive families, they're almost always older and usually have serious mental or physical health issues.
Fostering, specifically, adds another massive hurdle, in that IIUC it doesn't come with the certainty or permanency of adoption - to take in a troubled child and raise them as our own is hard, but rewarding. To take in a troubled child, learn to think of him as your own and help him with his issues, then have his druggie parents claim him back a couple of years later, is a horror story. That doesn't even have to be very frequent to put off a large number of prospective adopters, the possibility is terrifying and it only takes a handful of real stories spread widely to make it salient
This is very true. More specifically, children below the age of about 10 can fairly readily get adopted, and below the age of about 5 seem to be able to get adopted pretty easily even if they have mental or physical handicaps and/or come from very rough home environments. Kids aged 5-12 may have developed some pretty difficult behaviors and it may be harder to transition to a new home, no matter how well-intentioned and loving the prospective parents.
Teenagers are hard to deal with, and teenagers who have been through foster care and/or the types of situations that often result in foster care are much more difficult than normal. Teenagers rarely get adopted, often bounce from house to house, and deal with a long list of problems from these things (which causes them to act out more, continuing the cycle). The only situations I hear about where teenagers readily find adoptive homes are situations where they were in stable and loving households and then the parents died or something similarly sudden.
>More specifically, children below the age of about 10 can fairly readily get adopted
Just a sad little interjection here, last I looked in my state, this is pretty racial. White kids get adopted, black kids mostly don't. I *think* babies are different.
Unfortunately this is true. I *think* this is due to a perception (right or wrong) that black children are more likely to have internalized difficult situations. This may be very well-reasoned on the part of the adoptive parents, as with white children from very bad home lives. This could probably be studied with a clear conclusion by asking the question - are children from minority homes adopted less often after controlling for how bad their home lives were prior to being up for adoption? One point in favor of this conclusion - children in foster care for 2 or more years are much more likely (3 to 1) to be adopted if they are white. Though certainly not conclusive, holding the metric of multi-year foster care steady does narrow the possible confounders somewhat.
An odd confounder here, I did some basic Googling and apparently 23% of all adopted children are black, despite only making up 14% of the population. Also some other odd confounders - most people who adopt are white (well above their population levels) and black people are less likely to adopt.
Because in your first example 2 people are raising the child. And in the second one only 1.
I would argue 2 people is already too little. Let alone 1.
I would assume it's just a normal case of accepting the consequences of actions, with the actions in this case being sex. I think your category 2 has a subset of those who want no direct part in the life of their child but voluntarily meet some expected obligations such as paying support, recognising paternity(/maternity, although that's generally hard to deny at the time of birth) and even sending presents and the like, who significantly are not generally regarded as losers even if they aren't paragons of virtue in anybody's eyes. The basic fact is that the more responsibility someone takes for the child they (carelessly?) created, the less negative reaction they get. So people in category 1, who are taking full responsibility and seeking to make things right, get respect for accepting the consequences and finding a solution. Those in category 2 are basically seen as walking away from a problem of their own making and leaving it to others to deal with, and therefore as socially undesirable.
Note this these rules are socially constructed: there's plenty of societies where at least some classes of men can disown an illegitimate child with minimal consequence, generally because it would be socially more disruptive to recognise the paternity than to ignore it, for reasons of honour or the like. And it's not exactly long ago in western countries that adoption of a child was a secret affair because of the stigma attached to the having a baby out of wedlock, to the point that the father probably never even had a say. So what we regard as acceptable now is not a universal or a constant judgement, but reflects the fact that as regards sex and childbirth our (western) societies generally believe that personal responsibility is required, and we pass moral judgement on the individual's actions, rightly or wrongly, through this filter.
I think what you are missing is an interceding, much more primary/important right:
1. You are supposed to be allowed to raise your own kid.
If mom and dad both decide they don't want to raise the kid, AND find someone to wholly assume all their responsibilities, we go "Oh, ok, no problems then - they both voluntarily gave up the uber-important right not to have your kid taken away, and they provided for the kid."
If one of the two decides they want to raise the kid, then "find someone else to wholly assume their responsibilities" in the sense that ownership of the kid is handed off isn't going to be possible to accomplish in a clean way. So the non-participatory partner is still on the hook; the responsibilities for the child still exist.
Here's some scenarios where that gets more complex, but I think fail to defeat that logic:
1. Dad doesn't want the kid, and pays child support for a time. But eventually mom gets married to someone else who assumes at least some fatherhood responsibilities (and associated perks). I think Dad is still on the hook here; mom already had to sacrifice a lot of attractiveness as a mate (single moms havei t hard), and she'd be sacrificing even more if "deadbeat dad's responsibilities will be foisted on you if you marry this woman".
2. Dad doesn't want the kid and pays child support for a time (say ten or fifteen years) and then mom dies, and he wants to dump the kid despite whatever familiarity/context has been built in that time. I'm of the opinion the kid should probably get a bit of a say here.
Anyway, for what you want to have happen in this hypothetical to come about, you'd basically have to say "you either don't get to raise your kid, or you have to take on someone else's half of the responsibility purely because they don't wanna do it". Nobody will accept bypassing the former so you can't get the latter.
So let's create a unit and call it "one raising of a child" (1RAC). Imagine it as a basket of goods and services, sort of like the consumer price index, indicating what a child is "owed". We can argue about what to put in there, but broadly these are the kinds of things we might consider while we have that argument:
1. Finances/resources. Food, clothes, and shelter; toys and games. stuff like that.
2. Educational/care. Time spent cleaning the child and teaching the child to clean itself. Lessons imparted. Habits built. Cultural traditions passed down.
3. Emotional. Love, support, friendship, companionship - things that build trust and overall emotional health/security.
But whatever we choose to put in the basket, most people agree that *there is a basket*; very few people are comfortable with a newborn in a dumpster. More-but-still-few are OK with the idea of abandoning the child to a group home or similar, to be raised by the state; it's considered a bad state of affairs.
And whether or not we would agree on what should go in the basket, pretty much anything you'd put in there would take time/resources/effort to provide. We can imagine a situation where the child isn't owed anything but category 1., but there's still a "divisible share" of that category - we can split the costs of raising the child. We can split the effort of teaching the child things or providing it a positive emotional environment, etc. Or we can say "one person handles more money/finance provision, and one person handles more emotional provision", etc.
I think that it's fairly hard to argue that raising a child takes resources *of some kind* and that these resources can either be split between multiple parties, fulfilled by just one party, or can go unfulfilled.
Your arguments all (seem to) rely on the idea that one parent should be able to say "Nope, not doing it; you have to pay out all the costs for this alone. Fuck you, fuck that; it is right that I foist this all on you." That's what it takes for dead-beat to be able to walk away - that's the assumption you need for it to be OK.
But for that to be fair in a situation where both people participated in the conception voluntarily (i.e. nobody poked holes in condoms, no rape, etc.), you need one of two bucket-destroying assumptions to be true:
1. It's reasonable for a parent who doesn't want to be involved to unilaterally force an abortion which is successfully carried out
2. It's reasonable for one parent to demand the other parent hand off the child to another party who then assumes responsibility for the bucket.
My original post was about the necessity of 1-2. It sets up these scenarios:
1. If abortion is reasonable to demand, then it's unreasonable for the other person not to go along with it, and they should be subjected to the full cost of the child.
2. If 1. isn't acceptable, but "put the child up for adoption" is both an option and reasonable to demand, and one parent doesn't go along with it, they are unreasonable and should have to pay all the costs.
The problem you are running into is that most people aren't OK with forced abortion (even if they are pro-abortion, which is part of why the "choice" euphemism is popular!) and most people are similarly not OK with a parent having their child stripped from them against their will. Since they don't find them reasonable to demand, they don't consider it to "shift" where responsibility is assigned based on what happens at those decision-points.
The only other obvious place in which responsibility can be assigned is "conception". Because of that, most people read your argument like this:
"I demand you get an abortion, or else you have to face a penalty of taking on ALL my responsibility here."
And they react poorly to that, and you get expected "a person who abandons their responsibility in this way has done something shitty and wrong" phrasing (like deadbeat) to describe how they feel about it.
If you want to get around that, I'm arguing that the only way you can do that is to successfully convince people that either 1 or 2 above is true. If you can do that, then the rest of what you want (one person can walk away free of responsibility or shame) falls into place. But if you can't, you will continue to see "he's a deadbeat" be a common sentiment.
My life changed forever the moment I held my first born in my arms. Do you have kids?
Eh. The situation is very dynamic. There are very strong emotional interactions between parent and child, and between the parents, especially when the child is young. These change things immensely for all concerned, so assuming the emotional status quo at birth is a good guide to what it will be 5 years later is not very sound. It rarely is. Most of the time, it has improved considerably -- most people, even if they are surprised by a birth, or feel unprepared for it, resent it, come to adore the child and treasure their parenthood relatively quickly. After all, both baby and parents are wired to go in that direction, since in the primitive state *all* childbirth is a surprise, or at least not planned. There are certainly exceptions, but given the chaos and uncertainty of human history, if it was required that human parents be in a prepared and poised state, ready for a birth, in order to cherish and rear the child with affection, the human species would've gone extinct millenia ago.
It's okay for parents to feel "pressured or obliged". That's exactly how most of us feel, a lot of the time (at least when the kids are young).
Some of the time I spend with my kids is pure joy and there's nothing I'd rather be doing. Other bits are plain old obligation and I'd much rather be doing something else. It's usually some kind of combination of the two. If we only spent time with our kids when we felt like it, then our kids would be dangerously unattended a lot of the time.
It's part of being a parent that you have to spend a lot of time doing things that you don't particularly want to do. You just have to learn to hide how you feel about it.
Sure? But you've put forth a scenario where said child *can't have the good outcome*. The original situation is one where at least one parent doesn't want the kid, no matter what, with the original complaint being that they have to sort of pay into the system.
But more than that, this isn't actually a great excuse *so long as you acknowledge the dead-beat has some responsibilities here*. Like, very specifically "I'm supposed to take GOOD care of this kid, but I've decided treat him like shit, which thus justifies me leaving" is just negotiating if said person was shitty just once, or twice.
I'm not saying there's no complexity here. Like the amount it's reasonable to say "you made your bed, now lie in it" depends on how big of a deal you think abortion is/how reasonable you think it is to demand one, among other things. If you don't think the person should have any responsibility at all, then the dead-beat gets off the hook both times - he shouldn't be forced to help raise the kids, well or otherwise.
Once deadbeat has responsibility, though, "I'm going to do a *real shitty job*, so it's OK that I just fully leave and offer no support at all, and I get away with both entirely with no judgment" doesn't work anymore. It's sort of an solution in search of an appropriate problem, as it stands.
There's also the fact that if a man wants the child and the woman doesn't, she can have an abortion and the father has no say in it.
Feminists often say that feminism literally just means sexual equality, but it's hard to see how abortion rights and child support laws have anything to do with men and women being equal, because men have far fewer rights than women in this situation. You might think that's fair given X Y Z reasons, but it's certainly not something being supported strictly for the sake of "equality".
It’s not necessarily that it’s wrong for only one of them to have the attitude, but to insist on it when the other parent doesn’t indicates some sort of failure of negotiation.
Pragmatic differences in child outcomes?
Children raised by single parents face additional challenges and tend to fare worse statistically in some ways compared to those raised by 2 parents [citation needed]. When both parents give up their kid early, there’s a good chance they can be adopted by a loving, supportive family. When only one gives up, they make it harder for the remaining parent and disadvantage the kid. Hurting the innocent kid seems like a reasonable thing to disapprove of. Also, the desire to avoid social condemnation might encourage some would-be deadbeats to provide some support that can help children have a better shot at growing up well.
In consequentialist terms, either of the disagreeing parents could have prevented the bad outcome by flipping their decision, so they're both equally guilty of causing the bad outcome. Why then is there this vast gulf of moral status between the two parents when they disagree?
Some ideas:
1. Maybe deadbeat behavior is more elastic from social condemnation than than the behavior of an ill-equipped single parent who refuses to put their kid up for adoption.
2. Emotional/political baggage from mid-20th century policy overreaches in eugenics makes people reluctant to admit anyone is unfit to raise a child even in cases where it's obviously true.
Kind of related to these but different: people generally deserve the right to raise their own kids, so one parent abandoning a child shouldn’t force their partner to also do so. Shaming someone into supporting their kid doesn’t seem morally equivalent to shaming someone into abandoning their kid.
Wanting to raise your own kid and wanting to abandon your own kid seem morally equivalent to you?
Also what if my wife dies in childbirth? Your reasoning would imply that I am morally obligated to give my kid up for adoption.
It might help to note that not all adoptive parents are great, and it’s definitely possible that a single parent could provide a better environment than an adoptive couple.
A related hypothetical: if I want to play a tricky video game and my brother doesn’t, my failure rate will be higher than if he were to help. In this hypothetical, my options now are to try playing solo, or give the game away to my cousins who will play co-op. Yeah, maybe you could argue I’m morally obligated to let my cousins try, as they’re more likely to save the Princess than I am, but it’s my game, and I deserve the right to try saving the princess myself.
Parenthood is harder difficulty on single player compared to co-op (on average), but that doesn’t mean a parent deserves condemnation for giving it a try.
“Abandon“ sort of smuggles in connotations of neglect but actually there is a large surplus of couples who want to adopt, and on average they’d do better than a single parent at maximizing the child’s welfare. So you’d be trading off the child’s welfare against the entertainment of the parent. Do parents “deserve” to be allowed to make that category of trade offs? Sometimes, within reason. Stay out all night drinking and forgetting to feed the kid? Nah. Doomscrolling all evening instead of talking to your kids? Kind of shitty but legally permissible.
“Entertainment” smuggles sort of smuggles in connotations of doing something for your own selfish amusement, but actually much of raising a kid involves putting the needs of the child above your own entertainment. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist being a bit cheeky with my phrasing here).
Framing the choice to raise your own child alone as being in the same class of behavior as intentionally neglecting your child doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
I’ll also note that you’d be trading off your child’s welfare on average, but not necessarily in a specific case. It’s more comparable to letting your kid play basketball. They are more likely to get a leg injury than if you prohibited it, so on average it’s riskier. If you knew for sure that they would end up with a lifetime of painful walking due to a bad leg injury, or course letting them play would be stupid, and you should convince them to play a lower risk sport instead. But without prescience, it doesn’t seem neglectful for a parent to allow their kid to take that risk in general.
>Children raised by single parents face additional challenges and tend to fare worse statistically in some ways compared to those raised by 2 parents
HEAVILY confounded by the fact that the per capita majority of children raised in single parent households are black
>>Children raised by single parents face additional challenges and tend to fare worse statistically in some ways compared to those raised by 2 parents
>HEAVILY confounded by the fact that the per capita majority of children raised in single parent households are black
I am interested in critiquing this statement.
I hope you notice the distinction between the statement "A majority of Black children in the United States grow up in single-parent homes", and the statement "A majority of the children who grow up in single-parents homes in the United States are Black". It is very probable that the first statement is false, and the second statement is true.
Doing a quick web-search, I find <a href="https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-single-parent-families-by-race-and-ethnicity#detailed/1/any/false/1729,37,871,870,573,869,36,868,867,133/10,11,9,12,1,185,13/432,431">this link</a>.
It claims to have hard numbers to answer this question, and shows them for the years 2010 to 2019. Data is said to be sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau, and its American Community Survey.
Across those years, the numbers of Black/African-American children living in single-parent households range from ~5.9 million to ~6.5 million. By percentage, about 64% to 65% of Black children live in single-parent households.
The numbers for non-Hispanic-White are ~9.3 million to ~8.5 million, (about 23% to 24% of non-Hispanic-White children) while the numbers for Hispanic/Latino are ~6.6 million to ~7.3 million (about 41% to 42% of Hispanic/Latino children).
The numbers for "Two or more races" are between 1.5 million and 1.9 million (about 40% to 42% of children who can classified as belonging to two or more races).
The categories Asian/Pacific-Islander and American-Indian come in around 0.5 million and 0.3 million, respectively.
For every 10 Black children living in single-parent homes in the U.S., there are 12 Hispanic children, 14 non-Hispanic-White children, and 3 multi-racial children.
Put another way: if you had a statistically-accurate sample of 100 children of single-parent homes in the U.S., then 25 of those children would be Black , 30 of them would be Hispanic, and 34 would be non-Hispanic-White. About 8 would be Bi-racial. The remainder would be 2 children who are Asian/Pacific-Islander , and 1 that is American-Indian.
If the social statistics show that children who grow up in single-parent homes "face additional challenges and tend to fare worse [in school/work/etc] statistics", then it looks like that is true in some way for all of the Black, non-Hispanic-White, Hispanic/Latino, and Bi-Racial children in the U.S.
This isn't to say that the bad effects of single-parent-homes are the same for all races (or economic classes). But it is worth asking whether the typical Black child (of a particular social/economic strata) growing up a single-parent home fares worse than a comparable typical White child (of the similar social/economic status) growing up in a single-parent home.
Also confounded by the fact that the kind of people who end up as single parents are statistically pretty different from the kind who don't, and some of those differences are likely to be heritable.
You cut out my [citation needed] note! I agree, it gets complicated, and that was my attempt to punt on doing an in-depth analysis while acknowledging it would be useful here.
For a little taste of what that might look like, just looking at black households, my claims hold up: https://ifstudies.org/blog/less-poverty-less-prison-more-college-what-two-parents-mean-for-black-and-white-children which uses data from here https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
From the article: “black children in homes headed by single parents are about 3.5 times more likely to be living in poverty compared to black children living with two parents in a first marriage.”
Obviously more caveats apply (correlation vs causation, etc).
Just to note, I usually don't read [citation needed] as a "I don't want to analyze in now, but it might be useful" and rather interpret it as "this is obvious and it would be silly to disagree." I get that you didn't intend it that way, but for the future, that's the way that I guess some people like me might read it
If you want to raise your kid, but your partner doesn't, you're stuck raising your kid alone. Adoptive parents are generally couples so they don't have that problem, and if a single parent does adopt then it's a situation that they sought out.
Is it even possible in the USA for single people to adopt? I'm under the impression that the requirements are fairly strict (arguably too strict?) and require (married?) couples.
I'm confident it is as I know one person who has done so, though I'm not sure through the US adoption system.
I mean...no? Do you imagine every widow/widower who didn't want to raise their kid alone gives them up for adoption?
Okay, but that's not what you asked in the question I was answering.
On the question you're asking, no, because the obligation isn't to the parent who wants to raise the child, it's to the child. That obligation can be severed by adoption, but not by unilateral disavowal by the party who desires not to be a parent. There's a moral argument that it should, but I disagree.
There's an unavoidable need for care of children, which takes time and money, this is an inherent risk of potentially procreative sex.
ETA: To clarify, I think you're assuming only a two step preference:
1) Have a partner and a child
2) Have neither
Rather than:
1) Have a partner and a child
2) Have a child
3) Have neither
And yes, child support is relevant to the sorting of (2) and (3), but our society tends to prioritize (for reasons I believe are probably just and correct) maintaining biological families and so tends to support someone who wants (2) over someone who wants (3) (at least contingent on the existence of a child, as forced impregnation/abortion are generally quite illegal).
Not necessarily. I am currently pregnant and really really really don't want to raise my kid alone, but if anything happened to my husband, I'd do it--no doubt about it. I feel a certain level of attachment to and love for the kid already, plus I have very thorough knowledge about the kind of upbringing and resources I could provide the child. From my perspective, adoptive parents would be a shot in the dark by comparison.
Mazel tov!
I suppose it might be, but a lot of people *like* their kids.
He seems to be in over his head, but the whole debacle is also amusing to watch while he crushes people who make the world worse. I just enjoy the ride with popcorn in hand.
The most surprising part to me was that he was willing to publicly try to renege on his deal to buy Twitter, despite presumably knowing he would probably be forced to go through with the purchase. Weird that he would voluntarily incur so much damage to his reputation.
Well, he's the richest man in the world and we're just schmos on the Internet, so....I might watch Usain Bolt lose a 100m race I was sure he could win, but I'd be hesitant to critique his technique in detail.
Nothing about Musk's life story is consistent with him being an "idiot".
If you want to argue that he's a very smart man who occasionally makes high-stakes foolish decisions then I'm right there with you. I make those myself sometimes but thankfully my bad decisions get less media scrutiny.
He's had astounding success in several fields at once. When he talks about the technical sides of his businesses, he seems to know what he's talking about, and people who have worked with him vouch that he does. On what basis are you fairly confident that he's an idiot? The possibility seems highly unlikely to me.
:- His track record suggests that he's very good at certain sorts of things, but also that he clearly has some fairly extreme mental and social limitations.
:- Running Twitter looks superficially like the kind of thing he's done well in the past.
:- What I've heard of his decisions and actions there so far look, to my untrained eye, spectacularly dumb, but this is not an area I trust my judgement in.
:- "Running a business heavily dependent on popular goodwill" vs "running a business dependent on being able to prove to experts that your products work" might be different skills, of which he has only the latter?
:- If I were a gambling man, I would bet on his purchase being bad, and probably very bad, for Twitter-as-a-business (impact for Twitter-as-a-community is more subjective), but not heavily or at long odds.
What is an "advertising investor"? An ad buyer?
Are you referring to where a bunch of advertisers pulled their advertising even though nothing at Twitter had changed except that Elon Musk took over and woke people don't like Elon Musk?
Even a non-woke advertiser would be well advised to pull back after such a significant change in ownership and foreshadowing of policy changes. Big advertisers are inherently very conservative. What's it going to cost you to pause your Twitter buys for a few weeks until the dust settles? Basically noise. (Twitter isn't even that big an advertising platform, and you can just shift your ad buys over to Google or Youtube and reduce even the modest effect of a reduction in Twitter spend.) And for that caution you avoid any possibility of something blowing up in your face, either because of a weird new policy, or some random chaos caused by the shifts going on.
Now if 40% of advertisers stay away for 6 months, we'll know Musk has a problem.
It’s not true that nothing changed. Twitter algorithm first discourages swears and hate speech, then bans the user after
Several infractions. As soon as Musk took over he shut down that form of content moderation. Use of words like “nigger” and “kike” surged in next 24 hrs. I did searches of the 2 word to see what the tweets were like. A few just repeated the previously forbidden word as many times as Twitter character limit allowed, but many were substantive and genuinely hate-filled. — eg photos of Nazis paired with text about how sinister and sneaky Jews are
No I’m not under the impression there’s a racial slurs knife switch. Um, are you under the impression
I’m a dum dum?
Here are my reasons for thinking there was some sort of setting
for racial slurs and certain other kinds of offensive language that was changed right as Elon took
over:
-Twitter definitely has been monitoring for certain words. What was on the list seemed to be racial and ethnic slirs, some of the cruder swears, and insulting terms such as “moron.” Maybe a dozen times in the last few months I have drafted a tweet with a crass or insulting word in it: usually “fuck,” used for emphasis; one time “morons”. When I hit POST I got a Twitter screen saying something like “people don’t isually put up Tweets containing one of the words you used. Are you sure you want to post that?” When I get that screen I would remove the word, because I got banned once a couple years ago for a particularly pungent Twitter swear. So there is content moderation at the level of individual words, and don’t think it would take take long to add a word to its lost, subtract a word, or subtract *all* words. Looks to me like Elon had all
words substracted.
-I did do the searches for “nigger” and “kike” myself. Several of the tweets I saw actually referred to the fact that it was now possible to use the word on Twitter.
-www.Montclair.edu/school-of-communication-and-media/2022/10/29/study-finds-hate-speech-increases/
-After doing the search I replied
to one of the worst tweets
With one of my own I’m which I used a crass sexual swear that is definitely worse than “fuck.” (For the record I did not call the poster
an X, I used the word in reference to a politician he had mentioned admiringly.). When I hit “post” I got the Twitter “Are you sure you want to say that?” screen. Posted
anyhow and Immediately got a notice that I was banned for 12 hrs. However, the ban didn’t take effect. I continued posting for the rest of the day with no problem. Since then I have experimented with tweeting every swear
I know, and no longer even get the warning screen.
The word I used in a tweet the day I did the search was the word that got me a permanent ban 2 or 3 years ago. I have never seen it I used on Twitter. It is a very rude word. This time Twitter told me I was banned for 12 hrs, but in fact the ban did not work. Couple of years ago I was locked out of my account instantly
I have never posted a racial slur, except in recent tweets in which I have used them when commenting on the effect their use is going to have on advertisers. I do not put them in quotation marks in these tweets, and Twitter does not react to their presence.
When I did my search for racial slurs, there were multiple tweets saying things along the lines of
“Haha we can say nigger now. Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger . . .”
And there’s this: www.Montclair.edu/school-of-communication-and-media/2022/10/29/study-finds-hate-speech-increases/
I really think all this adds up to a pretty good case that some change had been made in the forbidden word part of the moderation system, which seems like it would not be difficult to change.
Musk has explicitly stated that he did not change the moderation policies, furthermore there are tweets from the moderation guys saying they had a surge of hate speech that they brought under control and showed some graphs/charts
I read that he fired thousands and is seeking to re-hire dozens. And given Twitter's financials (and the fact that they agreed to, indeed tried to compel, the sale) it's hard not to suspect even Twitter's top management knew the company was seriously bloated and needed savage reform. Fortunate for them, Musk is willing to be the hatchet man, and they can float away on golden parachutes.
I skimmed the NYTimes interview you appear to be referencing here, but it seemed to me the request was for examples of code to be made available to Musk's (Tesla?) engineers who are helping advise during this process. The notion that they were looking for quantity instead of quality appeared to be an assumption made within the NYT piece.
Second, it's not clear at all that half of the engineers were fired when the teams most clearly impacted based on initial reporting were to do with "content moderation" or "human rights" (lol).
Twitter's financials were not great and so it is inevitable that cuts had to be made somewhere to turn the company around. Were the cuts reasonable? I have no idea, as I'm not even a twitter user (I think it's a horrible platform, fwiw, and Musk probably can't fix that). But I have been through an acquisition at a large company, which makes me think some of the hot takes being made on this are from people who haven't been privy to this process, which is inevitably messy, confusing, and imperfect.
Is any of this true, though? He has not let back in any bad actors (this is a thing that could happen in the future). He has not implemented a new verified user system (same). And since when has firing people (I don't believe your claim of "who had written the least code") harmed the reputation of a company? It doesn't make sense.
>He has not implemented a new verified user system (same)
He announced that you will be able to pay $8 for an icon that previously indicated a verified user. That's new.
I believe the feature hasn't been implemented *yet*, but if you see a volcano about to erupt then you don't need to wait for the lava to actually start flowing before you decide that there's a problem.
>And since when has firing people (I don't believe your claim of "who had written the least code") harmed the reputation of a company? It doesn't make sense.
Literally half of their employees. No matter how clever your scheme is for choosing who to fire (and it can't be *that* clever considering how little time Musk took to make the decision), you can't snap away half the company and expect business to continue as usual.
I've noticed that when it suits, liberals take a free market approach to things, but when it doesn't suit, they will say that these businesses need more regulation.
That's hardly unique to lefties. Look at all the righties who wanted the Trump DoJ to sue the social media platforms under antitrust law and break them up.
In think in general both left and right love the free market when they're winning in it, and find a reason it needs correction (or is being "distorted" by some conspiracy that needs purging) when they're losing.
I think "all companies must pay for ads on twitter, even if they don't want to" would be significantly less sensible than almost all existing business regulations.
Obviously
"there are many working people who use Twitter to find clients"
Why or how? How do you go looking for a possible client on Twitter? Do you put up a tweet about "I'm a [doctor lawyer banker thief]" and hope it will be seen by people looking for same?
I not sure who Machine interface had in mind, but I think authors, podcasters and pundits use Twitter to maintain public visibility and promote their content — also people in the entertainment field. In fact Scott Galloway was suggesting that a reasonable way for Twitter to make money would be to charge these people a hefty sum to use it — something like 10
Or 20% of the amount of their income that’s dependent on Twitter. Seem like it could
work. There really is no substitute for Twitter if you’re a journalist, author, podcaster who wants
to keep people aware that you’re alive and thinking every single day. I mean where else are they going to post — freakin
Facebook?
I wouldn't necessarily say he's an idiot per se. But he seems to have fallen I to the common trap where someone is successful in one area and over estimates the transferability of their expertise. This seems to be particularly bad with rich people who end up surrounded by people whose job is depenendent on them, so don't get the normal negative feedback that prevents most people going ahead with bad ideas
Many people fall into this trap, but Elon has founded or led (or otherwise been involved in running) at least three massively successful industry-revolutionising companies at this point.
He's never bought an underperforming large company and fixed it before, so maybe that's not in his wheelhouse. But I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now. Best case scenario he fixes twitter and makes the world a better place, worst case scenario he destroys twitter and makes the world a better place.
+1
The worry is that he could make Twitter a financially successful business whose side effect is making the world a worse place, instead of a financially unsuccessful business whose side effect is making the world a worse place.
Agree with this. I think Peter Thiel is another notable example
What do you base that on? Thiel has been very successful in a whole bunch of different areas. Eg, running Paypal, palantir, becoming a thought leader, destroying gawker, etc.
If he had just stuck to one area, like most people do, he would have missed out on a lot of successes.
I personally think Thiel's opinions on STEM are mostly wrong. He believes AGI in the near future is unlikely, that the real risk of AI is surveillance by the CCP, that cryptocurrencies are the way of the future. He also thinks progress in STEM has slowed a lot.
I think these are all things that he would like to be true, as they would fit nicely with his ideological preconceptions. e.g. he believes AI is authoritarian while crypto is libertarian, so he wants the latter to succeed. The theme of stagnation of science fits into his worries about the stagnation of American government. I think this causes him to overlook the actual facts.
Why no chance that he will make very little difference in anything major at Twitter? Personally I would say that's the most likely scenario.
Maybe 10% genius, 20% overextended, 70% no major changes to Twitter in the foreseeable future. Charging for blue checks and similar administrative changes wouldn't count as major to me. For major I am talking about your "skyrocket value" or "burn to the ground" results.
My understanding is that because he bought Twitter at an overvaluation, if he doesn't make changes, then he has overextended himself. There is some middle ground, but it looks more like "Musk fixes enough stuff to get out relatively unscathed, and twitter is marginally better" than "Musk sits on twitter for a couple years and then resells it"
I'm going to presume you typed this message on your phone, because the spelling is atrocious and if I thought this was how you usually wrote, I'd dismiss you out of hand.
Okay, so you invented a religion once. And? Did you promulgate it? Did you convince any people to follow it? What did you do with it, after you invented it? Did you drop it?
If you did drop it, don't you feel any duty towards those who may have taken it seriously? Was it just a game for you, a way of "anyone can make up dumb shit and get others to believe it"?
And if so, why should I take seriously any of your undiscovered physics of consciousness? Maybe this is just another intellectual game until you get bored, and then whatever poor fool you roped in to help you will be left holding the bag when you clear off.
I have a limited skillet, still it's cast iron and I love it. :^) You are hardly ever kind, but often true and necessary and I love you. George.
So you prefer sloppiness, which gives me a fair idea of what your "undiscovered physics of consciousness" is going to turn out to be - stoner talk.
Do you know that if you tap the ellipses at the bottom there is an Edit Comment option?
The fundamental problem is there is as-yet not good way to monetize longterm matchmaking. All dating apps make more money when they fail at matchmaking, because they make more money if you keep coming back to the app.
Assuming monetizing longterm matchmaking is within the social Overton window - I'm still unclear whether one is allowed to "put a price on love" these days - why not take a cue from voc-ed/apprenticeship/etc models, and reward platforms some small % of a future couple's combined-earnings-above-individual-expectations? That'd create some skin in the game, or at least start to offer alternative incentives to endless lemon market based on whales. Or a different tweak: users don't pay anything *until* they're matched up successfully.
Although I suppose securing proof in both cases would be...difficult. Though there's certainly a market for people who'd trade surveillance for companionship.
People always say this, but I'm not sure it's true. Plenty of people/companies make money by solving people's problems once and for all.
A good eye surgeon (for instance) who fixes people's eyes permanently is not going to be outcompeted by a bunch of lousy ones who keep doing a bad job so patients have to come back. Word will get around, and people will choose the good one over the bad one.
If you came up with an online dating app that actually worked really well, then you could make a lot of money even if you only saw each customer once. I don't think it's an incentives problem, it's just that building a really good online dating business is really hard.
I said what I meant specifically, not as a generalization.
You can pay to solve someone's eye problems once and for all because there's a functioning market for that service which has objective standards that are easy to verify, and simple contracts you can sign, laws defining medical malpractice, etc. A surgeon who promises to fix your vision can tell you with 95 percent certainty that your vision after the surgery will be 20/20, with a 4.9 percent chance of something a bit better or worse than that and a .1 percent chance of severely worse, or something approximately to that effect.
A matchmaker can't credibly tell you that if you pay them 20,000 dollars that you will live happily ever after with your one true love, or even have a 90 percent chance of doing so. On the flip side, a customer can't credibly tell you that if you provide them with a good match, they'll pay you 20,000 dollars conditional on them actually getting married, because people regularly renege on contracts for far less than that amount.
As I said, no one has YET come up with a good way to align the incentives such that a website can offer this service at a profitable price to a large number of people. I don't think it's impossible, but I sure haven't figured out a way to do it.
And I absolutely do believe it's an incentive problem, because there are dozens if not hundreds of dating apps that all mostly suck in the same ways because they all exist in the exact same incentive environment based on monetizing via advertising and/or premium usability features.
Speaking of Aella, I agree with her evaluation of the common failure mode of "date me" docs (it was in a tweet, can't immediately find it so I'm paraphrasing): people love the chance to introspect out loud about themselves at great length, if given the chance they will (mis)use a date-me doc to do this. Based on my experience on OkC, someone could write a long, earnest, introspective blurb about the rich intricacies of their own inner lives and dating preferences, and completely miss relevant character defects that were immediately apparent to me within 20 minutes of meeting them.
Personally I'm not optimistic about the ability of any dating site to give as much relevant information as just 20 minutes of in-person interaction, so my ideal dating site(s) would be ones that give very superficial information within as narrow a niche as possible. Like, if there were a dating site for mildly autistic Reformed Christians, then within that pool I would filter out my dealbreakers (eg outside my age bracket, lives too far away) and set up dates with whoever was left. Do the more nuanced filtering in person.
But I'm getting the feeling that rationalist dating culture tends to gravitate towards the opposite strategy (casting a narrow net within a wide net, as opposed to my casting a wide net within a narrow net). That would explain the existence of date-me docs which are otherwise confusing to me.
Yeah, it really declined in quality, especially when they turned it into a swiping game.
The problem with those docs is discoverability. If you have a high profile career or social media presence, people might find you, but for everyone else it doesn't work.
Reddit has multiple relationship-seeking forums and you can write as much as you want, but they are going to have a selection bias on who sees your profile. If you are trying to cast a wide net, its hard to beat Tinder just on name recognition.
Rationalists might be like other niche interests (childfree, etc) where, outside of major cities, there just isn't sufficient density for them to matchmaking properly.
I think a billionaire funding a dating app that operates at a loss and optimizes for number and quality of matches is a reasonable forward-looking solution. Not Musk though, has to be someone with genuine altruism.