umm i just want to be a part of the experiment so im putting out a general query of mine
So yeah we know blackholes exist right and they are quite litterally a rupture in space time due to gravity we also know that blackholes can move like the one at the centre of our galaxy.
My question is at the singularity where time and space change positions how does the blackhole move if its not in the space like giving a hypothetical for a stone to move in a room it has to be in the room right we can say the even horizon moves alr but how do we know if the singularity which has no space or is not in space can move through our space
The punctuation of that comment is far below the ACX average, but maybe that's okay.
I don't think a physicist would agree that a black hole is "quite litterally a rupture in space time" or even that "time and space change positions" in a singularity. What would that mean? There are three spatial dimensions and one time dimension; how can they "switch positions"?
What is "a thought" anyway? What do people mean when they say "a thought", or when they say they have "no thoughts"? I have always considered anything that goes on in one's conscious mind to be "a thought" or "thoughts", but then I was very puzzled by the exchange between a woman and a monk quoted in the last article:
'“How long has it been since you were last lost in thought?”
“I haven’t had any thoughts for over a week,” the woman replied.'
Clearly *something* is going on in her conscious mind (and that of the monk, for that matter) for her to be able to even register that someone is asking a question, and give a reply. But everyone seems totally fine with the implied idea that some conscious thinking process is happening, which, however, is not made up of "thoughts".
Is "a thought" only meant to refer to a verbalized thought, i.e. something which is said by the internal narrator and heard by whatever listens to the internal narrator? Are people calling themselves enlightened just because they learned to stop verbalizing all their thoughts? Are people who don't verbalize their thoughts automatically more enlightened without even trying?
I suppose “I haven’t had any thoughts for over a week” means either that the woman thinks very little, or that she has an unusual definition of "thought" that excludes most of what I would call "thoughts" from it.
I think a thought is (1) an idea or hypothesis or inference, but potentially a minor one that doesn't rise to the level of importance that earns the term 'idea' or 'hypothesis', or (2) mental speech. A thought need not be verbalized. Since I verbalize most of my thoughts, I'm going to say that nonverbalized thoughts are not more enlightened.
> But everyone seems totally fine with the implied idea that some conscious thinking process is happening, which, however, is not made up of "thoughts".
I think the point of the story was, she was to say the least a little bit ahead of herself, and the Monk was calling her out in the inscrutable way.
I vote no, no, no on the other three inquiries.
With the possible exception of taking a vow of silence as a path towards enlightenment.
"Learn about the biggest problems facing humanity with our new World's Biggest Problems Quiz!
This new quiz will test your knowledge of three of the world’s biggest problems. We chose these issues because they are relatively large, neglected, and solvable:
• Global health - e.g. how many children die every year from malaria?
• Animal welfare - e.g. how many chickens are killed for meat every year?
• Existential risk - e.g. how many nuclear weapons are there in the world?"
I did terribly on all three quizzes which I should hang my head on, given all the information on these topics on this very Substack. Shows how much attention I pay, I suppose!
The thing is, I don't agree that "how many chickens are killed for meat every year?" *is* one of "the world's greatest problems facing humanity". That "What percent of global agricultural land is used for farmed animals? 75% (Our World in Data)" is interesting and is arguably a problem that needs to be solved (we should be using this land not to support animals but to grow crops for humans, discuss).
But do I care that 70 billion chickens are killed for meat every year? No, I do not. You can get me on "conditions the birds are kept in" but not on "will end up as tasty Sunday roast on your table".
"Are there more overall neurons in the human or fish populations?
Correct Answer: Fish outweigh human neurons by ∼16x (William MacAskill What We Owe The Future (p. 271))"
Yes, and? What are those fish doing with all those neurons as against what we are doing with ours? If I'm only sixteen times smarter than a fish, maybe that makes me very dumb, but I'm still sixteen times smarter than a fish. Or at least, by weight we have sixteen times fewer, but we also have a lot fewer fins, scales, swim bladders and the like. Do I care about that deficiency, either?
Now if there were a duelling Human Collective Unconsciousness versus a Piscine Collective Unconsciousness, then I might care (because then there would be hive-mind intelligence and the sixteen times outweighing *would* be a real difference that made a real difference), but in that case my patriotic duty to my species would mean I should Eat More Fish.
This raw number on neurons is meaningless; is this supposed to make me care that fish are intelligent or sapient or have feeeelings like the Disney movie about Finding Nemo? You could rustle up an incubator-full of neurons in a lab that outdid a given weight of "human in their brains" neurons, but it wouldn't mean anything, because that would just be a load of tissue in petri dishes versus organised brains in an entire organism doing something.
This kind of feel-good emotional blackmail (think about the cluck-clucks! think about the little fishies!) is the kind of thing that doesn't work on me and makes me think less of EA type projects.
Or at least, that websites like this are, for rationalists, the equivalent of all those "what is your inner goddess?" quizzes online; fun time-wasting entertainment, but ultimately pointless.
I wasn't impressed with this quiz; it had several issues. Some spoilers ahead.
Certain questions depended on a certain definition of a term that was not provided:
- "How many children have lead poisoning": how much lead is "lead poisoning"? I heard there is no "safe" level, and also no one is exposed to exactly zero lead, so this question is meaningless without a threshold, and given what the answer was, I doubt very much it is talking about an amount of lead that fits the ordinary meaning of the word "poisoning".
- "What causes the most premature deaths": define "premature". Is 75 years old a "premature" age to die? 80 years? Based on the answer to this question, I suspect "premature death" means something like "any death not caused directly by ageing itself".
- I think there was a question about how many eggs were free-range (not mentioning the UK) but the answer was "Most eggs are free-range in the UK" (and only in the UK) but I got it wrong partly because I didn't know it was a question about the UK and partly because I wouldn't have known the answer for the UK specifically. And in a quiz about "the world's problems" it's weird to expect me to know about the UK.
And as Pham mentioned, the quiz makes the options unfairly similar, e.g. often I might know the answer within an order of magnitude, but I need to be within 2x or 3x to get it right.
One question was especially egregious, asking whether more fish were farmed than caught in the wild. One possible answer was "1.1x more farmed than caught in the wild" and another was "1.1x less farmed than caught in the wild", making these two answers just 21% apart. That, plus the fact that expressing a 10% difference as "1.1x" is extremely unusual, made me think that "1.1x" was probably not the answer. But it was.
Another example is the question of how many humans have ever existed: 30 billion, 60 billion, ∼110 billion humans have lived since the start of humanity. If it was more like "20 billion, 100 billion or 500 billion" I could've gotten it right.
Then there was the question on how much the US government spends on "pandemic prevention" which turns out, after you answer it, to ACTUALLY be a question about "pandemic preparedness" which, in case it's not obvious, is something completely different.
The genome sequencing question also seems to be just wrong. It offers three options for the cost of sequencing a human genome in 2021, two of which are "$1000 and 1 hour" and "$10,000 and 1 day". The supposedly correct answer is "$1000 and 1 hour", but news published in 2022 states that the world record for fastest sequencing in 2022 is 5 hours and two minutes. And I doubt the world-record holder spent only $1000 on it.
Another question asks "What would Europe's population be in 500 years if fertility rates stay constant at 1.5 children per woman?" It fails to state any conditions on immigration. Based on what the "correct" answer is, we are apparently supposed to assume zero immigration, which is a silly assumption and therefore ought to have been stated explicitly.
Finally, a question asks "How many researchers focus on ensuring AI is safe for humanity (as of 2021)?" It's unclear whether this is the number of AGI existential-risk researchers or a more general category of AI safety (e.g. concerned with AI bias or specialized military AIs that can kill autonomously). And note that if the question is concerned with AGI specifically then it's a bit strange to compare that (as the question's "tip" does) to the number of people working non-AGI AIs.
And the answer blurb stated "AGI researchers probably outnumber AI safety researchers by 100 times", with a "reference" for this claim that is a Tweet thread (!) by Benjamin Todd that says "I would guess similarly qualified AGI researchers outnumber AI safety researchers by at least a factor of 10 and probably more like 100." Yeah, can we not state one man's guess as fact? And the idea that there are 30,000 people trying to invent AGI sounds extremely unlikely to me. If you're just working on "speeding up AI" or some such, you are not an AGI researcher, even if your work eventually makes AGI more dangerous.
I did the quiz without using a search engine or wearing clothes, achieving 55%.
🏥 Global Health accuracy: 55% (vs. 45% for the average user)
🐣 Animal Welfare accuracy: 45% (vs. 50% for the average user)
🧨 Existential Risk accuracy: 64% (vs. 55% for the average user)
And yeah, that Fish question was super annoying, because my guess of the fish population was probably off by 100x, but you should be within 2x or so to get the right answer (as the answers offered are all 4x apart).
Broadly agree that there's some overly specific EA groupthink on display, and it should have been more sensitive to the range of views that exist (even among EAs).
This is a certain type of quiz with which I'm familiar, and anyone with a modest experience of writing exams can write one on which it is almost impossible to do well -- and that certainly seems to have been the intention here. What you do is crank up the required precision on each multiple choice answer set, and dial down the relevance, until only someone who happens to have looked up the answer recently, or has an eidetic memory, could get them right.
For example, if you want to ask "What fraction of US energy production comes from coal?" and you were asking a strictly honest question, one designed to see if people had any awareness of the situation, you'd have answer choices like "all", "most", "a good chunk but not most," "hardly any," and you'd find out whether people were reasonably aware of the role of coal in US power generation (which is "a good chunk but not most.")
But you can easily make a question even well informed people get wrong by making the answer choices "40%," "30%", "20%", "10%", because even a good awareness of the situation doesn't let you distinguish between the latter four possibilities. (And if you think most people actually realize the answer is ~20% you could just make it "22%," "21%", "20%", "19%" and then only someone who had just looked up the data would know.)
You can also dial down the relevance, e.g. I certainly know a ton of children die of malaria every year, but is it closer to 5 million or 1 million or 200,000? I know it's not 100 million, and I know it's not 10,000, and that's a pretty good global awareness, but I could not easily choose between the first three choices.
Furthermore, it's unimportant to know the exact number (unless you're a WHO official planning detailed logistics), a reasonable awareness is attained with merely knowing it's a major cause of death among children in the world. You could certainly ask that question in an honest way, to measure reasonable awareness, but you can also ask it in a way pretty much guaranteed to suggest the quiz-taker is ignorant -- which it appears to me they have done.
Because nothing is unstable. Have you fallen prey to the unwarranted but common intuitive assumption that nothing is stable, because it contains no classical causes? Let me introduce you to virtual particle pairs...
Oh well, I consider that even more unstable and bizarre. To have not even the possibility of something is sort of a logical black hole, I wouldn't know how to even conceptualize such a vaccuum. It almost strikes me as logically incoherent, sort of like trying to assert a statement like "1 = 2" could have meaning. It doesn't. So that may just be one of those things that you can state in English, because English is a very flexible instrument, but which on closer examination make no more sense than "mumbo dogface in the banana patch."
I might ask "why is there so vastly more nothing than things". But then some pedantic guy might point out that our laws of physics would collapse everything into black holes if the universe had a much higher density of things.
It is noteworthy that black holes are still something rather than nothing, but a black-hole universe has no one in it to ask why there is something rather than nothing.
I realize this is an incredibly sensitive topic, so I just want to acknowledge that school shooting is a terrible tragedy, every time it inevitably occurs. Also, I am going to be treating school shootings in a somewhat flippant way. Just know that this comes from a place of semi-panicked hysteria as I think about how my own son might be shot someday when he’s just being a kid, out playing or learning with his friends.
So, my thinking is that schools take out an insurance policy and as part of the protection they get a bimonthly security audit on behalf of the policyholder. This auditor would have two functions, first as said, to study any risks at an individual school and how they might be mitigated. Because these ‘risks’ are as likely as not to be the children themselves, this role is really more of a counsellor, specializing in very troubled children. He might speak with several of them throughout a given day at the schools on his rounds
Any districts with a higher proportion of seriously troubled youths who might require attention would certainly have to pay higher premiums. I think a single auditor could cover a territory of ~40 individual schools in month, an average of ~2 audits a day every school day
The second function is if one of those terrible/inevitable tragedies should occur, then the auditor, who is also a highly trained security agent, would be capable and mandated to respond immediately to the shooter, and stop them, with deadly force if necessary. Since they probably won’t be at the school when the shooting begins they wouldn’t be able to respond as soon as someone permanently based at the school, but then they also wouldn’t be a first target for the shooter.
Something about this feels like it should be featured in an grungy dystopian as one of the more heavy handed metaphors, but yeah I’m seriously forced to think about shit like this and I really dislike that
Seems unnecessarily complicated. I don't see anything stopping most school boards from implementing the Israeli solution, which is to lock the school down so it has only one entrance during school hours, and there's an armed guard at that entrance (a guard who I should emphasize is almost always ex-military or ex-police, and who has to undergo pretty rigorous training every four months, including plenty of weapons training).
Admittedly locking a school down in states like Arizona and California, where the mild weather encourages very open school plans, is harder, but you could probably close even those off for your casual madman with a few hundred meters of concertina wire.
And it would definitely cost. So if you put it to the school board, you probably want to be prepared to say on what else they should cut spending, or that you're willing to fork out higher property taxes.
Alternatively, if you think just someone on the scene will help a lot in most cases -- which is probably true, although probably also means going from 25 deaths to 1 or 2, not zero -- you could ask the school board to require one of the several vice-principals public schools typically hire to also be its chief of security, and to require that person to be well-trained in weapons use, be armed at all times, and undergo periodic training in tactics. That seems like it could be 25% of job duties. leaving the other 75% of his time to do...well, whatever vice principals normally do. This solution might cost a bit less, and be less obtrusive.
I think the general difficulty with any kind of solution here is that the event is still very rare, and so people have the same bifurcated reaction they do to most rare catastrophes: either full-on denial ('It can't happen here") or brief full-scale panic ("OMG! It could happen here tomorrow!"). Neither state is very useful for rationally addressing a low-probability but high-cost event.
These school shootings are horrible, of course, but if we want to save children's lives I don't think this is the place to put effort. I just looked up some stats. There are 50 million kids in public school in the US. If 20 per year die in school shootings (and that estimate's on the high side), then your son's chance of being killed in a school shooting is one in 2.5 million. Meanwhile, there are other things in his life that pose far greater dangers. In the years 2004-2018, 70,000 kids died in auto accidents, while 134 were killed in school shootings. A child is 500 times as likely to die in an auto accident as in a school shooting.
And I'll bet there's a lot more low-hanging in the auto accident realm. What about people who don't put their small children in car seats, for instance, or don't make the kids fasten seat belts, or let them ride in the front when they're little? I'm not sure what the best way to improve the seat belt situation is -- big fines? public education? free carseats? -- but there have to be some simple things that would improve the kids' safety. What about parents with DWI's? Maybe one DWI should be enough to disqualify a person from driving with children in the car for the next 10 years.
I really doubt there is any low-hanging fruit in the school shooter situation. Having the auditor talk with troubled kids sounds like a good idea, but the thing about teenagers, who are the ones doing most of the shootings, is that many of them, maybe even most, are a little bit crazy. They are moody & impulsive, and when they feel bad they feel *really* bad. I read somewhere recently that 40% of high school students have cut themselves, and upwards of 50% have suicide fantasies. When my daughter was in high school she brought home a vase she had made in ceramics class. It was white, with red streaks that looked like blood running down the sides, as though the vessel was full to overflowing with blood. "Um, what do you think of this?" I asked the art teacher. "Oh," she said," there are a lot like this one. They're very emo at this age." So the auditor comes to the school with the goal of talking to the kids that are isolated, angry, miserable and weird. How does he pick? A good 10% of kids will fit that description. And unless the auditor is very very gifted at talking with teens, none of them are going to disclose anything to him in his interviews. And besides, 60% of the time the shooter is not even a student at the school.
As for the James Bond guy who's going to come in and take out the shooter: Since he is not on site, the chance that he will arrive in time to make much difference is very small. These things go down fast.
My advice is to put your attention on things that are more likely to happen than school shootings, and many of which are also things you have a better chance of controlling, such as the safety practices of people who are transporting your kid (and the safety practices of the kid himself, once he's driving).
I have two objections: Firstly, it provides the schools with a financial incentive to cover up risk factors. Secondly, you're asking a counsellor to be ready to stop a shooter with force; these are two very different jobs with very different skill sets.
Highly pertinent user name! For the hiring, I'd actually given that some thought. You are indeed looking at hiring either very competent security agents and training them how to be excellent crisis counsellors with the 8-18 crowd, or vice versa. Maybe you'd want to recruit both? I'd watch that movie. Honestly I'm not sure which is easier to do, but I do know that you'd be paying a lot of money for an extremely narrow skillset. I think one would have to expect quite a lot of specialized training (6 months?) before being put in the field.
As part of the employment contract, if the inevitable etc. and they have to kill the shooter to end it? Then so long as there is convincing evidence that the use of lethal force was the only or most likely to successful method to end a shooting, they would have the full backing of the company to provide support for legal issues, public scrutiny etc.
On the other hand, if in the judgement of a court of law or the management of the company, that the lethal recourse was not mandatory, or god forbid a non-involved child is killed by the agent, then they would have no protection whatsoever and the employment contract would be terminated, effectively immediately.
That's a good point on the school's perverse incentives, hadn't thought of that before
It's fascinating, that's such a slim margin, really easy for defections, here's my prediction: icy silence across the chambers. For like 3 weeks, then someone says they're going to take a stand for bipartisanship and introduce a new piece of legislation with a fig-leaf Democrat / Republican
Also, it's a good time to be a moderate, since the senate will allow no defections, the most powerful person is the democrat who's the furthest right (relatively). This year that's been alternating between Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, about whatever their pet issue is. Add one extra seat and now you only need one of them, or Cortez Mastro perhaps.
Those following the FTX/SBF crisis may be interested in this feature article about Sam Bankman-Fried, and what he was trying to do. It appeared on Sequoia's website, and was later taken down, but is still available on the Wayback Machine.
"The point was this: When SBF multiplied out the billions of dollars a year a successful crypto-trading exchange could throw off by his self-assessed 20 percent chance of successfully building one, the number was still huge. That’s the expected value. And if you live your life according to the same principles by which you’d trade an asset, there’s only one way forward: You calculate the expected values, then aim for the largest one—because, in one (but just one) alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously. To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality."
I think we should consider that all of this may in some sense have been part of the plan. SBF was quite comfortable with risk, including really big risks. And he certainly wasn't the sort of man to be restrained by convention or any sort of deontological notion of right and wrong. He was a diehard consequentialist. Maybe this is just what it looks like when a really big bet fails.
"because, in one (but just one) alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously."
Well, turns out it wasn't *this* universe. And this is why I prefer boring grey accountants who look for the safe, boring, dull option when playing with hundreds of millions of pension funds or whatever.
You want high-risk, high-return? Go into bank robbing.
"To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality."
Oh merciful hour, this kind of lingo makes me yearn for the days of the nuns of the past, including my past, who would have taken people spouting this stuff outside and beaten them with sticks to knock the foolishness out of them.
That's what is wrong with kids these days. Not enough nuns with rulers over the backs of their knuckles.
> You want high-risk, high-return? Go into bank robbing.
Um, banks don't have tens of billions of dollars in cash, and if they did they wouldn't give it to a bank robber. I'm not sure whether SBF's strategy was "bad" or "horrible" but either way it seems better than bank robbing.
I don't have any inside information but based on the past week of information it appears that for at least the last several months FTX/Alameda was operating as a Ponzi scheme. Giving SBF the benefit of the doubt there was probably a time in the past year where he could have let Alameda go bankrupt and it would have been a reasonable high risk trade that didn't pay off but instead he chose unethical (and probably illegal) actions in order to delay facing the consequences. Instead of being Adam Neumann he chose to be Bernie Madoff.
There is an immense cruelty for Sam to say "I can do illegal stuff that risks *other* peoples' money, because of the small chance that I give it all to charity"... I hope that attitude is drawn further into public scrutiny and discussion!
It also lays in contrast with my own emphasis: creating things that have real-world value for people who need it, which must work well enough to stand on their own as a product. Forget donating a portion of profits - just make it cheaper! Scamming for charity doesn't enlarge the pie, and its failure-mode poisons the well! (I wonder if Sam's risk-calculus on secreting Alameda billions was including all the other people, crypto's future, EA's capacity in the face of fall-out...)
A close friend of mine has scoliosis. She has chronic pain now. She also deals with ADHD and her pre-diabetes is getting worse. She quit her super successful career as it all got to be too much. She's sort of in a funk due to the chronic pain.
What is the way out for her?
She sees a physiotherapist 3 times a week and has added acupuncture.
I wish I could help but don't know how to. She lives in the bay area in California.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
She has a family too, so they get her energy and attention and she has nothing left after that. I'd like to see her get out of the chronic pain and feel better. The pain used to be intermittent but seems more constant now.
I don't know if it's a 'way out', but Shinzen Young's work on pain (an audio CD of Break Through Pain, the book Natural Pain Relief, etc) may be of some value.
There are many psychological techniques that can decrease the impact of the pain on your mental well being absent the ability to actually reduce the pain. The secondary effects, e.g. how you frame or respond to the pain can be very disabling itself, and that is something you have control over. The Wim Hof method, or any kind of cold exposure is a kind of mental training that increases pain tolerance. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as well as the ideas of the ancient Stoics it is based on (e.g. Epictetus) can allow you to re-frame the pain in a positive light rather than a horrible life ruining thing you can never hope to escape from.
I think that is true for some people with some kinds of pain, but you have to watch it with suggesting that someone's pain would bother them less if they just did mental training or tried harder to tolerate it or ignore it. That is perilously close to telling them that they could suffer less if they tried, so STFU, and that is a terrible thing to say to someone in pain. And consider this: the people in pain may *already* be doing reframing, etc. to change their relationship to their pain, and getting as much mileage out of that as it is possible to get. I, for instance, may be one of them. My spine looks like a twisted jagged piece of shit on Xrays -- but the worst pain I feel is about a 3, and if I do all my exercises etc. I can usually keep it to a 2. I bike, exercise, and am generally active. I never did any training in those pain reduction techniques, because I saw them used in settings where it was clear to me that the what the "trainers" were mostly doing was encouraging people to be brave and STFU. But I may have spontaneously developed some pain-managing techniques of my own over the years as my spine has worsened. Or I may just be lucky, no way to know. You don't know that Deepa's friend isn't doing the same. She's taking care of her family. Maybe to do that she has spontaneously developed all kinds of coping techniques that allow her to drive, move around the house, carry children etc. In which case it is maybe time either for some better PT or maybe for some of the drugs like gabapentin that reduce chronic pain.
I highly recommend Paul Ingraham's excellent site PainScience, for really good evidence-based advice. I have scoliosis myself, and all the regular shit you're supposed to do for low back pain makes no difference at ALL to my back pain. Paul's site is literally the only place where I have learned about something that actually makes a substantial difference in my discomfort. His site also gave some decatastrophizing info that helped me be less worried about what I'm in for from my back as I age. Last I knew Paul is willing to do consults by phone -- possibly in person too, I don't know. He's in Vancouver.
There are non-opioid drugs that help with chronic pain -- some of the antidepressants, gabapentin, some stuff called Lyrica that I know very little about. While I'm not sure they're the way to go, your friend should probably talk to a professional about pain relief options. There are also pain management techniques that involve meditation & the like. Some people find them helpful, though I myself got very turned off to them during my training as a psychologist because it seemed to me the meditate-and-accept-your-pain stuff had a large unacknowledged element of "STFU about your pain."
If your friend is overweight, losing weight & being fit is likely to make her back give her less trouble.
She sounds discouraged & disempowered, & maybe depressed. Might be a good idea for her to see a psychologist with a special interest in people with chronic health problems. (Though I'm not sure it makes sense to label scoliosis a chronic health problem. Mine is moderately bad, but I stay fit & active, and know which activities to avoid and ways to reduce the pain when it starts hurting, & mostly think of it as a nuisance. I really don't know why it's not a worse problem for me -- how much is the way I manage it, how much my attitude, how much that I somehow lucked out physically in some way. Looking at an Xray of my spine you'd think I'd be quite disabled, but there may be something about my musculature or my nerves that keeps the vertebral chaos from setting off massive pain.)
You can search on Psychology Today for someone in your area, but there is just no online resource for getting good info about therapist style and quality. I think your best shot is to ask on here, since the Bay area is overrepresented on ACX. Describe the problem and the kind of therapist you think she needs.
Some general guidelines for picking therapists:
-Psychiatrists' expertise is usually either meds or psychoanalytic approaches, neither of which is a good fit for your friend
-Psychologists are more research-oriented, and often are trained in approaches for specific problems, eg anxiety disorders, substance abuse, health problems.
-Social workers tend to have expertise in family relations.
-Licensed mental health counselors & nurse practitioners have training that is not as intensive and deep as what the other specialties have.
I think a psychologist is most likely to be a good fit, but in real life the generalizations above don't hold for everybody.
Let's see -- what else?
-Anyone affiliated with a teaching hospital, especially if they are in fact involved in training mental health professionals, is more likely to be highly competent.
-Don't see anyone who's less than 5 years out from completing their training.
-Check the person's license online. Don't see anyone who is not licensed. If they have black marks on their license, be cautious. Ask them about it.
-Your friend has way more options if she is willing to see someone who does not take insurance. If her insurance is a PPO plan it will reimburse her for some of the therapist's charges.
I don't know if this is a case of nominative determinism which no-one picked up on: he was indeed a man who set up his own (sort of) bank which ended up fried.
Surely it's not "the end", but it's unclear if SBF was a funder. From Dec 28, 2021:
> I originally planned to spend $250,000 on these grants; this came partly from subscribers like you, partly from unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, and partly from someone who paid an unexpectedly large amount for an NFT of a blog post. Thanks to everyone involved in helping me have this extra money.
> But I was also able to get another $1.3 million (!) from extremely generous outside funders, of whom only two would let me reveal their names: Vitalik Buterin and Misha Gurevich. Thank you Vitalik, Misha, and other anonymous people!
Last I heard, Scott's annual income from ACX alone exceeds $250,000.
Edit: a Nov 13 thread says
> 3: I have no idea what’s going to happen with ACX Grants now. Some of the infrastructure I was hoping to use was being funded by the FTX Foundation and may no longer exist. It might or might not be more important to use all available funding to rescue charities about to go under from losing FTX support. I still want to do something, because of the increased need and urgency mentioned above, but give me a while to hide under my bed and gibber before I sort out specifics.
> 4. None of last year’s ACX Grants were funded by the FTX Foundation or anyone else linked to FTX, so if this is you, don’t worry.
One common meme story yesterday was that Eli Lily's stock plunged because of a fake verified tweet. This makes no sense to me for multiple reasons -- (a) the tweet was on Thursday but the stock fell on Friday, well after people would've realized the tweet was fake; (b) if it fell due to the fake tweet, it should've already come back up unless it was some permanent PR damage or something (and why would it be?)
And yet this story's everywhere, I can't even find a skeptical take, and the stock did fall a notable amount. Is it possibly actually true? Or is it just that random stocks fall 5% every day, and so crappy websites post this funny idea and don't think twice?
Come. If you pay any length of attention to financial news you'll realize soon enough it bears a strong resemblance to astrology. Random shit happens, and the pundits on a deadline (whose actual experience in finance is often zip) will bang out "this totally happened because Mercury was ascending to the zodiacal transverse of Aquarius" and all the other astrologers/pundits, on the same deadline, will nod their head vigorously yup! so true.
There is of course a reason behind any stock drop, or so those of us who believe in casuality would assert, and on rare occasion the reason is obvious (headquarters is firebombed, the CEO is caught with an underage prostitute), but most of the time it's the resultant of a large set of complex forces that it would take a multiyear research project (with extraordinary levels of access to privileged information) to understand correctly.
There seems to be a lot of interest in seeing Musk fail at Twitter. For obvious (I think) reasons. That is probably a factor in the lack of skepticism here.
Fair enough. I only keep tabs on popular stocks, and usually if something drops 5% it's clear why (especially if that's against the run of play of the broader market). I didn't see any OTHER story on Lilly, which is why I thought there may be an element of truth here. But presumably there could be a lot of explanations, as their historical chart seems pretty volatile.
Has anyone experimented with Gwern's idea of cycling nicotine, caffeine, and modafinal, or some other cycle like that? The idea would be to enjoy the benefits of these without the tolerance. I've posted about caffeine tolerance before, and the idea of enjoying a coffee buzz without having to first take 3-4 off first is so desirable.
I sort of tried cycling caffeine and modafinil, in the sense that I spent a little time searching for a regime in which I could access the benefits of both. All this is my experience and none of these claims should be taken to be universal; YMMV.
In theory, if I could schedule my workload around on and off days, this works great. Modafinil notably boosted concentration for the first day or two, at the expense of some increased irritability. (I think in practice some of this was my usual irritation at being interrupted out of a flow state, crossed with easier access to flow.) Caffeine boosts my mood for the first few days, and is especially useful for interpersonal work, but decreases my focus, especially in the first couple of days. Coffee before meetings, modafinil before coding.
I ran into two problems that made me abandon the pursuit. First, I never had the schedule predictability to really time the cycles correctly. Second, I really like coffee, and at the time good coffee was super easily accessible, so a regime where by default I didn't drink coffee felt like deprivation. That meant that it was easy to slip into a coffee-as-default regime, and then getting off coffee required a couple of unpleasant days of withdraw symptoms. Worse, modafinil and caffeine interact badly for me, and I got all the unpleasant interaction symptoms if I took modafinil during the caffeine withdraw period.
In fairness, I never tried cycling them rapidly, but given the mixing effects I experienced I have little interest in the experiment.
The window looks like the large end is nearer to you, even when it isn't. So when the window is made to *spin*, it instead looks like it's oscillating. And then a pen is put through the window and the whole thing is spun -- so you see the pen spinning, but it still looks like the window is oscillating, even though this requires the pen to pass through the paper! I suggest taking a look...
How well does this work in real life? IOW, I wonder if this looks as good in person while using stereo vision instead of a camera.
Also, I tried googling to see if this was for sale someplace. I can't imagine that I would be able/willing to make one this nice IRL. Has anyone seen one for purchase?
Is there a Bible on economically sustainable schools ?
Fostering, Adoption and boarding schools are huge expenses and cater to a growing demographic of adoption friendly & race agnostic careerists. The fast changing behaviors of this generation open a bunch of new opportunities.
Imagine a streamlined workflow from "orphanage -> adoption -> fostering -> boarding school -> introduction to labor force" for a small 3rd world town. Adopt a child, we take care of them for the school year, and you get to have them for the holidays. Your parents are happy to see their grand children on holidays, you get to be as much of the cool uncle as the parent, and we take care of everything from nannying, disciplining and education "YOUR" child. Since the funding goes to the school, it can be used to educate not just that one child, but also non-orphan poor children in the rest of the town. The teachers can be a bunch of 1st world retirees, empty nesters and yuppies in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Since the orphanage is still the legal guardian for many kids in the school, children can be pushed into the labor force at an earlier age. That way the orphans without the funding for university, can be trained for the trades by working the cafeteria as cooks, or building maintenance, carpentry or honestly, even white-collar trades like sales & marketing. Freshmen in universities everywhere in the US do it, how hard could it be for highschoolers to do it instead.
So the 3rd world school is the center of it all and children are the main 'commodity'. But you develop an entire retirement, spiritual retreat, local services & adoption industry around it.
I know there are like a million legal roadblocks to such a thing. And let's not ruin a good thing by talking about the ethics of it all.
But, has anyone tried a simple version of something like this ?
I find it hard to imagine a state that was functional enough to implement anything like this that wasn't also functional enough to spend enough money to implement a better system of caring for orphans.
"What would a solution optimised for a society with very little money but also very little Moloch look like?", which is what I take this to be, is generally not a useful question, I think.
States aren't that functional at anything, ever. Reliable mediocrity is the best a state (or any sufficiently large and broad organization) can aspire towards.
Such an effort would have to run as a small-medium scale startup. A small group of leaders with a clear vision, a lean org and fast paced delivery.
> caring for orphans.
Caring is a terrible thing. It assumes a permanence to dependence of those you are caring about. "Oh those terrible orphans, let me donate a little bit to feed them for a few days." No one wants the orphans to be self-sufficient. Rather they'd give them handouts and keep them dependent.
Caring is great for figuring out the thrust and aligning core guiding values of a pursuit (imp to avoid becoming a psychopath). The individual actions within said pursuit, should be planned much more coldly.
Was this comment written by AI? The weird mix of smiley advertising jargon and incongruity of tone for the concepts being crashed together makes me wonder.
"Hi, has anyone ever considered a modern take on indentured servitude? All the top thought leaders and influencers are exploring this exciting new lifestyle accessory choice to meet their needs as highly effective people!"
"But, has anyone tried a simple version of something like this ?"
The short answer to that is "yes". The workhouses had a system like this for orphaned pauper children, see "Oliver Twist" where he is apprenticed out to an undertaker.
Later on, the Home Children or Child Migrants operated from 1830 up to the 1970s under various auspices and forms:
The American version is Boys' Town, which eventually went unisex (I believe you say 'co-ed' in the USA), and seems to still be going, so that was successful:
naah, just a frantic attempt to condense a big idea into few words
> concepts being crashed together
unfortunately it's an idea I have been thinking about for 10 years, and I dumped all of it in 1 tiny paragraph. Ofc it lacks coherence.
> incongruity of tone
Behind the development of every country is a horrifying story of human exploitation. I guess it doesn't faze me much because I know how bad it is for kids down there. 2 square meals a day, a caring guardian and of-a-legal-age-and-wage child labor is an amazing deal for many. The base level of desperation is soo high, that these inhumane propositions are what people aspire to.
> considered a modern take on indentured servitude
I did do a terrible job of bringing of explaining the whole thing. Usually, I spend a few months building goodwill as a compassionate person before bringing up adult-child interactions as a purely capitalistic transaction.
A part of me is jaded from watching all of these 3rd world "non-profits" being run as money pits because there is no expectation of being an economically viable organization. Problem is : western money is limited. So instead of using NGO money to help their target audience, most $$ are spent lobbying a zero sum game of vying for a bigger slice of western money.
> Was this comment written by AI? I
write the way I speak. So my written English sometimes reads like a weird train of thought instead of a more structured prose. My bad.
"Usually, I spend a few months building goodwill as a compassionate person before bringing up adult-child interactions as a purely capitalistic transaction."
I will have to take your word on how you process English, because do you realise how that in particular sounds?
"Okay, groomer"? Or, "I fake being a Nice Guy who is purely disinterested before I can get the kids to whore themselves out to me".
Oh no, I put in a lot of effort into a reply and mislicked and lost the draft.
I was hoping it would have convinced you of my good faith. But, I'll make peace with being perceived as the devil rather than write out a whole emotionally vulnerable reply all over again.
Yep, I wanna groom kids, exploit vulnerable adults and become rich off it all while being seen as the nicest guy. A modern day Jimmy Saville if you will.
I'm sure the sarcasm is obvious, and in 20 years when my pseudo anonymous account gets dug up it won't be misunderstood. Right ? Right ?
Be a little more careful about writing things that can be misunderstood. I'm not the only idiot out there, and "I like to set up a fake niceness aura to get around adults who would be protective of children, so I can then smuggle in the idea of financial transactions around children" is something that can easily be misinterpreted.
well, I guess it is that 3rd world sense of humor. If you give away the joke by qualifying it, then it isn't funny anymore. When you see 3rd world poverty around you, jokes lose that glint of consideration and optimism. If it ain't grim, it ain't funny. Guess it doesn't translate that well when it is with strangers on the internet without context.
IMO, in the near future, if someone wants you cancelled you will be cancelled. With how much of us is archived on the internet, any soundbite can and will be used if you're the right target. So, I've pretty much given up any attempt of self-censoring in case the internet misunderstands. If an adversary wants a bad soundbite, they will find it.
I've been playing around with prediction markets recently (manifold). What strikes me as weird is that you're really aiming to guess what the consensus probability will be, as opposed to the resolution of the market, specially for markets that resolve on a scale of years. This is enabled by the market giving you frictionless ways of buying and selling your shares at any point in time.
It feels really weird when you make a serious long-term prediction, and then lose money because the market moves in the opposite direction. There's much more profit to be made in correctly anticipating market movements, than in actually being right about the underlying questions. I also suspect that you can make profits by abusing the publicly viewable order books in some way.
Manifold very prominently reports your daily profit/loss to you, which is supposed to be an indicator of your forecasting ability. But now that I've actually participated, I've updated towards considering this metric less informative.
I suppose these observations translate to real-money prediction markets as well. What's the alternative? forecasting tournaments?
This is how I thought prediction markets would go, just like real markets. If the incentive is to make money off them, then you do what makes money, not what provides "wisdom of the crowd" or whatever the nice-sounding principle behind them is about getting the best advice from a multitude of well-informed people to help you make decisions. And if you can invest real money in meaningful amounts in them, then your incentive is to make money.
This is why I think the selling-point of them as "governments can use them to set public policy!" is a *terrible* idea.
Well, real markets have operated this way for a long time. Quite a lot of people-- maybe even most, these days -- are "growth" investors, who don't give a damn about the underlying asset, but who believe they can predict (or already see) that the market price is headed up (or down if they're shorting).
I don't think there is an alternative, if you're hoping for a system in which very valuable information (a highly defensible and intelligent guess about the future) is given away for free. The existence of such a system defies common sense. If somebody has very valuable information, he is going to sell it, not give it away[1], and there will always be buyers who bid the price up handsomely.
----------------------
[1] Although I myself have written a short easy to understand book that explains how to become a billionaire without really trying. Send me $9.95 and the secret is yours. Paypal accepted, no checks, no refunds.
Quadcopter drones didn't once cost tens of thousands of dollars, because back when drones cost tens of thousands of dollars (minimum), they weren't quadcopters.
A quadcopter, as Ommo notes, is not a dynamically stable system. As such, it needs a fairly sophisticated autopilot, which didn't exist in the 1960s and even in the 1990s would have been very expensive. Instead, VTOL drones of that era were more conventional helicopters (see e.g. DASH, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrodyne_QH-50_DASH
Conventional helicopters are mechanically complex, as the rotor blades need to vary their pitch over the course of each rotation. The system that can do that, costs tens of thousands of dollars to design and build. Quadcopters can just use four fixed-pitch rotors, which is simpler and cheaper. Also, in the 1960s and 1990s, power would have had to come from some sort of internal combustion engine, again a mechanically complex expensive device, because there weren't batteries light and powerful enough to power any sort of helicopter. Now, cheap electric batteries and motors can take over.
At small scale, at least. The quadcopter platform isn't particularly efficient in aerodynamic terms, and batteries still can't match the energy density of internal combustion engines. So the serious high-performance or long-endurance drones, including almost all military drones past the "hey, I figured out how to rig the quadcopter I ordered from Amazon to drop a grenade" level, are still mostly conventional airplane or 1-2 rotor helicopter designs using iinternal combustion engines. And priced at tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars.
But if you're just looking for a Minimum Viable Drone, for recreational or limited commercial purposes, a cheap microcomputer coupled to four cheap electric motors in a simple quadcopter airframe is a possibility that didn't exist until recently. It won't fly very high or very far or carry very much, but it can carry a camera to see what's just over that ridge a mile or two away - and, yes, a grenade to drop on whatever's there if you insist.
Why four rotors, rather than three? To replace the varying pitch single rotor one needs more than one fixed-pitch rotor, sure. Two seems to allow only one axis along which to correct course. But three allows three vectors separated by 120 degrees which is enough as a basis for the underlying vector space. I'm left mystified by the use of a fourth.
My first guess would be to minimize the Third Law reaction force on the body of the copter, which tends to spin the body in the opposite way as the rotor. Normal helicopters with one big rotor have a vertical tail rotor for this purpose, and two-rotor helicopters have the rotors counter-rotating to eliminate this problem, sometimes on the same shaft, probably more often on two.
If you have an even number of rotors you can make them counter-rotate in pairs, while if you have an odd number you can't, so you will have an uncompensated Third Law torque trying to rotate the body of the copter.
You need 4-dof. Imagine a vtol (of whatever architecture) hovering. It needs control of pitch, roll, yaw and vertical acceleration.
You can get this from a traditional helicopter (collective + 2dof cyclic + tail rotor), or a quadcopter, or a tricopter (a servo tilts one rotor from side to side), or a tiltrotor (2 props on 2 servos).
A tricopter as you are imagining would not have yaw control.
Quadcopters are instable systems: You want your quadcopter to mostly stay parallel to the ground (not tilted). However, once it tilts even a little bit, there is no natural force pushing it back to that desired position and if no counter force is applied by the correct propeller, it's going to continue to tilt. Say you apply a counter force: Now it's spinning in the opposite direction and you eventually need to apply a counter force to that. Long story short: To control a quadcopter a computer is required which has sensor input on the current tilting state (the orientation), is able to calculate the appropriate counter force and control the propellers to apply this force. This "control loop" 1) -> 2) -> 3) -> 4) -> 1) -> ...
1) Get current orientation
2) Compare to desired orientation
3) Calculate appropriate correcting force
4) Apply force via propellers
Needs to be carried out dozens of times per second for the system to be stabilized. A much simpler example of such a control problem is the inverted pendulum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pendulum). So aside the state of battery technology, small computers (nowadays called micro-controllers) capable of performing the calculations and motor control units capable of driving a propeller with the required fidelity weren't available. Finally, what surprised me when I started in drone development is that until the early 2000s, the gyroscopes necessary to figure out the quadcopters orientation were mechanical devices (see e.g.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope ).
So quadcopters were held back until recently by 1) a lack of batteries with sufficient energy density, 2) limited computer technology, and 3) gyroscopes. Anything else?
The other components of a quadcopter, like the frame, electric motor and rotors, could have been built at low cost in the 1960s, right?
They are still mechanical devices. But now they are measured in µm and use oscillating parts (everything is a bit flexible on those scales) fabricated using the same technologies as they use to etch computer chips.
"The Volocopter test aircraft, which resembles a large drone with eight rotors, took off with a passenger on board from the Pontoise-Cormeilles airfield outside Paris and briefly circled around while other aircraft were in the vicinity.
...Test pilot Paul Stone said that the craft's digital fly-by-wire system and multiple rotors make it much easier to fly than a traditional helicopter.
"In a helicopter, when you move one control, three things happen, and it's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy - it's a coordination exercise. In this aircraft, they take away all that difficulty, and it's very simple controls in each axis, that's what makes it easier to fly," he said."
So we may be getting flying cars eventually, but they won't be cars as such?
Easier to fly if the computer is working properly, impossible to fly at all if it isn't. There are times when that is a reasonable trade to make, but do keep in mind that computers reliable enough for safety-critical aviation applications are not at all cheap. Having learned to fly the hard way, I'll pass.
And I'll note that being able to precisely manipulate the controls is not the part that troubles pilots into an early grave. It's things like sound judgement, calculating weight and balance and fuel (or battery) consumption, maintaining situational awareness, evaluating weather, managing risk, and responding promptly and correctly to a broad range of problems. The computer that can do all *that*, hasn't been invented yet and will be very very expensive when it is.
Until then, I read "Look how easy this is! Anyone can learn it in an afternoon!" as a pointer to thousands of future wannabe pilots e.g. running out of battery power at 6500' over the San Gabriel mountains on their glorious LA commute. Or flying into one of those mountains while intently focused on figuring out why the landing-gear light is blinking red.
Not sure about the numbers for helicopters, but for fixed-wing aircraft we can teach a pilot to fly solo under ideal conditions in about fifteen hours, but being trusted to carry passengers without supervision even on clear days is forty hours minimum, and for reliable transportation day or night or fog or rain, more like two hundred hours. The "move one control, three things happen" part is adequately taken care of in that first fifteen hours, so at best you're down to 185 hours before I'm going to be comfortable sharing the sky with you.
I'm not saying the product will or won't be sucessful/profitable but if it is, it'll be by competing with executive helicopters rather than with black cabs.
The fly-by-wire might reduce training requirements for pilots and the multirotor design avoids many single points of failure (e.g. the infamous Jesus Nut), but there are still a lot of rather prosaic failure modes that need to be mitigated before you can fly any kind of aircraft over a city.
You'll need to employ skilled mechanics to maintain it, lest improperly tightened bolts shake themselves free; regularly inspect the airframe with x-rays or ultrasound to make sure there are no hairline cracks and maintain a paper trail all along the supply chain to make sure that your subcontractor's subcontractor's copper supplier isn't some latter-day Ea-Nasir. These things really drive up the cost of aerospace-grade anything.
I think we'll see more of an impact from unmanned multirotors operating in relatively unpopulated areas such as forests or large construction sites. Apart from crashes being less likely to hit people or property, these sectors are already pushing the limits of what can be traversed by ground-based vehicles such as walking excavators (imagine a JCB but the wheels are on the end of hydraulically actuated legs).
Meditators, is there, or could there be, such a thing as a "reverse" Jhana?
From my limited understanding, First Jhana makes people feel joy by suppressing their desires. Could I use the same techniques to inflame them? Dedicated Buddhists will probably say that's a bad idea and contrary to Enlightenment, but I'm seeking ways to increase my motivation. I have an easy time abstaining from harmful things but less success actively pursuing goals, so I don't think standard teachings will be right for me.
Imagine you have the object of your desire. Whatever the goal is you are trying to increase desire for, imagine in as vivid detail as possible what it would be like to have the thing. Notice if you start to feel positive feelings. If you do, then focus on those positive feelings. If you realize the goal you started meditating on is a means to an end, switch to meditating on what it would be like to have the 'end-goal'. Cycle through 3 questions: what do I want? how do I feel in my body when I have this thing that I want? what does it change for me to have this thing?
I vaguely remember tantric techniques that lean in that direction, but finding actual instruction in tantra is nearly impossible in the West. IIRC the goal is still to make desire optional instead of compulsive, then indulge in it anyway because why not.
First we hear Mr. Musk is laying off staff at Twitter, then he's not, then well actually he may retrain them, no maybe he'll lay them off, etc., etc.; now we hear tens of thousands may be laid off by Meta.
So, who are these engineers, what are their skill sets, and what did they do all day at Twitter and Meta? Who is likely to hire them? If and when they find new positions, will they be able to work remotely? I've always wondered who these techies are. I believe my niece instructs doctors on the use of her company's software, and her husbands flags legal citations for attorneys, but I imagine workers for large tech companies may be more specialized.
They're not all engineers. Though many are. Even at a tech company only 30-40% of people are in technical roles. A lot of the trimming was non-technical people. Especially in Twitter since Musk is openly critical of non-technical workers and thinks of a lot of them as inherently bloat. It's pretty easy to redirect engineers. "You were working on ads and now you're working on X." It's much harder to redirect, say, someone who specializes in selling ads to a specific industry.
What interests me is first, the glee a lot of the online are showing about Musk and the lay-offs and re-hirings; he's an idiot, he's going to ruin Twitter and lose all his money, he has no idea how it works, etc.
But when you take into consideration that a lot of other businesses are doing the same kind of trimming (Stripe, Meta, others) and putting it down to the over-optimistic hiring of extra employees during the pandemic, and now there is no work for them/the volume of business is crunching due to the recession, what about them? I don't think there's any "ha ha Musk is alt-right Trump-lover idiot, serves him right if he runs the business into the ground!" Schadenfreude to be obtained there, so doesn't that mean that maybe Musk is not being an idiot when it comes to lay-offs, that even if Twitter ownership and management had remained the same, the same level of firing and lay-offs would have happened?
But so far, nothing but "Musk is a fascist so that's why all the good people are leaving Twitter" spin.
Mostly web development, though you're gonna have lots of security, data science, devops, machine learning, and other related skill sets in there
> what did they do all day at Twitter and Meta?
the above jobs. Some of them probably genuinely did it poorly or half-assedly and were correctly identified as low-performing, but at the scale of these layoffs we can be pretty sure many of them were productive and competent.
> Who is likely to hire them?
Mostly other tech companies. Some of them will probably take it as a sign to switch industries (e.g. to finance) or roles (e.g. to management or PM). That being said, tech companies in general aren't hiring very much right now. I do share your curiosity about whether this will lead to a glut of tech workers and what they will do about it.
> If and when they find new positions, will they be able to work remotely?
Probably. That's becoming the norm for tech work these days.
> I imagine workers for large tech companies may be more specialized.
It's not *that* specialized. It transfers easily to other companies in the tech industry, as well as to companies that do have in-house software despite not being a "tech company". Those generally pay less, but if there is indeed a glut of tech workers I suspect many of them will be willing to take the downgrade.
As an aside: even the gas man now works from home. A neighbor in my apartment complex parks his tricked-out pickup truck whose bed is rimmed with gas meters in an uncovered parking spot. They look pretty well secured, and the truck's too big for a covered slot.
I imagine he or she is dispatched from home. Surprising.
I am glad to announce the 10th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first few meetings were great (approximately 8 to 10 people), and I hope to see many of you at this one. Snacks will be available.
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (video and reading at the end)
1) Ken Wilkenson on the harms of inequality
2) Levels of intensity in psychedelics
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually go for a walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660. I also provide paleo and vegetarian-friendly food.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Inequality is more beneficial in developed countries than improved wealth. Professor Sir Richard Wilkinson.
KTLS18: Richard Wilkinson on Inequality - The Enemy Between Us
Imagine you live in a group house. You eat together, you clean together, you work together, you meditate together. Sometimes members from the group travel to another group house part of your network. Sometimes you are sent on an individual mission to go get a useful item from another group house which is a three week or three-month journey away. The key currency of your brotherhood is the gossip and stories from the other group houses. Everyone lives for the pastime of storytelling, and no night goes by without the swapping of a tale.
One member of the group house never travels, but always listens. He skips meals to sneak off and jot down some juicy stories. By midnight candle and by light of the moon he writes. This is my impression of Bede the Venerable.
Bede was an Anglo-Saxon, a monk, and a prolific writer and teacher. From a North Britain monastery, where he was put at the age of seven, he became the voice of all Britain. His voice carried across the channel to renew France. And this France kept the flame of learning despite the Viking onslaught which bloodied Bede’s once-majestic monastery.
Parlous the age. Parlous the waters. Parlous the journeys and the fraying threads of civilization. Today it is nearly effortless to keep knowledge alive. But in those days, a single book could cost something like $40,000. Imagine how that would affect all knowledge if the price of knowledge were so high.
In his book the Ecclesiastical History of the British People the British people become another Israel called by and calling out to God for salvation. The British are discovered first as slaves on the market on auction in the Forum. The future pope Gregory inquired where these white angelic faces fell from. He learned they were Angles from Deira whose king is called Aella. From these pagan roots, Gregory foresaw a hidden meaning. “Not Angles rather they are angels! Indeed, Deira for from De Ira of God they will be saved! And Aella is blessed for in naming their king they sing Alleluia!” The monkish puns and ironic monikers punctuate Bede’s work with a regularity as set as the Liturgical Hours.
Any way this how I understand English monasticism before it was destroyed in 793 by the Northmen.
What Bede would see in Astral Codex Ten, Aella, and Substack, I leave to the kabbalists among you.
I also have a strong suspicion that the twist will turn out to be that Scott isn't deleting jack shit, he just wants to see if the mere claim of deletions will make the commentariat up its game.
I might be just tarring Scott with the brush of his profession, but one thing I learned from studying the history of the discipline is that research psychologists will gleefully construct arbitrarily manipulative experiments unless you physically restrain them.
This might be hair splitting, but Scott is an MD psychiatrist, those types do mostly med management for patients, and are not very scheming that way. Psychologists are traditionally the more behavioral experiment/test-administering/scheming types. It is indeed Eremolalos you need to watch out for instead.
I'm gonna agree that Scott's also not gamey like that. We can wager on that and see if he'll fess up at the end to his strategy. I suspect it's going to be exactly what he said.
Yes, I'm a psychologist myself and right this minute my basement is full of subjects whom I have gleefully convinced that Scott is the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde and if he culls their posts they will be allowed to travel back in time with him to the Mauve Decade.
I've been reading different views on when distillation was invented. I have sources saying everywhere from the 9th century AD to the 5th millenium BCE (based on vessels recovered about 15 years ago on Cypress.)
It seems like a huge range. I'm deeply skeptical of the later dates and I'm curious if anyone has any insight.
Martin Levey and Maria Rosaria Belgiorno seem to be prime proponents for the very early development of distillation.
Distillation was invented some time before the 1st millennium BC. How far back we're not quite sure. I don't know anyone who says it was developed in the 8th century AD but the position is completely unsupportable. We have references to distilled products from the Bronze Age like perfume and we have diagrams of Roman stills.
Widespread liquor distillation started in roughly the 12th century AD and changed radically in the 18th-19th century as it industrialized. And of course continues to change with technological progress.
No. For example, I haven't read this particular cited text, but I've read other texts by the linked author. Her title specifically references alembics, which is a type of equipment very particular to heat distillation.
So essential oils being distilled before alcohol? I have only a weak understanding of what "alchemical purposes" includes. I haven't heard that term referred to metallurgy. Is that what you're referring to?
*shrug* lets try to start an argument and see if I survive
I believe biotech and the possibility for bioterrorism, is more of a danger then any near term agi.
I don't think agi is likely to be soon; nn's are not general computation and generality will be a very hard problem.
1. Before we have general ai, I believe, we could have hacking narrow ai's, who are better at breaking out of technical boxes then understanding 3d space and human speech. This will be painful, and will probably break the current internet. But an internet after such an invention of such creatures isn't a forest of dead wood.
2. The human brain has several systems that appear well integrated. It seems to me intelligence is a collection of subsystems, for example alpha go intergrated nn's with min max trees. Either the alignment problem is solvable or it isnt; and how do you make subsystems "aligned" towards the same goal if its a hard problem? I expect that there will be a growing libary of good ideas that we slowly learn to smoosh together in ways that are useful, there will be family's of narrow ais that are super human is several niches for when you can push 2 ideas together, when theres maybe 100 subsystems to integrate to mimik the human brain
3. ai and fusion are 30 years away says guy who makes money on ai and fusion
And bio-terrorism is coming:
1. gain of function research, locked the world for 2 (going on 3) years and it appears to be by accident ; the technology to implement this is "lock sick animals in cages near other animals" (maybe humanized mice)
2. cisper
3. anti-human enverimentalists exist and were cheering that co2 went down during the lock downs
4. mental illness and isolation is increasing
5. The mrna technology is a way to manufacture proteins in basically any host that can survive it. If anything people wanted it to produce less product for vaccines. Why would humans be the best hosts? There are simpler life like worms you can cut into 1/8ths and get 8 individuals, or mold and plants. While the animal kindom has several nasty toxins waiting to be pulled at. Couldnt you use mrna to produce a toxic that happens to be toxic to animals with brains but not one of these simple creatures and just dose them repeatly and extensively with mrna and produce biological poisons without a traceable ingredient.
The big issue with bioterror is targeting. You'd need to develop and deploy a vaccine for your own people (covertly, I assume) before using a transmissible disease. Or you'll risk killing your own people.
Maybe genetically engineer some crop plants to be toxic? You're still hitting mostly civilians.
Genetically engineer yeast to produce some particular chemical? Sure, but delivery is still an issue. As is containment of the yeast during production, refinement, etc. And if exposure kills, good luck not exposing yourself.
That would a limitation for a state or other organization who sees ingroup worth of protecting. Not necessarily true for anti-human enviromentalists or dooms-day cults.
Recently there was an environment protest in Berlin, which prevented emergency vehicles passing to assist an injured bicyclist who then died. There were pro-protestor voices that commented that it is a fight for a climate, not cuddle party for climate, and casualties are acceptable and necessary.
No comment on AGIs, but it is extremely difficult to create an x-risk with biotech. Create a super-plague? Some people will be immune anyway, while your pathogen will evolve to be less virulent and spread easier. Create a plant disease and destroy the food supply? Billions will die, but some people will keep on trucking, eating whatever survived the disease.
Peter Watts's Behemoth is a semi-realistic biological x-risk, though I remain unconvinced it wouldn't lose in a long-term evolutionary race with "classic" life.
What if hacking/coding narrow AIs end up building AGI before humans are capable of it?
And on mRNA and toxins: we already have very deadly toxins that are not that hard to obtain (e.g. botulinum toxin); the main factor here limiting terrorism is deploying it in a way that it gets to a lot of people.
> What if hacking/coding narrow AIs end up building AGI before humans are capable of it?
I dont think hacking and coding is the same thing and github co-pilot will not type out the magic 1k lines of dense math theory for a compete general theory of intelligence(which probably cant exist anyway) after you type "//function makeai makes a safe, human aligned general ai in your $HOME"
again I think intelligence is a collection of subsystems that are fairly well aligned
A human brain does not have a minimax tree solver in it; none the less its not hard for a human brain to design one or to make the connection to 2 player perfect knowledge games and even since it was built there has been super-human-at-2-player-games ais; you *align* it with a nn's(which is a product of calculus not a good model for brains) and you start winning everyone at all 2 player games
How you maintain the requirements of these subsystems, when you start mixing together 3, 4, 5, 100 subsystems together will be hard. All the while there will be 100 factorial narrow ais being used by bad actors with super human capability in their narrow fields and requiring super human counter measures.
Hacking and coding are not the same things but there's a lot of overlap when it comes to any hacking that is *not* social engineering--you need to be able to understand code well to find vulnerabilities and you need to write your shell code subject to very tight constraints. Anyway coding AIs are another "narrow" area that can be pursued that could lead to AGI (probably not aligned) assuming you're correct about needing a lot of "subsystems" and a superhuman coder would have an easier time sticking them together without breaking them. Github copilot is AFAIK the first coding-specialized AI that works at all, you shouldn't assume it's the ceiling.
Needing 100 subsystems for AGI is pretty doubtful too; just because the human brain has a lot of subsystems and our intelligence can use them doesn't mean all or even a lot are required. General intelligence as-such of humans seems pretty robust when losing a lot of things in situations of brain damage or atypical development, and while evolution can get ridiculously efficient it can also be just as ridiculously inefficient in its early iterations of a feature.
While I was browsing Zillow, it struck me that a priori I would expect market incentives to tend to cause overproduction of the more-legible features of housing (size, yards, pretty pictures on zillow) at the expense of less legible features (walkability, nearby amenities, durability, community, accessibility, time-savings). It also struck me that low density imposes negative externalities on all your neighbors by making them travel farther to get from point A to point B, compared to the counterfactual where your low density lot didn't exist and everything had been built in different places accordingly. A Georgist land value tax could help internalize that externality and promote density.
The first seems dubious to me, because it would require a lot of people to buy houses based on these more superficial characteristics, which in my experience hardly anybody does. It's a great big investment, so everybody I know makes it very carefully, and spends a lot of time and effort ascertaining whether all those harder to measure things are worth the price they're paying[1]. Most people walk the neighborhood, for example, and assess how far away the things they want to get to lie[2].
The second also strikes me in the first place as pretty unimportant to almost all buyers. You wouldn't buy a house in a low density development unless you yourself prized the space between you and your neighbors above any delay in getting somewhere.
And in the second place at anything higher than rural one-house-per-square-mile densities, I'd say it's more common that it takes *longer* to get places in a higher density development. In the 'burbs it may be 2-3 miles to the grocery store, but the door-to-door time is like 10 min, because you have a car in the garage and the store has a big parking lot and the roads are big and have low traffic. In the city the grocery store may be four blocks away, but if you have to walk it will take you longer than 10 min (plus you have to carry all the groceries on your back), and if you drive parking and traffic will both be nightmares, and if you take public transport or it's rush hour it could easily be far worse.
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[1] As evidence I adduce the fact that Zillow and Redfin include stuff like "walkability index," school quality, and even used to include crime/safety stats until that became politically incorrect. People clearly want to know these things, or they would not add things that are expensive to calculate.
[2] Here we note the famous adage that the top 3 valued characteristics in real estate are "location, location, and location."
> While I was browsing Zillow, it struck me that a priori I would expect market incentives to tend to cause overproduction of the more-legible features of housing (size, yards, pretty pictures on zillow) at the expense of less legible features (walkability, nearby amenities, durability, community, accessibility, time-savings).
Correct. This is true even within the house where you try to cram in as many listed/filterable features. Sometimes at the expense of livability. To a lesser extent there's issues of imperfect knowledge and heterogenous goods.
> It also struck me that low density imposes negative externalities on all your neighbors by making them travel farther to get from point A to point B, compared to the counterfactual where your low density lot didn't exist and everything had been built in different places accordingly.
This is not a negative externality. This is just the nature of ownership. You might as well say my sandwich imposes a negative externality in that you didn't get to eat it. Regardless, when it comes to urban planning dense urban centers impose more negative building patterns than suburbs. The ideal would be a city built around a series of networked coherent urban cores. Of course, this can be through single family towns or dense apartments.
> A Georgist land value tax could help internalize that externality and promote density.
It would promote density because it'd incentive maximal building on minimal amounts of land. It would not do the other things you propose or correct an externality.
Not sure if politics is allowed in this thread, but hopefully it'll be okay especially if I keep to the process-and-predictions side rather than object level stuff?
Going into the midterm it seemed to me that a lot of people (and prediction markets) were assuming that the 2016 and 2020 paradigm of polls significantly overestimating Democrats' share of the vote would continue, and even more cautious commenters (including me) thought there was a significant chance of that.
Now that we have at least the rough sketch of the results it seems like things were much more like 2018 than like 2016 or 2020- the polls were mostly right and if anything it was Republicans who underperformed. Prediction markets in particular did noticeably worse than 538.
What are people's thoughts here? A couple obvious potential explanations:
-Sample size just isn't very big. Sometimes the polls do better, sometimes they do worse.
-Trump being on the ballot adds unusual effects that the polls aren't good at accounting for- when he's running, he outperforms the polls, but that doesn't apply to midterms.
The simple answer is probably the best answer. The polls are always right-ish, but the margin of error is always going to be at least 3-4% if only due to sample size effects, and now that all elections are close elections, 3-4% isn't enough to know with high confidence who will win. And, that's a 3-4% margin of *error*, not of consistent Republican underprediction. Sometimes the polls underpredict the Democratic vote. But theories that there's a consistent error one way or another because [X] makes one group less likely to respond to pollsters, are theories that the pollsters themselves know about and try to correct for by weighting responses from different groups accordingly. Sometimes they overcorrect and sometimes they undercorrect, but anyone who tells you that their deep understanding of the minds of the voters lets them know which, is full or it.
Joe Biden actually called the midterms correctly on the 4th and he was widely mocked:
""I think we’re going to keep the Senate, pick up a seat. I think we have a chance of winning the House. I don’t think we’re going to not win. We’re keeping the House. So I’m optimistic. I really am," Mr. Biden told reporters traveling with him in California."
Also rightwing partisan polls were predicting that there wasn't a red wave. People misread those polls due to hopium and assumed a big shock. Thanks to Trafalgar we knew Dems were going to win the Senate. Cahaly predicted nearly every competitive Senate Republican candidate's vote share correctly for instance. Within a 1%.
I don't think this was a case of Trump not being on the ballot. Outside of Florida Dems just won the persuasion battle. Voters who said the economy was "not great" voted for Dems over Reps by a good amount. Bad Republican Senate candidates and Dobbs probably account for most things.
Two more possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive:
- pollsters' problem of 'quiet MAGA voters' is currently roughly balanced by the problem of young adults, who heavily vote against MAGA candidates, being more difficult to poll. (because no land lines to call, they don't take cell calls from unknown numbers, and they have little interest in things like participating in opinion polls)
- the serious (nonpartisan) pollsters have kept tinkering with their samples and weightings, trying to learn from their varying results during recent elections, and had some success this time around with their adjustments.
A week or two back, someone told me that he had tried to buy one of my books from Amazon and it wasn't available. I searched for my books on Amazon and found that almost all the self-published books, including two that Scott reviewed in SSC, were missing. On further inquiry, I discovered that KDP, Amazon's self-publishing branch, had deleted my account. Their explanation, after I had made inquiries and asked to have the decision reversed, was:
" Upon further review, we are upholding our previous decision to terminate your account and remove all your books from sale on Amazon. Having multiple accounts is a violation of our Terms and Conditions, and we are confident that your account is related to an account that has already been terminated due to violations of our Content Guidelines. As a result, we will not be reinstating your account."
They have given me no explanation of in what sense my account is "related to" another account that had been terminated or what that other account was, despite my asking.
The obvious solution is to put the books up on another service — Lulu and Barnes and Noble have been recommended to me. That gets them back on Amazon in both print and ebook form and I intend to do that. But I remain puzzled about what is going on. My first theory was incompetence — that KDP simply made a mistake and was unwilling to take the trouble to find and correct it. The alternative is malice, probably ideological, by someone at KDP in a position to fudge up reasons for removing my account or, less plausibly, by someone outside KDP who found some way of making it look as though I was violating their rules.
If any of you have experience with competing services, let me know. So far I have had one recommendation on FB for Lulu, one for Barnes and Noble.
Wow, and I thought it was bad having my comments permanently demoted on YouTube. To have one's *books* taken down is a nasty thing to do on what is most likely minimal evidence (someone else named David Friedman?) But... you can put them back up, right?
Amazon KDP eventually reversed its decision and put my account back up, although I still had to go through the process of putting each book back up. I was told, not by Amazon, that the reason was people with Amazon contacts getting attention to the case from real human beings — my previous interaction, pretty clearly, being with software.
Having extensive experience with KDP pains, I'd say don't even try using it if you are publishing anything even remotely controversial or inappropriate for the Amazon overlords. It's much better to use a third-party service that will distribute to ebook stores such as Amazon for you. They have enterprise-level Amazon accounts, which gives them access to actual human beings to dispute takedowns with, and they'll fight takedowns on your behalf, or at the very least be able to give you an explanation for why it was taken down rather than an automated message.
This is a shame. I purchased Legal Systems Very Different from Ours at the end of June without issue. By the way, I was just reading it now (seriously, one minute ago I was on page 273).
If there are any Amazon employees reading this, please help him out if you can!
I would say incompetence with high probability. These systems are usually driven by probabilistic algorithms, and if you end up on the wrong side of them it can be really difficult to get an actual human to review your case. Unfortunately, appeals processes with human CS agents are viewed as expensive (they're a marginal cost, which tech companies really want to minimize) and so the companies tend to resource them as low as they can get away with.
1) Most people want to feel good about themselves.
2) Most are not really praiseworthy.
3) Some people are outright failures.
4) We have mass media that are capable of near-instantly communicating ideas between people.
Where do 1-4 lead you? For me, it seems to imply that many persistent or even popular ideas will be about cope. People who are outright failures will generate ideas to cope with their failures, while people in the bulk of the spectrum will generate ideas to cope with their mediocrity. Before mass media, most of the cope was probably for the people in 2 due to their large number, while after mass media the people in 3 started creating weird and persistent cope groups.
Examples of pre-mass media cope groups:
i) Christianity. Christianity maintains that the rich and powerful won't reach paradise after death, while the poor and innocent will easily be virtuous enough to gain entry to Heaven. Classic cope.
ii) Eastern religions with karma and reincarnation. Similar idea as above.
iii) National socialism. The Germans couldn't believe that the German Army had been defeated, not a single shot was fired on German land after all! It must have been the home front, a stab in the back! Very clearly cope.
New cope groups post-mass media:
i) MGTOW. Unsuccessful men trying to cope with their failed romantic lives by trying to convince themselves it's high-status to not be in a romantic relationship. Cope.
ii) Anti-natalism. People who are too lazy to form a family and have resorted to moralizing over small climate impacts or other weird stuff ("the world is too bad for me to want a child"). It's cope.
iii) "Fat acceptance". Do I even need to go on?
Weird other copes that I don't know how to categorize:
i) Liberal blank-slatism. High-skill and high-intelligence successful white collar workers who have been raised on the idea that success should be earned by hard work, so they refuse to believe in innate, unearned skills. Coping about their failure to work hard enough to earn their success, or something?
ii) Conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstrapsism. A weird less-common variant of the above where the person instead takes as a postulate that success IS earned by hard work, then copes with the fact that most people aren't successful by maintaining that they must simply be lazy.
Interesting take on antinatalism. Never heard "it's cope for people too lazy to form a family" before...
I tend to find myself disagreeing with reasoning like "oh no the world is too horrible *now* for me to have a kid", like the world is worse in some fundamental line-crossing way than it was, idk, a few decades ago.
But I'm also quite sympathetic to a principled antinatalist stance that doesn't take the state of the world, including environment/climate, into account at all - it's mostly that I haven't encountered a convincing argument against the asymmetry that follows from "a potential person not coming into existence is ethically neutral, even if they would have a life they would consider enjoyable", which I find myself agreeing with. (Also the sort-of consent issue that you can't ask potential people if they agree to being existed.)
At the same time, I...
- like children, and feel I'll very likely want some of my own.
- have "the universe contains a flourishing humanity, or some direct successor of it" as a terminal value that I consider to be Good.
- think that, at present human biology & psychology (not that there's some strict separation), it's Very Important for humanity to have replacement cycles with new humans who haven't yet overfitted their models to culturally biased training data and think they have found the correct answers to how to do things.
Kinda like that thought that society (or some subset thereof, eg some academic branch) primarily advances via the old & powerful people dying, or at least retiring.
Basically - I don't think my antinatalist leanings have anything to do with laziness, but with intellectually held ethical principles, which are in conflict with other values I hold, with pragmatism, and with my own inherent drives.
Ie these leanings don't help me cope with anything, they're actually making it more difficult.
Prediction: I'll probably bite the bullet of non-consensually forcing existence on a few persons to satisfy the other preferences (and presumably preferences of my partner).
Why assume most people are not praiseworthy? That sounds too misanthropic even for me.
On the wider point, I don't think this paradigm is constructive. You can reduce every worldview that's not complete nihilistic misery to cope, but people holding these worldviews enjoy life and do important work while the nihilists hang themselves. If rationality is systematized winning, disrupting all positive frameworks because they are "cope" doesn't look like winning.
Without touching on your broader theory, your understanding of Christianity is wrong here. The NT does say it is harder for rich people to enter heaven, but it has nothing to do with being / not being virtuous enough. Entering heaven in the Christian understanding depends on faith, and specifically not on amount of virtue. Scripture also describes wealth as a blessing from God, some of the OT patriarchs were quite wealthy, etc. So the view of wealth in Christianity is not as one-dimensional as you're stating.
The Bible contains multitudes of contradictory statements. Jesus said some pretty extreme anti wealth things. (quoting from memory) “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” and in Matthew 19:21 “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” and similarly in Mark 10:21 “ Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.””
I think you ascribe in (1) a far higher level of self-doubt and anxiety to the average person than is reasonable. Where's your evidence that sufficient numbers of people suffer from near-obsessive concern about their self worth that they would build all these religions, political systems, and ideologies, at enormous cost in order to address it?
Surely *some* people suffer from savage self-esteem problems, but not, I think, enough to construct entire religions or political movements.
I think blank-slatism is mostly about coping with not being on the top of the heap. Most of the professional middle class are absolutely seething themselves into hell over the existence of billionaires etc., and even about capitalism as a system even though they're the primary beneficiaries. Blank-slatism not only suggests that all the rednecks you hate deserve their trailer parks, it crucially suggests that if you meet a guy who's richer and more powerful than you, and are able to convince yourself that he's also stupider than you, *that guy's wealth is necessarily undeserved* and you have a moral right to usurp his place in the big status and wealth ranking; you can tell yourself that his superiority to you is only due to an evil, unfair social order, instead of the almost certain truth that you're actually total shit compared to the rich guy.
Also, in a post like this I'm surprised you didn't include the massive, probably largest losercope: nerd culture. Especially for women, having nerdy interests is a clear coping strategy for being or believing yourself to be ugly: I have never, literally never, known a single woman who A) was good-looking, B) had anything like a reasonable self-image or self-esteem, and C) even liked to read. It seems clear that basically any woman who even thinks she has a reasonable shot at being hot enough to participate in clubbing culture or whatever you want to call it dives straight into that and invests all her time in it, e.g. approximately all women would actually prefer to be doing that, and reading, knitting etc. are just compensatory occupations for the losers who don't think they cut the mustard. (With men it's a bit different, I've known several jocks who liked things like Warhammer and Tolkien, and each of them had friends who in turn, etc. In fact I personally know more than one guy who got jacked specifically because of liking Conan the Barbarian, then ended up doing shit like swimming for the swim team or playing football from there. These guys are just repelled by the nerd *subculture*, or don't even really know it exists, and don't participate in it.)
While I can't confirm that all the highly attractive nerdy women I know have "reasonable self-image or self-esteem" I sure know a lot of knock-outs who are into nerd shit and they don't act like they're in doubt about their attractiveness any more than anybody else. But I know plenty of attractive men who are into nerd shit too. I think it *is* quite likely that when they got into the nerdy stuff they were comparatively socially low class--maybe they were unattractive or socially awkward in high school and grew into themselves.
But also: As nerd stuff gets more popularly acceptable and comparatively higher status, I'd expect even that association to break down.
"I have never, literally never, known a single woman who A) was good-looking, B) had anything like a reasonable self-image or self-esteem, and C) even liked to read."
Sweet Child of Prague, so what you are saying sounds like "Hot chicks are dumb" or "Only ugly chicks read".
Can we at least get a definition of what you consider "reading"? Even the kind of mass-market bestseller fluff which I don't read myself is indeed reading, albeit of a low level (you couldn't pay me to read Jodie Picoult but she seems to be popular).
What do you consider "hot" and "ugly"? This can be very subjective and what to you is "average/plain" could be "pretty/attractive" to someone else.
Try linking to some images online of what you consider "this is what I call a hot chick and I bet she don't read", please?
"Especially for women, having nerdy interests is a clear coping strategy for being or believing yourself to be ugly: I have never, literally never, known a single woman who A) was good-looking, B) had anything like a reasonable self-image or self-esteem, and C) even liked to read. It seems clear that basically any woman who even thinks she has a reasonable shot at being hot enough to participate in clubbing culture or whatever you want to call it dives straight into that and invests all her time in it"
Either you aren't paying attention, or you live in a very unusual bubble. I know quite a few stunningly attractive women who work as literal rocket scientists and are very confident in their ability to excel in that field while still being really, really, ridiculously good looking. I can't honestly say whether any of them participate in "clubbing culture", but they have enough time left over to e.g. earn advanced degrees and do really, really, ridiculously hard technical work at a high level.
I know a whole bunch of A+B+C. Reading is, funnily enough, more popular among women - check the userbase of e.g. Goodreads. There is an absolutely huge overlap between nerds and artists, and you'd be surprised how many nerds you can find on a rave party. See also: Cyberia.
I'm very well aware that most casual? entertainment? readers are women; that doesn't imply that most women are readers or that they aren't selected from a subgroup of women. For a sex-flipped example of the same principle, consider Warhammer. Inarguably male by a large majority.
I am pretty sad about how much of the variation in gender and human experience you seem to be missing, enough so that I suspect you're actually trying to bait attractive nerdy women into responding to you rather than stating your real position.
But fine, I'll bite, because maybe you do just need the existence proof to be nudged into a more expansive view of humanity (and admittedly, because I like the excuse to list my credentials.)
(the cosplay makes me look bigger than I am, but it's just ill-fitting. Hopefully the clubbing photo gives a better idea of my body type.)
I have a degree in neuroscience from an Ivy+ university. My IQ has been formally tested at 140. I am a senior software engineer and the #6 contributor to my work repo.
I like Star Trek (clearly), board games (my favorite is Innovation), and yes, reading, including sci-fi, fantasy, non-fiction, and fanfic (my favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut).
For my birthday in 2019 I hosted a classic LAN party. I know 49 digits of pi, and all the lyrics to Lemon Demon's "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny". In high school I was in computer club, chess club, and on the robotics team. I have never been on any kind of sports team or spent any amount of time voluntarily watching sports. I've read not only The Hobbit and LotR but also The Silmarillion.
I didn't exactly choose to be like this. Sure, I've gotten into some of these things on purpose, but when I was 7 years old I loved everything Star Wars, spent several months doing nothing with my free time besides sorting my Pokemon cards by various schemas, and another several months doing nothing but poking around the content in Encarta 2000.
Frankly I bet I have more nerd cred than 70-80% of the people who read SSC/ACX, thankyouverymuch.
I also go clubbing, have an interest in fashion, makeup and interior decorating, attend music festivals, and love pumpkin spice lattes. I have as much sex as I want.
I also do things on neither the "nerdy" nor "basic" axes - I have pet rats, I listen primarily to metal/industrial music, I spent some time as a leftist political activist living in an honest-to-goodness hippie commune.
People don't have to fit into tidy little boxes, and in fact mostly don't.
(And no, I don't normally brag about myself like this. I'm aware it's a bit cringe, even in this context, but the situation did seem to call for it.)
As a reply to both yourself and Eremolalos: what's the point of dragging this to an entirely personal, individual level? I doubt you intended it that way, but that ends up being a pretty ugly rhetorical trick where you put me in the untenable position of either throwing up my hands and lying that "okay, fine, I made up my life experiences for no reason, you got me" or grossly violating the conversational norms of Scott's blog (which I already joked about earlier with Jonah). For this reason, I haven't followed any of the links either of you posted. Perhaps that seems evasive or dismissive to you, but it seems to me to be the only way to maintain anything like discursive hygiene here.
Instead, I'll remark that I think it's interesting, especially in the context of Jnlb's original question/thesis, that both of you apparently reacted really viscerally to what is in fact a pretty unremarkable empirical observation, calling me a misogynist etc. What exactly is the origin of this emotional outrage at someone having experiences incompatible with yours, and/or your self-image?
Finally, a question:
"enough so that I suspect you're actually trying to bait attractive nerdy women into responding to you"
What on Earth would be the point of that? Genuinely baffled by this suspicion.
I did not call you a misogynist. I am not enraged. Your observation is very politically incorrect, but I don't give a shit about that. I could tell that you thought you were making an unremarkable observation, and I was actually sort of astonished that you thought what you were saying was pretty obvious basic stuff, and had somehow not noticed how many exceptions there are to your generalization. If you are at or have been at a college or university or a professional setting you have to have seen many examples of female scientists, female athletes, female professional, & observed that the entire hotness spectrum is represented in these groups. And obviously these women did not get to where they are by knitting and clubbing. Even if you work at Starbucks you will have seen lots of hot female shit-kickers come through. In fact, even if you never leave your bedroom but you've been on ACX you'll know that Scott recently married an entomologist. She likes bugs so big they barely fit in your hand. Do you think she goes "eww" about tromping through the bush because there are spiders there? How on earth can you be failing to notice that your generalizations are inaccurate?
So I didn't post the pix because I felt that I or my daughter was being personally attacked -- I posted it to back up my point. I get that a photo set does not win the argument hands down, but it's a valid way to make a point.
Why was doing that an ugly rhetorical trick? What's "unhygienic" about it? I posted photos of an exception to your generalization. If you're afraid that looking at the photos is going to make you break Scott's conversational norms (um, how, exactly? you're going to feel obliged to say that my daughter or oxytocin-love are actually dogs? Heh, I don't think you need to have worries on that score). But, if you're squeamish about these pix, then google "young Jan Goodall" or "best current female mountaineers." Give 'em the 'ol Anonymous could-she-get-into-the-club-free test.
"What exactly is the origin of this emotional outrage at someone having experiences incompatible with yours, and/or your self-image?" I'm irritated, but not outraged. Also, as I said, astonished & curious. If your generalizations really do hold for the setting you're in, what setting *is* it?
No, that in particular was Oxytocin. I was replying to her too, after all.
"I am not enraged."
For a guy who's definitely not mad you sound pretty mad, but let's not make this into a recycled Buttlord gag – baffled I understand, but baffled sounds pretty different in my mind; regardless of your internal state, I feel like the heat/light ratio on this subthread is getting bad enough that I considered not replying.
"If you are at or have been at a college or university or a professional setting you have to have seen many examples of female scientists, female athletes, female professional, & observed that the entire hotness spectrum is represented in these groups."
I am an engineer, I studied engineering, I work in engineering, and I have not seen those examples or observed that. The few women studying engineering when I did were representatives of a quite narrow band of the hotness spectrum.
"And obviously these women did not get to where they are by knitting and clubbing."
Just a minor point here: the knitting was something I mentioned as a typical feminine-coded nerd-spectrum activity. I'm not suggesting that knitting is what women in general prefer to do if provided with a full gamut of options.
"Do you think she goes "eww" about tromping through the bush because there are spiders there?"
I do not. I never claimed the bit about camping was general, so accusing me of a false generalization there seems... well it seems like the sort of thing a guy who's too mad to read properly would do actually. What I said to Jonah was to first concede he had a point, then suggest a reason for our divergent observations on that score. Does that really sound to you like someone denying the non-universality of his experiences? If it does, I genuinely don't know what to tell you.
"Why was doing that an ugly rhetorical trick?"
Because if I look at them, and it turns out I sincerely don't think your daughter is very attractive and this is an understandable case of fatherly overestimation, I'm now in the position of either having to insult you in a way widely regarded as unacceptable far beyond the borders of this blog (and for which I would undoubtedly be sanctioned), or to lie and pretend you're right to avoid the insult. This is a pretty bad-faith corner to work one's counterpart into if it's done on purpose.
As for the googling, young Jane Goodall was absolutely not an attractive woman. I checked this again now and she looks like a gawky, flat dork who doesn't appear to know how to smile in the pictures that came up. "Best current female mountaineers" gives me no hits on DDG.
Finally, I would like to suggest to you that if there's no emotional outrage here, if you genuinely don't give a shit that my observation is very politically incorrect, it's odd that I got pushback on *only* the thing I said about women, when I said something only very mildly less brutal about male nerds. Not one word of criticism on that, even though it was a near-identical claim. Why do *you* think that is?
"if there's no emotional outrage here, if you genuinely don't give a shit that my observation is very politically incorrect, it's odd that I got pushback on *only* the thing I said about women, when I said something only very mildly less brutal about male nerds. Not one word of criticism on that, even though it was a near-identical claim. Why do *you* think that is?”
3 reasons:
(1) I don’t agree that you were only mildly less brutal about men. Let’s compare your typographies for men and women:
Women:
-hot: care only about clubbing, have no interest in books
-not hot
—those who adopt nerd culture to cope
—those who do not, but distract themselves with knitting and reading
Men:
-jocks
—jocks uninterested in Tolkein & other nerd culture things
—jocks who are interested in Tolkein, Warhammar etc. They make friends with others in nerd culture, presumably both jocks and non-jocks
-non-jocks
—those who adopt nerd culture as a cope
—presumably some who have no cope, but just feel like losers
—those who get so into Conan the Barbarion they get jacked and become jocks
Notice how much more differentiated & complex the male typography is? There are 5 categories instead of 3. Also, for the males there even exists the possibility that someone can change from the not-hot group to the hot group (the guys who dug Conan and got jacked). And there’s a realm where jocks and non-jocks can come together, around shared nerd culture interests. Also, regarding the women you declare that “I have never known a single woman who was good looking and liked to read.” While you don’t have anything to say about whether male jocks like to read or have any interests or skills beyond athleticism, you at least do not say that jocks are complete blanks as people when it comes to anything except, you know, jocking.
So the first reason I am critical of what you have to say about women is that I think it is a particulartly Flatland version of the rich 3-D truth — way worse than what you have to say about men, though that too seems pretty lame and bleak to me in comparison to the crazy variety I see.
(2) The second reason I am critical of what you wrote about women is that I am proud of my daughter. When I read what you have to say about women, I imagine you seeing my daughter and mentally stuffing her into one of your 3 cramped & flat little categories, and I feel pained and angry. One of the reasons I’m proud of her is that she is very pretty, but has managed to escape being over-concerned with her looks & relying on them to get her things. She doesn’t care about clothes & makeup, & got a degree that allows her to make a good living.
And by the way, I really think you should look at my pix and oxytocin's. You are not all that locked into bad options. If you think they are good counter-examples to your line of thought then the honest thing is to admit that. But of course you aren't obliged to do that . But let's say you don't think they are good counterexamples. You think the women in the photos are not particularly attractive. Well then, you have options, right? You can just look at the photos and make no comment about about them. You can say in a civil way that you do not agree that these are attractive women, perhaps softening it by saying well, these things are a matter of taste. Nobody's going to kick you off ACX for saying that. Oxytocin and I put up the pix as a challenge of your views in an argument. If you honestly think the challenge fails, it's reasonable to say that and we'll have to take out lumps.
(3) In general, I find your ways of understanding people’s self-esteem & how they deal with challenges to it to be simplistic and mean-spirited. “Most of the professional middle class are absolutely seething themselves into hell over the existence of billionaires.” I really don’t think that’s true. I am a member of the professional middle class and I am not seething with jealousy of billiionaires. I’ve make a pretty good living, I can buy and do they things I want to. I’d love to make another $50K/year, and hope I will sometime soon, but beyond that, I am satisfied. I do not yearn to have a bigger house, a solid gold toilet or a large penisy car. And I do not think I am a bit unusual in all this. My friends all seem to feel the same. We certainly have things we yearn for, but it’s things like to be young again — or to see again some people we’ve lost — or to overcome some personal flaw. We don’t yearn to be billionaires.
Do *you* yearn to be a billionaire? Later in the paragraph about how the professionals are seething about the billionaires you describe a person salvaging his self-esteem by telling himself that rich and powerful man is stupider than him and the man’s weath is undeserved. But then you add that the “almost certain truth [is] that you're actually total shit compared to the rich guy.” Sounds like you’ve really bought into the idea that wealth is the sole measure of worth, as well as the idea that people who are not at the upper end of some scale or other are worthless.
Oh also, I know plenty of other women in this category, including some I'd call hotter than me. (I have a coworker who's an excellent engineer, and the first thing I thought when I first met her was "wow, she looks and dresses like an Instagram model.")
I know many women who are various kinds of nerdy, including one or two full classic comics-and-video-games-and-math types, who are conventionally attractive. Lots more who like to read. If that hasn’t been your experience, I think there’s some massive sample bias going on. I know my own sample is skewed in the other direction (I have hobbies with an even gender balance that skew both attractive and nerdy, i.e. climbing and hiking), but the question is one of existence as much as frequency.
I would not class climbing and hiking as nerdy activities per se, and I don't think they're even nerd-*oriented* because I don't feel like those are hobbies with an overrepresentation of obese wheezy cheetodusters *or* weedy pocket-protected coke-bottle glasses guys.
That being said you do have a kind of point insofar as I also don't know any women at all, actually, who would react to the idea of hiking or camping in any way other than "ew, insects!". Maybe this is some sort of urban/rural divide?
If you go up a mountain, the people you come across will be disproportionately likely to know what at least one of hydraulic jump and the Silmarillion are, IME. There'll be women and obese people up there too.
It's easy to avoid insects you just go hiking in winter.
Rather than argue with you about whether there are beautiful women who like to read and dislike clubs, and women who don't go eww at the idea of camping, I'm just going to show you some photos of my daughter. She is beautiful. She does not like clubs. She can do one-armed chin-ups and she climbs 5.12. Oh, and she has a degree in engineering. https://photos.app.goo.gl/pRE8XL3RXaXH8ZWg7
And she did not turn out this way because we are rural." We live in a big coastal city. Lots of climbers here, by the way, many of them hot women. Good GRIEF, where do you live, Barbieland?
I'm glad you're proud of your daughter, and I am annoyed with Anonymous too, but I really hope you have her consent to show her photos to random vaguely-misogynist internet commenters
I doubt she would be as sturdy and happy as she is if I was the kind of person who put photos of her online in scanty climbing shorts when she was 14, oxytocin. She is 26 and said she didn't give a shit what I posted.
Could be? I’m certainly reminded heavily of section III from I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/), where Scott talks about never interacting with religious conservatives. I’ll also note real quick that the two things you just correlated with nerdiness, while they certainly *are* correlated with nerdiness, are also the aspects of nerdiness that you might least expect to be least correlated with attractiveness. That’s why you brought them up, but the bigger issue is that they’re non-central to the question nerdiness.
I’m currently studying to be an actuary. The interaction that put that on the map for me was meeting an actuary at Gencon, a tabletop convention, where I was running a LARP I wrote. I met him because we both sort of coalesced into an attractive nerd subspace, and hit it off talking about climbing. Most of the people I climb with are programmers, gamers, Sci-fi fans, etc. They might not be a large share of climbers overall, but there’s a whole world out there. And the past three women I’ve dated/am dating all read books, fiction and nonfiction, unprompted, without mentioning it to people, for pleasure (though I would only consider one of them to be a serious nerd).
I think the X-as-cope framing captures some important truths, but even a cope-heavy framework offers plenty of room for women to get into nerd-dom and/or reading, even if they’re attractive.
"That’s why you brought them up, but the bigger issue is that they’re non-central to the question nerdiness."
Obviously the two caricatures were just that, for brevity and clarity (two things you'll find that this reply fails at), but I guess we basically disagree about this on the level of definitions; as above I think the vast majority of male and nearly all female nerds are defined partially by their unattractiveness, and before the recent mainstream rehabilitation of "nerdiness" to mean liking very popular TV shows, I date to claim that this was also the generally accepted definition. Or if you prefer, the interests and unattractiveness have always been seen to be clustered together; my contention is that the causality flows from the unattractiveness to the interests. (Which appears to surprise people, both here and now and elsewhere/on other occasions, but if you think about it is rather trivial, because the idea that liking Magic: the Gathering *makes you ugly* is obviously wrong and the idea that it's just a comical but persistent coincidence is absurd.)
"I met him [in] an attractive nerd subspace [at Gencon]"
I'm actually willing to believe that there's some small minority of exceptions to the rule such that they can congregate and form a clique during a massive-scale nerd event such as Gencon.
"And the past three women I’ve dated/am dating all read books"
There's an obvious response to this, but it's inevitably rude as hell, so I'm not going to make it in this most hallowed of open threads.
"without mentioning it to people"
Sorry, is this meant to imply that they don't use it as status posturing, or that they're ashamed of reading? I genuinely can't tell which, but if it's the former I'm not sure how virtuous it is since part of my claim is that reading isn't generically high status among women.
"I think the X-as-cope framing captures some important truths, but even a cope-heavy framework offers plenty of room for women to get into nerd-dom and/or reading, even if they’re attractive."
I feel like this kind of slips past my claim rather than addressing it. I'm not really saying that there's no room for women to do this if they wanted to; I'm saying that in practice, women's aggregate revealed preferences strongly imply that virtually no woman *actually wants* to e.g. read and play boardgames in the first instance, but is only willing to do so as a "consolation prize" if she feels rightly or wrongly that she isn't attractive enough for her real desires which are basically a modern form of princess stuff. I phrased the observation in the coping-strategy framework because that was OP's topic, but you could just as well think of the thing itself as a completely rational acceptance of second place and that the coping only comes in when a given woman, as most do (and indeed this is also extremely common, endemic, among male nerds), decides she didn't want those grapes anyway, they were probably sour, and forms a hard identity around wanting/liking her nerd interests instad.
In fact, let me repeat for emphasis that when I wrote "especially women" I meant just that, not "only women", and I worry that by focusing on that part in these replies attention is drawn from the fact that I contend a large majority of nerd men are doing the exact same thing. It's just a smaller very high percentage.
Hot girls don’t read? This might depend on the definition of hot. I can affirm from experience that pretty girls do read - your definition of hot though might involve the kinds of things; clubbing, gyms, plastic surgery or over use of makeup, that the pretty but intelligent girl isn’t that concerned with.
Haha, I love it. Reminds me of the review of Sadly, Porn, in which book it is argued that almost everyone anyone thinks or does is some sort of cope to try convince themselves they're high status. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn
Hard to explain all the specific examples without the risk of seeming mean. I will try to make these true and necessary and no meaner than necessary.
* The Klan is a cope group for bottom decile trailer park residents to feel superior to someone.
* Parts of the feminist blogosphere are basically a cope group for femcels. Overlaps a lot with fat acceptance.
* blank slatism seems to have originated as a cope for non-aristocrats who were jealous of aristocrats, to justify erasing aristocratic distinctions. After that battle, the principle kept going further and did a lot of collateral damage. An uncharitable summary of Wokeness as a cope would be "everybody who has enough blue-coded immutable characteristics gets to blame their inadequacies on a laundry list of historical grievances and a vague miasma of present thoughtcrimes, without getting into plausible specifics of causal mechanisms for why these things would cause those inadequacies" This sort of cope is only necessary in a society that praises people for talents per se, instead of what they do with the talents they're given ala https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/
I would say that propositions 1-3 are not a given—at least not without further definition and context. I'd accept proposition 4, except the mass media can significantly skew what's being communicated. I would agree that there's a huge amount of cope marketing in the media with pitches for products and programs for people to lead happier, healthier, and more successful lives (most of which I suspect are ineffective).
Your model might work better if you categorized different copes by their function in our lives—a hierarchy of copes, so to speak—but Abraham Maslow already did this. Likewise, I think you waaaay over-simplify the coping functions of religions. For instance, many people use the religious groups they belong to as a social-cultural focal point while only paying lip service to the dogmas. That would be coping for social support and social enjoyment. Some religious groups have an overtly political outlook. For instance, certain jihadist elements of Islam want to reconquer all the lands that were formerly Muslim (e.g. India and Spain) and restore the Caliphate. Ultimately that would be coping with political disempowerment.
The implicit assumptions behind your arguments make a rational appraisal of them difficult.
When exploring places on Google Maps satellite view (everyone does this, right?), I've noticed an odd phenomenon: snow-covered regions will frequently have really weird discoloration, typically green and/or pink, in a way that doesn't line up with anything I've seen in real life.
My current best guess is that extremely white regions with the right angle of reflectivity onto the imaging satellite will get bright enough that some kind of RGB channel overflow thing happens? This would explain yellow (blue channel overflow) and magenta (green channel overflow) but not green, which I see frequently. Many of the green discolorations also don't seem like they're all that bright in general.
I'm confused. If anyone has theories or sources, I'd love to know about them!
Once upon a time, a kingdom was tyrannized by flocks of predatory birds. Some species stood over ten feet tall and had hooked claws like scythes. Some species were clever and hunted methodically in packs. Some species had superior camouflage, nearly invisible until the moment it was too late. Some species were tiny, but dripped venom from their claws, so that the smallest scratch meant death. The birds could kill anyone, but most preferred weaker targets: the very young or the very old.
The misery inflicted by the vicious, hungry birds was incalculable. In addition to those who were gruesomely killed each day, there were the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends that were left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones. Victims of birds’ attacks who didn’t die were often left with painful scars.
People tried to fight the birds, of course. Priests and magicians called down curses, to no avail. Warriors, armed with roaring courage, attacked them, but failed more often than not. Chemists concocted healing brews for scratched victims, but they died anyway. The birds were prolific and deadly, but not perfect, so many people were able to survive encounters with the less dangerous species before falling prey for the last time. Most people were able to find happiness, though: they coped mostly by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them. Anticipating that many of their children would be lost to the birds, people began having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon for a girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday. Couples often spawned a dozen children. The human population was thus kept from shrinking, and the birds flourished.
Technological progress changed everything, though, as it is wont to do. The King’s master at arms developed a high precision crossbow. A smith developed a technique to cheaply produce swords and daggers. These weapons could kill many species of birds. For the first time, people felt like they had a chance.
One day, in court, the King declared a war on birds. “No society should live in fear as we do. It is an abomination that we have normalized this terrible scourge on humanity, this senseless grief and loss of life.” The people reacted with roaring cheers. People were ready to fight, to kill the birds that they knew would one day target their children, their parents, themselves.
The King proposed an unthinkably ambitious project: to wipe all birds from the face of the Earth forever. Humans would live without fear, would be able to go outside without watching their backs and wondering if it was their last day on Earth. No one would have to mourn their friends or siblings or parents or children. Each person in the Kingdom would be armed! Each would receive a house safe from the birds! And, most ambitiously: the King’s own chemist would be developing an antidote to the bird venom that had killed so many!
At this announcement, murmurs echoed throughout the hall. The venomous birds had been around forever. Anything and everything had been tried to spare their victims, but a scratch was always fatal. People started wondering if this was going too far, if the King’s project was a little too optimistic, an absurd waste of money. Loud grumblings started around the room, when suddenly a small boy yelled out from the audience: “The birds are bad!”
The boy’s parents turned bright red and began hushing and scolding the child. But the King said, “Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser than an old fool like me.”
At first, the boy was too scared and confused to move. But when he saw the genuinely friendly smile on the King’s face and the outreached hand, he obediently took it and walked up to the podium. “Now, there’s a brave little man,” said the King. “Are you afraid of the birds?“
“I want my granny back,” said the boy.
“Did the venomous birds kill your granny?”
“Yes,” the boy said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes. “Granny promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies for Christmas. She said that we would make a little house out of gingerbread and little gingerbread men that would live in it. Then a bird scratched her and she got sick and… The birds are bad… I want my Granny back!”
At this point the child was crying so hard that the King had to return him to his parents. The child’s simple testimony had moved the room, and everyone in the King’s court felt a rejuvenated zest to fight, to win, to reclaim humanity and these simple experiences from the predators.
And so, over the next ten years, the Kingdom’s bureaucrats and weapons masters and chemists went to work. The King’s weapon masters churned out more spikes and swords, arming each person in the Kingdom. They educated villagers on the safest times to keep their children inside and safe from attacks, and relocated people living in the most dangerous areas. More children, those precious young lives, were saved than ever before–dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of blossoming souls who would have been confined to that senseless oblivion!
Miraculously, chemists developed antidotes to the poison birds’ venom, and for the first time, people could be scratched and live! Some victims were fine after taking the antidote, and returned to their lives as before. Some became tired after taking the antidote, and felt fatigue and spiky pains in their wrists and ankles. Some couldn’t walk more than a mile without feeling their head spinning and their hearts pumping after being saved. But they were alive, and the people rejoiced!
Emboldened by their new technology, the King’s men killed more and more birds. Attacks went down, and the people felt safer every day. They knew that they were defeating the birds. But the birds were not completely gone yet. The giant birds with the scythe-like claws rarely killed anyone, now that people rarely left home without their standard issue gear and weapons. But they could still injure, and many of the frail never recovered from their injuries. Safe from the birds, people lived longer than they ever had before, but in their old age they developed strange new pains and behaviors.
As the years passed and many species of bird were made extinct, it seemed as though the poison birds were only getting more common. They were small, and sneaky, and could hide almost anywhere: not even the King himself was safe. When scratched, some people would have to take the antidote once, twice–but usually after this you would have to take another antidote, stronger and stranger, that had curious and multiform effects: it left the victims deaf and their minds slow, it thinned out their skin so pressure sores formed on their arms and buttocks; ulcers formed on their mouths and food tasted strange to them. And sometimes the venom lingered; the chemists never knew when it was safe for someone to stop taking the antidote. Some people could not afford an antidote, and sometimes it did not work at all. People who had survived multiple attacks weren’t as strong as they were, and some became unable to work, to walk, to think, or even use the bathroom, until their lives became a quiet constellation of experiencing their pain, their boredom, and simple pleasures like a ray of sunshine and a warm blanket.
MORAL: Let us not confuse treating death with treating aging, the former creates a Hell that is unthinkable for people who have no experience with nursing homes and ICUs.
On the note of the original, CGP Grey did an animated narration of The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant back in 2018, which is great for those who are more video-inclined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
If the CIA wants to plant a story in the NY Times, what's its exact mechanism of doing so? Does one of the editors get invited into a smoke-filled room where a shadowy man slides a briefcase full of cash and the exact text they want to appear in the newspaper, or does something more subtle happen?
If anyone knows of a Youtube clip of a movie or TV show that depicts the process accurately, post it.
A reporter who has long time sources close to or aligned with the cia just gets a call from those sources and is pitched a story. It’s not complicated, it is almost just like a press release.
Medication and endurance training are helping, I would say she is back to 80%? Seeing a neurologist (in APR?!?!), and a cardiologist in a couple weeks.
In kind of a weird development, one of her preexisting 6 exercise/gym buddies had this (rare) illness 12 years ago, and one is a current sufferer (something my wife had zero idea about until she mentioned her recent troubles). Also a neighbor down the street was just diagnosed within the last week. Seems kind of odd for what everyone is saying is an uncommon syndrome.
I don't think getting the Times to write about it is the hard part. The hard part is creating the simulcrum of events, so that when the reporter (or readers) do a mild bit of googling afterward they come up with something that supports the story. I mean, you can't ask the Times to run a story reporting on revolution in Albania if there isn't in fact a revolution going on. You can't say "President Zelensky said such-and-such" if the man's press flack is available to answer yea or nay.
The most successful fake story is probably one of unverifiable future planning, e.g. Vladimir Putin is planning to this or that in Ukraine, according to confidential government sources that decline to be named because of the sensitivity of the story. In this case, probably all you need to do is *be* the confidential government source, and the only real barrier is probably that the story is consistent with the Times editors' world views and ideology. If it is, they're likely to talk themselves into printing it even if there's no real verification possible.
I think it is extremely common for national security reporters to have sources within the intelligence agencies that leak to them from time to time, and that these stories are often the reporters' bread and butter. A lot of media criticism centers around complaints that these reporters end up as more-or-less mouthpieces for their sources. So I imagine the default way to plant a story is simply to have several of your people have cultivated some reporters with leaks/confirmations on small stuff over the years, and now have them leak the story they want told.
An interesting case study here would probably be the NYT's coverage in the runup to the Iraq war, because the NYT in particular seemed like it almost turned into a part of the white house's PR campaign to convince Americans to support the war.
One way would be to "accidentally" leak information relating to it to a journalist. I think this happens a lot - a lot of leaks are intentional, and are actually supported by the organization they're "accidentally" leaked from. In some cases, there might even be an implicit ultimatum - that, if the journalist doesn't publish the "accidental" leak, then they won't be given access to "accidental" leaks in the future. (I don't have good evidence for any this off the top of my head, other than the fact that it seems to explain the world really well, but perhaps someone else can add some).
Presumably it depends on the type of story, but on average I assume they'd order one of the journalists who's a paid CIA asset to write the story and one of the editors who's a paid CIA asset to vet it.
If you're a real conspiracist you assume the entire paper is owned-operated by the CIA.
I don't believe that there are any great number of journalists who are paid CIA assets, if only because that would be a complete waste of money and the CIA doesn't actually have an unlimited budget. You need a CIA official to decide what the story is and write up the outline. At that point, the CIA official just needs to call a reporter and say "I have a juicy story that will generate many clicks and get you that much closer to your next promotion; want it?" The reporter will not say no, because he does in fact want that promotion. And if he does, just go on to the next reporter in your Rolodex. The CIA officials in question all have Rolodexes full of reporters who have consistently played their part in that game, without needing to be paid for it.
Others have made the same point, but, cynic or just nut that I am, I don't buy it when it comes to the Times. I totally agree with you that there isn't any great number of journalists on the payroll, but the NYT has such a prominent position nationally as *the* newspaper of record that I can't believe it isn't worth their while to have a few spoops in there specifically.
Wrong question. You start by recruiting someone to be a CIA guy, typically in college, *then* put him in the relevant position, e.g. NYT journo. You don't go floor to floor on 620 Eighth Avenue with a bullhorn, shouting WHO HERE WANTS TO BECOME A CIA GUY AND SUBVERT THIS PAPER?! That's too unsubtle even for a US intelligence agency.
So I read Matt Levine's newsletter about the FTX thing, and I have a question.
The claim seems to be: "FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange." And now FTX has gone under, so Alameda doesn't have to pay back the loan.
But FTX and Alameda are owned by the same person, aren't they? So -- does this mean Alameda now gets to walk away with a big pile of FTX's customers' assets, while FTX goes under?
The thing I was confused about is where Alameda got the FTT initially. FTX mints FTT, so doesn't that mean Alameda had to give cash to FTX to get it? Which makes the overall transaction something like "Alameda gives FTX $1 billion in cash to get N FTT tokens; Alameda then borrows $1 billion in cash from FTX and gives them N FTT tokens as collateral." Which obviously makes zero sense. Can someone explain this?
You've actually summed it up perfectly. It not making sense is part of the problem that then causes it to violently detonate.
Only, a few added steps might be:
Alameda doesn't have to buy the $FTT for a billion initially. We're the same people, Alameda and FTX.
It's possible to just transfer N $FTT tokens to Alameda. If a sale has to be made for purposes of paperwork, discounts or special deals are possible. So maybe Alameda gives FTX 10$ for N $FTT tokens, not a billion! Now our N worth of $FTT has price 0. But when offered up for trade, price hits 20$. Good thing we paid 10$ for N tokens, each of which is now totally worth 20$ (so long as we never sell and destroy the market).
The beauty of the whole thing is we've minted a token whose value is directly tied to trading activity on our platform. When used as collateral for a loan, the very act of people depositing to FTX and using the platform gives more funds to tap into. Which makes Alameda seem like a more effective trading group because they can use their tools. Which bolsters FTX, since we're so closely aligned.
Whole thing just goes faster and faster until, as you say, someone goes " Hey, why is all this worth a billion eaxctly? that doesn't seem to make sense. "
This whole sector is a scam so the default answer/assumption to all of it is that the companies are not operating as they describe and are just making highly speculative investments with funds hoping the overall speculative bubble in the area coves up for their lack of any real plan/economic value.
Just lie to people to get that money, go play with the money, and hope it all works out in the end! Great gig if you can get it and have no morals. Also why these dudes like EA. Dirty consciences.
Compared to fiat, btc has major structural advantages in:
* scarcity
* verifiability
* portability
* anticounterfeiting
* divisibility
* the inability of any third party to block transactions between consenting adults
The disadvantages are mainly volatility and a lack of widespread adoption, but those are the second-order outputs of a Keynesian beauty contest that bitcoin will win eventually due to the aforementioned first-order advantages. I've been hodling for a very long time and this latest kerfuffle doesn't bother me at all. I would still put pretty high chances of it flipping gold this decade.
Meh, a lot of those advantages are pretty fleeting and/or undermine each other.
The transactions really are not verifiable to “average” users.
Scarcity is worthless, my poop is scarce.
Divisibility is not something that is a meaningful difference from other options.
Anyway, it isn’t without merits, but I don’t think it is remotely clear those merits overcome its issues, or the inherent advantage of more traditional systems.
As ledger no one can alter is kind of annoying actually. And as you can see from how the sector has developed, basically people just end up redeveloping the same financial system but with shittier protections and less ease of use.
Scarcity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to be valuable long term. Fiat currency is not scarce because central banks are willing to triple the money supply to soften stock market crashes. We are seeing the resulting high CPI inflation in USD, GBP, Euro, etc this year.
I think that the worry is that Alameda does not actually have assets it borrowed from FTX. It might have used them to buy something which is now worthless. And since collateral (i.e. the thing which Alameda gave to FTX so FTX can seize it in case Alameda does not pay the loan back) is now also worthless, it is possible that FTX will not have any practical means to get its assets back.
Of course since Alameda and FTX are owned by the same person, it might be simplified as "SBF covertly redirected his client's money to buy who knows what".
I also have questions about legality on this. Does not appear to be an arm’s length transaction, but that rule likely specific to regulated entities.
I think we need more info. Does the loan say 1 FTT = 1 USD (or whatever). Or does the loan say, we loan you $X total notional dollar value, (currently made up of FTT worth >0), and later we get back $X*1.1 total notional dollar value, TBD what that includes.
the legality of it might have been the issue of lending customers or not properly isolating customer funds that were assumed to be held in trust. i'm not sure what agreement FTX had with its customers or what the default legal position of the assets held on behalf of FTX customers.
one issue with this 'lending' is that its always possible to structure a trade such that the custodian is able to capture X% of the value of the assets. the value the custodian captures is based on how likely the trade is to go negative because this is when the losses are paid out from the customer. for example i can take your assets and then put them all in red in the casino and ignoring the house edge my expected value of the transaction is 50% of the assets and this made up by the customer losing on average 50% of the assets.
Why would FTX going under mean that Alameda doesn't have to pay back the loan? Any world in which FTX ceases to exist is one in which someone else owns their assets (including any loans to Alameda).
I cannot link you to an email, but here's the full paragraph:
"The reason for a run on FTX is that you think that Alameda is, in my terminology, Customer C. The reason for a run on FTX is if you think that FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange. If that’s the case, then a crash in the price of FTT will destabilize FTX. If you’re worried about that, you should take your money out of FTX before the crash. If everyone is worried about that, they will all take their money out of FTX. But FTX doesn’t have their money; it has FTT, and a loan to Alameda. If they all take their money out, that’s a bank run."
I agree that he didn't directly say this was true, but he does seem to have proposed it as a possibility worth considering.
I've been attempting to be less introverted (not that there's anything wrong with it), but each day is a huge will-power fight against a strong instinct to go back into my shell. I've had limited success, but am interested to hear people's thoughts on why some of us are like this, how and if we can reliably overcome that instinct, or even if we should.
It seems I uh, flipped my first MBTI letter somehow in the recent years and I'm not sure how it happened, only that it can. I still often get tired of people, but I also need and enjoy company way more than I used to.
It seems to be somehow related to confidence and self-image? Like, I feel pretty alright about myself, if someone treats me badly I assume by default it's a problem with them not with me, I'd even consider myself attractive to the opposite sex. Hell, sometimes I dance and enjoy it. None of those were the case a decade ago.
I think a huge part of introversion is being tired of the small hits of psychic damage one receives in company of strangers, feeling obligated to maintain a mask, etc. Once that resolves, being in company of people feels a lot more like being in the company of cats or dogs - sometimes they're loud and annoying, but they don't bother me otherwise.
I still think people have a preference towards solitude or towards others, but the preference is fluid depending on the mood and being completely locked into one mode may be pathological and worth working on.
I am introverted too, but then I have AS, so it's par for the course I guess...anyway, I am more extroverted in a few situations:
- When I know the people I am talking to quite well;
- When I am (semi)-anonymous like on internet comment boards etc. and don't have to talk in-person to others (like here, I wouldn't be that open if people could see me "live")...
For what it’s worth, I sometimes repeat to myself, “life is an act of will,” just as a reminder that not everything will be easy for me.
Apparently, being (more) extroverted is important to you, but also difficult for you — it takes willpower. I’d say that you already know how to “reliably overcome” (your words) your instinct toward introversion — by using willpower, pretty much daily. That may be the best answer there is.
I know it's clichéd, but it really helps to join some sort of group that meets regularly - a club, a adult class[1], an amateur sports team, bar trivia nights, etc. Having a regular appointment to go out and socialize works wonders.
Personally, I recommend D&D if you're at all into it - it's rising in popularity, so your local game store almost certainly has a group[2], and if not there's probably *someone* in the area running one. It coming with the added benefit that D&D is literally about pretending to be someone interacting in a group, so you're actually practicing social skills. I do recommend finding an in-person group rather than an online one if you can - online groups are much better than nothing, but face time is more valuable for filling your social meter.
[1] Like wine tasting or painting, not an actual scholastic subject that requires a lot of focus on the lecture. Your goal is to have room to socialize, after all.
[2] The downside to this increase in popularity is that it's largely among gen Z and alpha, so your LGS will probably have a lot of teens and kids there. If that's not your scene, it might be problematic - but on the other hand, the few actual adults there might be more willing to talk and relate to you as a break from the kids
I'm definitely still mostly introverted. My brain gravitates to conflict and to concrete tasks, while the really extroverted people I know like camaraderie and shared experience. So the first thing is, why do you want to be extroverted?
The most helpful thing for me (apart from my uncle enforcing a friendship quota when I was a teenager) was getting a job answering phones. It's a very controlled interaction with people, that has a concrete endpoint of "connect them to the right person". Grocery clerk also worked.
Assuming you've already got a full-time job, I'd say try making yourself an information quota. "I'm going to ask how three people are feeling this morning, and share two anecdotes with them." Goals are a good way to keep retreat instincts at bay.
It's not obvious what the threshold is to meet your social needs, and perception can be distorted by depressive symptoms. You don't really need to be less introverted in temperament, just get face-to-face time with friends, family, and people out-in-the-world. That's not contingent on talking a lot, but it gets easier the more you do it anyway. I'd suspect that part of what factors into the 'instinct' is comfort with the familiar, and by the same token, social anxiety. You can't substitute social needs with virtual, pornographic experiences - notwithstanding that everyone's threshold is different.
After I found a good balance of introversion vs extroversion (80-20 for me), I no longer had to spend will power to force extroversion, it almost came naturally.
I also found it helpful to strictly segregate activities, so that I know which mode I'm in. I guard my work, hikes, reading, and hobbies so that they remain solitary. I choose activities like exercise classes, sporting events, and errands for extroversion. I sometimes give myself a pep talk to remind myself how the extroversion mode goes: "Remember to smile, say hello, exchange small talk. Don't forget microfriendships."
I switched from introverted to mostly extroverted as a kid, and it was because I ate the frog until it stopped tasting bad.
In my case it was making the phone calls to see who wanted to hang out. Other common paths to the same thing include organizations like Toastmasters or other social orgs or networking groups. They usually have a few minutes for each member to speak on a standard template each meeting. Practice what turns you off about extroversion until you aren't averse to it any more.
I used to be far more introverted, and the biggest trick I learned was to make extroverted friends. Someone who would often give me a gentle push to go out/hang out/et, but would also respect it if I said “no, I REALLY don’t want to do this” really helped. And then over the years, I just built up my endurance for human interaction
I once saw this phrased (on tumblr, presumably) as "Introverts don’t make friends, they get adopted by an extrovert".
I've found this to be mostly true - most nerdy friend groups I've been a part of consist of several introverts surrounding a nucleus of an extrovert. Usually this takes the form of the extrovert "pulling people out of their shells", initiating hang outs (group or otherwise), seeking out and vetting (adopting) new members, and generally serving as an excuse for introverts to hang out in proximity to each other long enough to become friends with each other. Having a token extrovert with you at social events removes a surprising amount of the emotional burden of being there.
I've actually been on both sides of this dynamic - I'm definitely an introvert, but I'm just extroverted enough that I've gotten several deep introverts to mistake me for an extrovert. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that this is, to borrow a term from the ASD community, a form of "masking" - I can pretend to be an extrovert long enough to engage in the ways needed to meet my social needs. "Fake it until you make it" is surprisingly effective here.
> Social activity didn’t drain me because it took a kind of energy out of me, like exercise would. It drained me because I was ashamed of myself. Small conversations would leave me with an overwhelming question: did they like me? And, if so, would this trick I played on them—getting them to like such an obviously ugly person—persist? I never answered these questions conclusively, they just sort of whirled around me like horseflies until the fluctuations of my mood took me elsewhere.
My own experience was similar. For a long time I thought I was introverted, but actually it turns out that I'm just really bad at communicating when there's any kind of background conversation going on. (Also, for a while I was trying to have conversations with people I didn't have much in common with.)
My advice is to try different types of socializing and see if there are some that you enjoy.
I want to be less introverted because I too often default to awkward silence. With resting grump face and a tendency to be quiet, after years in the office people still don't know or talk to me and I think they avoid me. It's probably negatively affecting my chances at career growth just in missed opportunities alone.
I love absorbing information. But it seems like I only have a limited reservoir of attention (or something).
Basically, I find it very hard to read a book. My mind wanders *while I'm reading*. As-in I'm somehow reading the words in my head but thinking of something else and not absorbing anything what I'm reading. (I'm also bad at paying attention in meetings and was bad at staying attentive during lectures back in my school days.)
What kind of strategy can I use to help me focus? (I try caffeine -- but it's not clear if it helps.)
I've never been diagnosed with anything like ADHD -- but I also grew up in a time and place where such a thing didn't exist. I'd definitely prefer not to take any drugs (caffeine excepted :). This seems like the kind of place that might have good advice, so asking you all.
It can be hard to pay attention when other stuff is on your mind. Your goal is to focus but your task should be to find a way to keep your head clear and free of distractions.
I have the same problem (and have an adhd diagnosis fwiw) and I've found a few ways to achieve this, though it still takes willpower.
1. habit. If you read only irregularly, it will never get easier. Try to do the focused task more often and you'll get better over time.
2. Keep a sheet of paper or something near you. Whenever a distracting thought pops in your head, write it down on the sheet and tell yourself you'll think about it later--right now you need to read. This staves off the worry of 'forgetting' to think about it later.
3. Minimize external distractions, especially tech. Try white/ambient noise.
I found that getting off of social media eventually gave me my attention span back. The constant scrolling of a feed shifts the brain to be rapidly scanning rather than focusing carefully, and I found it really hard to read books. My brain was looking for the random reinforcement reward of an interesting post and wasn't finding it in a slowly unfolding narrative. Expect a bit of time to retrain your brain's expectations.
Might be cliche advice, but I found my reading retention improved noticeably after reading (most of) Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. He advises a very attentive style of reading in which you actively keep track of the structure of the author's arguments as you go, even to the point of noting the hierarchy of arguments in the margins (eg "Point 1A, 1B, 2A" etc). I didn't get to this point in the book but he even advises a version of this for novels and other fiction.
I almost never actually make those kinds of notes in the margins, but Adler did successfully meme me into mentally keeping track of the hierarchy of arguments as I read, such that I can only zone out for so long before I snap back and realize, "Wait, what was that last point the author made? Let me go back and make sure I got it." And I'm finding the zone-outs are of shorter and shorter duration as time goes on.
Oh, interesting. I've never heard of that book. I'll give that a try.
I did chuckle when you said, "I didn't get to this point in the book but he even advises a version of this for novels and other fiction." There are a *lot* of books that I don't "get through".
Ha ha, yes. The classic catch-22 of not being able to finish "How to Read a Book" until you've already learned the lessons from "How to Read a Book." In actuality, it was just competing with more urgent reading at the time, definitely want to finish it.
I've found it very helpful to also have the text read to me while reading it, using a TTS app (I use NaturalReader). This only works if you have the book digitally, of course, and preferably read the digital version.
How fragile is a cashless society? I was trying to purchase an iTunes movie on Apple TV a few days ago for the weekend movie, and was always declined. Logging in to banking app didn’t show my accounts, it showed an error. So, then and there at least, my money is gone. I was not alone - people out for the night found their card not working, one guy had to run home leaving his watch as collateral. The problem was a multiple hour outage at HSBC, a major U.K. retail bank.
It got me thinking about a potential attack that takes out major retail banks for days, or weeks. Not only would that cause major disruption during that time, millions would literally have no money, but the subsequent fall out would also be disaster. No doubt people would try to go back to a partly cash society by withdrawing enough money to survive subsequent outages, whether they were personally affected or not, causing multiple runs in the banks.
It seems to me we have introduced massive fragility here without much thought, just as the fragility of globalisation wasn’t fully realised until it broke and supply chains were disrupted.
Isn't this exactly what happened in Ukraine a few years ago during the notpetya atrack?
Basically a Ukrainian tax software firm was compromised and every network with the software on it was wiped. Sent Ukraine into something of a dark age and even took our the imternational shipping giant maersk. Darknet diaries has some great coverage on it: https://pca.st/episode/1e9f718d-4b2b-494c-9fa7-3847de922006
If it does prove more fragile, I think there are easy steps to minimize that risk through diversification.
For example, multiple credit cards. If you're deeply concerned about outages at a single bank, it's not hard to have backup credit cars with 0 annual fees. Say, a primary credit card that uses Visa, and 1-2 backup cards through Discover/American Express/Mastercard. More seriously, after the Canadian trucker protestors got their accounts frozen I started looking into alternatives and it looks pretty easy to get a Union Pay Card through China's ICBC bank (1). It's hardly foolproof but it's also fairly trivial to get; just another credit card.
If or when this becomes a real concern for you, there's an easy solution of multiple overlapping credit card and banking companies that are all eager for your business (with the exception of Americans in foreign banks).
I think we actually already have a solution to such a situation on the consumer side (at least in the short term) that's antiquated enough that most places have stopped accepting them: personal checks. They're essentially low-to-zero-tech at transaction time, and are inherently asynchronous in relation to the banking system.
Now, as I said earlier, checks are antiquated - most places don't accept them and I think most people under 35 wouldn't be able to locate their checkbook in their home, if they even still had one. In the event of a real banking emergency, the local executive branch could temporarily mandate they be accepted, and those without checkbooks just need to figure out their account and routing numbers and then you could produce and print a workable facsimile in an emergency.
I don't think the vulnerability that's most important is at the consumer end. The disruption you're describing is pretty mild. The important vulnerabilities are at the wholesale level, so to speak, e.g. the massive settlements that occur between big banks, between banks and the Federal Reserve system (in the US), between national banks, between big corporations and government entities and the Fed, et cetera. Imagine a situation where Bank of American suddenly can't get access to whatever cash it's parked overnight at the Fed, or a zero gets added to everybody's FNMA-owned mortgage, or it's not possible to convert pounds to euros for 8 hours. These would cause messes that would affect millions and be very difficult and costly to unsnarl, because the enormous clerical infrastructure that used to take care of all this stuff has been gone for 50 years maybe. How would the Bank of England sell a gilt to a Swiss investor these days, even assuming he has a stack of pound notes sitting next to him in his office (in Zurich), if the whole electronic apparatus is gone? I'm skeptical anyone at the BoE even knows how it was done in 1960. They'd have to get some codger out of retirement to suggest a procedure.
But by the same token, because this stuff is so obviously mission critical, it's probably the case that smart people have spent lots of time thinking about what-ifs and backups. I doubt they cover every eventuality, and there might be some shocking carelessnesses we'll only find out if a certain Black Swan occurs, but I doubt it's treated as casually as whether the retail ATM system is up and running 24/7 without ever a glitch.
Very fragile. Not only human error and hacking, but system control by political outgroup (see also CBDCs and the recent Canadian banking measures against the truckers).
As despicable as the action against the truckers was (and if you don’t think so pretend it happened to your ingroup, not outgroup) this isn’t really my concern here. It’s an attack taking out the main retail banks for days. An attack against the system, not by it.
And it could be very easily solved, or prepared for. Just ask every household to have some cash on hand, enough for a week. This is the kind of thing that needs the joined up thinking that is not really an attribute of what Dominic Cummings calls „the blob“.
Systems of nation-level importance generally do network analysis to avoid being vulnerable to exactly that - they run checks on the C2 graphs to simulate any set of given links being "cut", see what routes and links become lynchpins, and build in redundancy for those links. I know for a fact that AT&T developed software to do exactly that, and that software has many clients.
That's a known vector of attack and any competent nation-state-level actor is going to have prepared accordingly.
Does anyone know the details around the Warnock domestic violence accusations? I’ve poked around a bit, and hadn’t been able to find anything.
For those of you who aren’t inundated with Georgia campaign ads and think that I misspelled Walker, let me give the context. For the past couple of months, ads against Walker have been run, which say he “wanted to strangle employees,” “put a gun to his wife’s head,” “threatened a shootout with the police,” etc. There are a lot of quotes. Good odds that you’ve heard about these if you follow the news.
About maybe a month ago, a new strain of attack ads against Warnock (not Walker) started. They show a clip of police cam footage, in which his ex-wife accuses him of trying to back up his car over her. Besides that, very little context is given. It’s now a popular 10 second clip in a 30 second campaign ad, but that’s the only such accusation I’ve seen.
It seems to me that if this really happened in some objectively bad way, it would be more prominently featured in ads. At the same time, if it really didn’t happen, it would be slander/libel. I haven’t been able to find details on what actually happened, and was hoping someone else with more google-fu than me had figured it out. Thanks
I actually live about 20 houses away from Warnock in Atlanta - the neighborhood consensus view is that basically nothing actually happened, and if anything it was an accident. There is no information other than what is in the news reports (I asked someone who would know).
Warnock called police to Ndoye’s Atlanta home shortly before 8:30 a.m. on March 2. According to a police report:
Warnock said Ndoye accused him of running over her left foot with his 2014 Tesla while they were arguing in her driveway. Ndoye was reluctant to show her foot to the officer, who wrote: "I did not see any signs that Ms. Ouleye’s foot was ran over." Medical personnel arrived and were "not able to locate any swelling, redness, or bruising or broken bones on Ms. Ouleye’s left foot."
I watched a local Atlanta news coverage over it. It seems that it's mostly a nothingburger. They were having a fight where she wouldn't move and the car probably got pretty close to her feet. However, according to medical examiners her foot was uninjured. Certainly it's nothing compared to everything about Herschel "Family Values" Walker.
N=1 but once as a teenager I fell out of a slowly-moving car while barefoot and my foot was run over by the back right tire. To my surprise, the only damage to my foot seemed to be some scrapes to the skin, which I'm pretty sure mostly happened in the "fell out of a moving car while barefoot" part of the incident.
For what it's worth, I found a Quora link with some anecdotes that sound a lot like mine:
It could be related to whether the full weight on the wheel goes onto your body. If the tire goes on your foot, it may at all times be also partly on the ground. Not so if the tire goes over your leg, which is much thicker. Also, if it goes on your leg then the vehicle will rise a lot further off the ground than in the foot case.
Also, some cars aren't that heavy on a per-wheel basis, especially the rear wheels that don't have an engine on them.
One can imagine a situation where he was trying to get out of there, and she was trying to block the car, leading to a close call. I do recall reading that she was checked out by paramedics and had no injuries, so her claim that he actually ran over her foot is hysterical.
> I’ll be deleting any comments below a vague and shifting quality bar, probably around the 33rd to 50th percentile of the average ACX comment. ... I only let the highest-quality comments (according to my subjective judgment)
I'm perfectly fine with this method, but I think it'd be essential to have significantly more input from you Scott, as to what your subjective understanding of high quality vs. low quality is.
For example, the 'neg. comment, low content' issue you mentioned lately was helpful, more of this is needed. So: what is high quality for you? What are elements of low quality?
For context, I am aware of the '2 of necessary, true, and kind' approach.
Okay, I predict, if you Scott will add more concrete, actionable information on what you subjectively consider to be high quality and low(er) quality comments, then a) over time (6 months) the quality will improve more on all threads than if you don't do this and b) folks will feel less nervous posting on challenge mode threads (=the number of those who feel nervous to post on challenge mode threads will be lower + for some of those who feel nervous to post, the level of nervousness will be lower, while it will not rise to the same extend for some others who are nervous to post, so that overall the level of nervousness in the 'nervous to post people' will be lower).
I'm aware, that this is difficult to impossible to check. Probably more an expression on how I'd expect things to work.
I think the fuzziness works because scrolling through here we can see the average quality level of the comments, and if we don't have an equivalently high-quality observation maybe we'll refrain.
Makes me wonder whether he's had to do any comment policing at all, or whether merely putting that rule in place made everyone self-police a little better. One would assume a base rate of him having to delete 33-50% of comments if he just did this on an open thread, but I'm guessing with that rule leading things off the real number is sub-10%.
At the time of writing there are 423 comments. People are brave! I normally just lurk on the comments and post very, very rarely. The last time I posted anything substantive Scott mentioned it as one of the highlights (so proud!) only to dismiss my argument (so mortified!). Well it was about Easter so perhaps it was a case of 'Whereof only 10,000 words will do, thereof you must be silent'.
The only semi regular posting I do is to try to promote my podcast Subject to Change (https://pod.link/1436447503). I'm almost certain promotional efforts like this are against the spirit of the comments section so I only do it when I feel I have an episode I am really proud of or if I think the readers of the blog might find it particularly interesting. (Not least episodes with David Friedman, Battleship Bean and John Schilling - all well known to ACX).
Anyway as the challenge has been thrown out I thought I'd jot down some random and not very connected thoughts on my experience as a (very) amateur podcaster over the last few years in case it is of interest. (And if it is not of interest it will be zapped!)
1. My podcast is one where I interview interesting people who have written interesting books. This is the laziest kind of podcast. I am relying 0% on my own knowledge and charisma and 100% on that of my guests. There are no production values to speak of.
2. That said putting doing the podcast is a surprising amount of work. I like to edit out misspeaking and pauses and loud breaths and so on. If the guest spoke for an hour that usually takes me at least 3 hours to edit.
3. Getting guests is easier than I thought it would be. I can understand that because if I had spent three years writing a book I'd sure want to talk about it. On the other had the historian Niall Ferguson surely had a point when he said his son had advised against doing podcasts because then people wouldn't bother buying the book.
4. I don't think I have had any bad guests so far. Pretty much everyone has been good at speaking.
5. One thing I have learned is not to waste time on introductory chit chat. When I listen to a podcast I just want them to get on with it. If we haven't got on with it within a couple of minutes maximum I have failed. I finally worked that out after about 15 episodes. I wish I'd have worked it out sooner.
6. A mistake I keep making is forgetting that I know more than the audience. So when I ask a question I take the shared knowledge I have with the guest for granted. That then leads to an answer that excludes a large part of the audience. And I still don't know exactly how to get the episode to flow in a way that will work for the listener. Sometimes I feel I am really helping the episode flow along and sometimes the guest is a great speaker and my job is just to say 'Oh really!' from time to time. Edward Shawcross on the Last Emperor of Mexico was probably the most effortlessly entertaining speaker of all my shows (and such a good subject!) and really didn't need me there at all.
7. My podcast doesn't get all that many listeners. Between one to four thousand downloads depending on whether the guest is famous AND has a strong social media game.(My social media game is zero). And for most guests it is at the lower end of the scale.
8. That doesn't matter - it is a chance for me to speak to and learn from some of the brightest most interesting people on the planet. Well, interesting to me. It is an absolute privilege.
9. I get extremely nervous before doing an interview. I want a good show for selfish reasons but I also feel like if I don't do justice to the guest I have really let them down.
10. There is more history around than I realised. I thought I knew a fair bit of history but it turns out I knew practically nothing. I had no idea about the Portuguese rounding Africa and heading into the Indian Ocean. How could I not have known about this? It is one of the most consequential events of world history. I blame my school! Then there are the smaller stories like the wreck of the Batavia. A treasure ship and a psychopathic madman made for an amazing story that Russell Crowe is turning into a movie. It turns out history is full of these barely believable stories that I had absolutely no idea existed.
11. I said above I am not so fussed by my listener numbers. That is not true. I want to have lots more listeners! But I have no idea how to get them. And I have no idea if the number I do have is okay given that it is a simple interview show or if I could promote it more effectively to people who would enjoy it. And there are lots of other history podcasts out there and some of them are really, really good.
12. My podcasts are way too long. Often an hour and a quarter or longer. I have started trying to split the really long ones in two if it is possible. But I think my philosophy will continue to be that I want to do the topic justice rather than fit with listener needs. But I must admit if I saw a podcast on the fall of Constantinople that was an hour and a half I might pass quickly by. But it is one my best episodes!!!
13. When you interview an author about a book they wrote 5 years ago they will likely have forgotten a lot of it. I read the book a few days ago, they haven't thought about it in years.
14. Guests never, ever have decent microphones. There is nothing you can do about this.
15. Recording on two tracks (which you can only do remotely) is great. It means that when you try to interrupt and the guest sensibly ignores you then you can just silence your embarrassing attempt to say something.
16. And finally if any of you have some good ideas for guests who you think would be entertaining please let me have your suggestions. hogg.russell at gmail dot com The podcast is history mainly but some film stuff mixed in.
Scott has promised to remove low quality comments. So if he doesn't take this one down that is basically an endorsement. So please give my podcast a go! https://pod.link/1436447503
I love your podcast and would hate for you to have to reduce the length at all. IMO the best podcasts are at least an hour in order to have enough time to explore any idea in depth. I just finished listening to your most recent episode on Interregnum England, a subject in which I have no particular interest, and I enjoyed the entirety.
I work in the skilled trades and often have long stretches of time where I can listen to whatever I want while I build, and your content really hits a sweet spot for me, along with Bilge Pumps, Red Scare, and The Fifth Column. Please keep it up and don't be afraid to go deep, people can always stop short if they've had enough.
PS please do more with Bret Devereaux, the man is a treasure!
I can't tell you how nice it is to get comments like this. You have inspired me to get back on the computer and chase up some new guests. And yes Bret Devereaux is brilliant - so knowledgeable, so enthusiastic and such good company!
I don't listen to every episode, some seem too obscure and niche for me, but generally they're great.
I would never have guessed that your numbers were so low given the quality.
Might seem lame, but love your voice and accent.
I would advise against splitting long episodes. Plenty of successful podcasts have episodes many hours long. If it's good, I don't want it to stop. Personally I definitely prefer a single longer episode.
As a guest, your work is very much appreciated. A large portion of the reason that I haven't done anything besides text myself is that I don't have the skills or the patience for production work.
Re 9, it doesn't come across. I didn't notice it the first time (possibly because I was also quite nervous), and definitely didn't notice the second time, although in fairness that was a repeat of stuff I'd done earlier.
Re 11, I know I made a conscious decision not to see traffic numbers, and it's one that I haven't regretted. Do what you want to do, not what draws eyes (ears?)
Re 14, sorry about that. You manage to make us sound good anyway.
And re 16, if you want me back, I'd be happy to do so, although I'm not sure what to talk about. Changes in the relationship between land and sea? Early history of the battleship? Unfortunately, I'm falling into the problems you mention in 13 with a lot of the better early battleship stories.
I've been flirting with the idea of doing a podcast, but it feels weird to create a podcast given that I never listen to them, because for me it's an incredibly tedious and frustrating experience (I'm very happy to read transcripts when they exist, and I wish they existed more often).
So thanks for a perspective on an amateur side of making a podcast, exactly where I'd land if I ever do one! Let me ask more questions:
1. Why don't you have transcripts? (I guess I gave that one away). Is it the cost/inconvenience or you're opposed to having them? If it were easy/cheap to generate a transcript, would you take care to always do it?
2. Do you get any listener feedback? How much of it, relative to the no. of downloads, and in what form? Do you wish you had more/less of it?
3. Do you give your guests exact or approximate lists of questions you are going to ask in advance, or is it completely improvised? Do you feel OK to spontaneously ask them questions leading away from the precise topic of the book (e.g. if talking about a history professor, ask about the life in academia and its ills and benefits)?
4. Do you try to put episodes out regularly and beat yourself up if you can't do it?
5. What's the platform you use to actually talk to the guest and record the episode? Zoom?
6. Does it happen as you talk to the guest that they misspeak or phrase something not very well and you simply re-do a part of the conversation, pretending it's "fresh" but actually saying again the things you both already said, slightly better? If that happens, how often; and does it happen by your request or the guest's?
7. Do you think you'd listen to your own podcast if you weren't doing it but someone else were, exactly the same episodes except for the different voice of the host?
1. No transcripts partly because it is too much bother but mostly because I don’t think there is much demand. Remembering my overall download numbers.
2. I get very occasional DMs on Twitter etc. very rare but I glow for days after!
3. I used to give a few questions in advance but have stopped. Nobody seemed to much want it. I have a rough outline prepared but just try to steer things so they can tell the story. If a new idea occurs to me I ask it and for example I asked Greenblatt about his faith in the light of the thoroughly atheistic The Nature of Things which was the subject of his The Swerve. Quite often I kick myself for not thinking of a question until after. On one occasion I wanted to kick my guest - a very nice old Japanese lady who asked me after we stopped recording ‘Should I have mentioned the time I was strafed by an American airplane?’
4. I aim for roughly once every two weeks. I don’t worry too much about timing so long as I have a couple of interviews in the pipeline. Getting a bit worried right now to be honest!
5. I record using Squadcast, edit on Audacity and upload on buzzsprout.
6. If it is a misspeak by the guest usually they correct themselves and I can edit so the error goes away. I don’t generally record a new bit but have at least once. If I stumble over my words I often just start again because I know I can edit.
7. Would I listen to my own podcast? I think for a lot of episodes I’d enjoy listening. But would my podcast be at the top of my list? Hmm! But really there are three or four episodes I am really proud to recommend. (And remember I don’t bring much to the podcast - often it’s a case of Scott’s ‘I see. Tell me more!’ )
Transcripts might help with SEO and getting new users to find your podcast. I would have thought with modern tech, automated transcription can make the task not too much work? But given your high production standards, I guess you would still need to review and edit any automated transcription.
I'd definitely want to make sure the transcripts were correct. But maybe you are right about it not being too much work? Would be good to get user numbers up. I need to have a think!
This is an interesting experiment which could have a few benefits. Forcing people to be more thoughtful about their comments could create a more intellectually stimulating environment for discussion. Additionally, it may help to weed out some of the less constructive comments that can sometimes bog down a discussion. I'm curious to see how it plays out.
I think a lot of people have a weirdly inflated idea of how good the bottom 33-50% of comments are.
Not to discourage people from trying to be excellent, because we should always strive for that, but the standard is more like "Please don't be terrible" rather than "Please be excellent."
"Forcing people to be more thoughtful about their comments could create a more intellectually stimulating environment for discussion."
Strong skepticism on this from me, simply because I haven't been more thoughtful about posting at all. I've just posted as I usually would and the devil take any deleted posts, especially since Scott already declared no personal consequences for deletion. I think the rule selects for confidence (and arguably accurate risk analysis) rather than anything else, which actually weakly selects *against* thoughtfulness since that trait seems (in my personal experience anyway, I don't have data) associated with timidity and self-doubt.
That's not to say that the experiment sucks or anything, just that I think its value has to come from the actual removal of bad content so nobody has to read it and the holistic impression is one of uncrappiness.
Androgens have been helpfully used to address depression (mostly in men, I think.)
Progesterone (which is structurally similar to androgens and another product of the same steroidogenic pipeline as testosterone ) has been used to treat some conditions in women like post partum depression. Scott covers this topic in regards to Zulresso (Allopregnanolone) which has a similar impact as the tragically unpatentable progesterone.
The anti-depressant effect of progesterone is consonant with the synaptogenesis hypothesis.
"Progesterone promotes dendritic growth, spinogenesis, and synaptogenesis via its nuclear receptor in the developing Purkinje cell. "
Does Scott's audience contain any Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians or any other similar barbarians who'd be willing to answer my question: are "thoo" and "tha" used interchangeably, or do they follow the same rules as tu/vous, du/Sie, etc in other languages?
Not a Yorkshireman / Lancastrian - but my grandparents were (both).
As I understand it this is a bit messy, because there's both a geographical and a syntactic dimension.
Syntax – for many speakers "tha" is a reduced form of various incarnations of the pronoun, including "thoo" – much as we use a reduced form of "you" like "ya" or "y'" in many positions. So if someone asked "Who did it?" they might say "Thou!" or "Thoo!", but in ordinary fluent speech they'd be likely to produce "tha" (or thə, or th') much of the time.
Geography – "tha" is/was more common in the North-East, especially the East Riding of Yorkshire and (I think) going all the way up to Tyneside.
I don't think either form can be a plural pronoun.
Thanks for answering. I wondered if "tha" was effectively the informal, and "you" or "thou" the formal. But there's no reason someone brought up to speak with it would consciously note what the rules are. It might have been better to ask about which circumstances feel more natural for "tha" and which for "you".
As you probably know, the evolution in the language before the loss of thou/thee/thy was that ye/you/your gained a formal/respectful singular use, much like (and perhaps by direct analogy with) the French “vous”. The fact that the th-forms could then occasionally have a demeaning connotation (denying respect) probably contributed to their loss.
However, I suspect the situation in the northern dialects that retained the th-forms was a bit more complicated than just “thou = singular + informal,” with various dimensions of age, familiarity and status (and also Quakerness), and maybe you’re right that the reduced form partakes in that. I don’t actually know this from any expertise, I only know that in Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason and Dixon” the pattern of usage is quite complex and not transparent, and I very much trust Pynchon to have done a ton of research and to know what he’s doing!
Just came here to mention to scott an interesting study [ Ketanserin reverses the acute response to LSD in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study in healthy subjects ](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36342343/).
Here's the gist:
* ketanserin is a 5HT2A antagonist, it can however be used to stop an LSD acute effets *after* they started
* the level of BDNF is still increased by LSD even though no subjective effets were felt.
This to me seems like a step forward to triggering neurogenesis regularly without having to deal with the psychological impairement.
Therapeutic applications are one thing, but having a pill that stops an overwhelming psychedelic trip - even if it's in your pocket for peace of mind and you never use it - sounds amazing.
I don't really think that this study particularly supports the idea that the psychedelic effects aren't necessary for the antidepressant effects of LSD. There are a few reasons for that.
First, and most importantly, they aren't trying to (and don't succeed to) completely abolish the psychedelic effects of LSD. Rather, they're trying to limit the duration. In the LSD+ketanserin group, the duration of psychedelic effects was about 3.5 hours, compared with 8.5 hours in the LSD+placebo group. So the only conclusion this seems to support (with regard to BDNF levels), if any, is that the benefit of psychedelics comes from some time in the first 3.5 hours of effects, and that a psychedelic experience with a longer duration is not more beneficial.
Second, according to the p-values in supplemental table S4, none of the data about BDNF reaches significance. There clearly isn't a significant _difference_, but that doesn't mean that the _lack of difference_ is significant. (Using a better statistical test might reveal a significant difference, since all the p-values reported in the table are for individual data points, but I don't really know enough about statistics to say for sure).
Third, this study was preregistered as NCT04558294. That preregistration doesn't mention anything about BDNF. That immediately makes me hesitant to draw any BDNF-related conclusions based on it.
Unfortunately, I think the only conclusion that can be drawn from this study's investigation of BDNF levels is that more study is needed. I would be interested to see a study of LSD given after ketanserin (so as to completely abolish its psychedelic effects), though my prediction would be that it would be completely ineffective in that case.
The neurological trimming experienced by children as they develop is hardly an impairment. The need to separate the machine from the experience seems petty at best, and at worst an assault on neurodivergence, claiming the subjective experience of LSD to be impairment. Ahhh the foibles of the just say no generation 😸
I do appreciate this kind of impairement as much as the-very-selected-few-who-appreciate-this but you can't deny that this kind of experience every week is not sustainable for months. Plus it's hard to fit some busy schedules.
Now come to think of it, the tolerance might build up to the subjective effect but not to the BDNF effect.
I'm not saying we need human guinea pigs but I'm not saying we don't need human guinea pigs.
By the way, as most antidepressants I've heard of (psilocybin, SSRIs, MAOI, ketamine) trigger this BDNF increase, why hasn't it been tested to directly *inject* BDNF into human patients? Serious question btw.
Well if I'm not mistaken those are psychiatric medication wheras ketanserin is an antihypertensive. Thus I think only ketanserin (so far) is fit for staying as sober as possible.
Since there has to be *some* comment of poor enough quality to get binned, in order for this experiment to work, let me step up.
Latest advertising email from a French perfumier whose scents I do like and sometimes buy. This one is for the gentlemen out there (though not confined to them):
"The ideal gift for the man who is looking for you, the one you are looking for; the one who loves you or whom you love; for a father, a brother, a friend, or for yourself. After all, perfume has always been gender-neutral."
Four writers, from Casanova to Ernest Hemingway, and I'll quote you the Hemingway one.
The Frenchest of American writers, Hemingway is one of the few to be equally revered on both sides of the Atlantic. An inveterate Parisian to the point of naming the bar at the Ritz after him, Hemingway was also known for his liberal drinking.
A great lover of rum, gin and champagne, he even invented the Papa Doble, replacing the dose of sugar with... a double dose of rum. A worthy heir to the opiated poets who made the great hours of French Romanticism, Hemingway is remembered as the embodiment of a right-bank intellectual epicureanism that is the antithesis of the Saint-Germain existentialism that today's authors claim as their own.
1899 emerges as a warm woody fragrance, free of treacly ambers without losing any of its generosity. Juniper and Bergamot echo gin and the mineral bubbles of the glasses of champagne that Hemingway swallowed during his interviews, then give way to a heart of cashmere-like Iris warmed by a voluptuous and sugar-free Orange Blossom, Papa Doble style.
Vanilla and Cinnamon underpin this heart in an old rum effect enhanced by a peaty whisky-like Vetiver, anchoring 1899 in the register of silky tobaccos; of a charming and irresistible sapiosexuality.
An image - Hemingway leaving the Ritz past midnight, the Place Vendôme covered in silent indigo, his wool and cashmere overcoat exhaling aromas of amber spirits, leather and vanilla-flavoured cigars."
Now this is teetering on, if not tumbled over into, pretentiousness but I like the way this guy weaves little stories around his scents and it is very French literary style. And who can resist having a go at "Saint-Germain existentialism", whatever that is when it's at home? It's a whole production around what are, to reduce it to the bones, a set of nice smells in little bottles.
If the description fascinates you, you can buy the four listed scents plus two others in a sample set:
I'm fascinating by the concept of using a perfume just for yourself, which I think women sometimes do (maybe even men for all I know). I get the use of perfume for the sake of someone else -- I've responded positively to perfume on a woman, although I have no good idea about why -- in my imagination she smells like herself only more so, if that makes any kind of sense.
But for me I *don't* want to ever smell myself, pretty much any conscious awareness of such would make me uncomfortable and want to go shower. To my mind smelling better is fully equivalent with smelling less, although I concede that women who are attracted to me almost certainly feel differently. I can resolve that weird tension by saying well, we look at the same thing (me) with very different perspectives, so we value very different aspects of it.
But how to resolve the idea of a woman wanting to smell good to someone else -- let us suppose a man because my Neanderthal mind works that way -- *and also* wanting to smell good to herself. Is she thinking "this would smell good to someone else to whom I want to smell good, even if there is no someone else in the immediate offing?" Or is it really only for her own satisfaction, e.g. "I want to smell as if I've spent all morning walking through fields of flowers?"
I wear cologne just for myself, like, even if I know I'm going to be at home all day. I like beautiful scents, and, for whatever reason, the way our culture consumes the art of perfumery is by putting it on yourself.
Humans are mammals; mammals orient themselves in the world by scent. I don't think we need any more of an explanation than that.
I rarely use perfume, but when I do, it's because I want to smell good *for myself*. I'm not interested in how it affects others, and indeed I don't wear it outside (partly because where I work involves being in the vicinity of kids with sensory issues so strong scents are out, but partly because I've never cared, and also partly I think because I had experience with one of the strong scents of the 80s, Poison, and the woman wearing it left a discernible trail behind her where even after she had left the room, you could still smell it. That put me off wearing strong scents in public).
Some of I think is hormonal;, when I've tracked my desire to wear perfume, it interweaves with the menstrual cycle. Or when I'm feeling down/depressed/blue, then I feel like wearing something that smells good and so makes me feel good (the idea behind aromatherapy in a nutshell, I guess).
That is fully consistent with the women I've known. But I'm still curious about the "why": does wearing it make you feel "more attractive" -- but perhaps in some abstract or general way? Not necessarily more attractive to any particular individual, or even any category of individual, but....sort of...to the universe? Or does it having nothing to do with your sense of self, more like...I want to carry around a pleasant scent with me, as if I worked all day outdoors in the gardenia garden, instead of in a cubicle faintly smellilng of air conditioner gear grease?
I realize I'm probably phrasing this in a very silly way, but this is reflective of the problem, which is that I don't understand how this works from the inside.
>I *don't* want to ever smell myself, pretty much any conscious awareness of such would make me uncomfortable and want to go shower.
This is fascinating to me, because it reads very similar to how I've heard several people describe dysphoria that is totally outside my experience as a cis male. In the same way, the idea that smelling a scent attached to myself would be inherently negative is contrary to my experience, since I happily use shea-butter-scented beard oil because I like the smell (and being literally under my nose, I do smell it during the day)
Does this aversion exclusively extend to smells, and are you really opposed to even pleasant smells attached to yourself?
Well, I wouldn't freak out if I happened to stroll through a field of lavender, if that's what you mean, but no I wouldn't ever deliberately add a scent, even a pleasant one, and if I found one clinging to me for some reason I would definitely get rid of it when the opportunity arose. I wouldn't be in nearly as much of a hurry if it was lavender versus stepping barefoot in dogshit, of course.
I recommend the latest episode of the Contemplative Science Podcast on Jhanas, an interview with Jhana researcher Jonas Mago (who studies under Karl Friston).
In the podcast, they described Jhanas through the lenses of predictive processing and active inference, discussed how research shows that Jhana experience is culturally dependent and mentioned an ongoing study of Jhana practitioners.
My takeaways from it were that Jhanas are actually studied in the academia both from neurological and sociological perspective, and we'll soon have even more published research discussing some of the same questions that were asked on this blog.
While it is absolutely minimalistic, it has probably more hits than most news sites in Germany!
And part of the "minimalistic" thing is: There are no comments!
But for a while (about 2010-2014) another IT-expert (Linus Neumann) "copied" the website and made comments available. And it was basically a "social experiment". Comments there were not moderated in the slightest! You can guess, how that looked liked ...
_But_ then they changed something: They put CAPTCHAs in front of the comments/commenting. Also they basically added a "word filter" for slurs and hate. And if this filter saw some "wrong words" the CAPTCHA did get a chance of failing, even if it was correct. I don't remember the real percentiles, but if you used a slur, the CAPTCHA had a "50%" of failing. And "the more the merrier", it gets more and more complicated to get a message through. Some people were quite presistant to get their terrible comment through and tried it 10+ times :D
This is a really interesting question. One of the takes that stuck with me on this was from Greg Cochran -- I think it was on one of his COVID podcasts in the early days of 2020. Who has the real information, the best expertise? Who are the most informed people capable of action in the face of a crisis and where are they congregating? In other words, where is the inner circle?
Answer: there isn't one. There's only a messy undifferentiated network of people and their decisions. There is no 4D chess. Since everyone is accountable to some sort of boss, practically their decisions revolve around keeping jobs, minute to minute, crisis to crisis, with very little planning or follow through.
Mitch McConnell has a pretty good reputation for long term planning, although I'm not sure it rises to the level of "4D chess."
One problem with such a query is that a truly successful politician playing 4D chess would be one who could do so successfully without it being known. If everyone knows he's a genius that's playing on a totally different level, then they don't trust him and his plans fail more than they should otherwise.
That said, I have heard that George W Bush played some pretty good games. He was apparently extremely intelligent, but would pretend he was dumb and more folksy, and intentionally garnered a reputation for misspeaking.
Herbert Hoover may be another example, but he might have just been an overbearing bully who was willing to use underhanded approaches to getting his way.
>That said, I have heard that George W Bush played some pretty good games. He was apparently extremely intelligent, but would pretend he was dumb and more folksy, and intentionally garnered a reputation for misspeaking.
Well he got a lot of people to believe this so it must be true.
I think "4D chess" ends up working sort of like "conspiracy theory."
There are both actual conspiracies and people who build evidence-proof shells around some bizarre conspiracy theory that explains everything. That is, both conspiracies and conspiracy theories are real (different) things that it is useful to know about.
Similarly, there are both genuinely clever maneuvers done by politicians/activists/etc., and people who build evidence-proof shells around their view of some politician's competence by retconning every misstep into another move in some super-deep Xanatos gambit.
Right. The people who said Obama or Trump (very different populations, same effect!) were political geniuses often excused lots of clear mistakes or sub-optimal decisions and made other outcomes, which may or may not have been intentional, out to be more clearly positive than is usually true in real life.
Why absurd or awful? I think probably not worth the risk, but I don't see anything particularly *wrong* here. I mean, other than our unregulated spending on political ads, but given that we're going with money=speech, this seems fine to me.
If it isn't worth the risk then it likely doesn't stack up under a utilitarian analysis.
Coming at it from a virtue ethics angle: if money=speech, it is wrong to lie.
It is awful to advocate through your speech/money for a candidate undermining norms of democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.
*Especially* when you are simultaneously telling people right of center that they are morally obligated to vote against their other values in order to preserve democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.
LBJ was effective, but I always understood his approach to be direct bullying. Things like getting uncomfortably close and looming over people (he was quite tall), yelling at them, etc.
This is nsfw and culture-war-adjacent, so please skip if that's not your thing.
I've recently come across the term 'autogynephilia', meaning roughly sexual arousal because of feeling and appearing female or feminine. I believe this was originally intended to refer to men with crossdressing kinks, but seems to be usually used these days in reference to trans women, implying that they are not really women but men who fetishize femininity.
I'm a cisgender woman and that argument seems wrong to me. In popular culture, and confirmed by many of my cis female friends, many cis women have something very similar to autogynephilia. Wearing lingerie that exaggerates feminine features like your hips is very common and many women seem to find it sexually exciting; similarly, some people like to see themselves in mirrors etc. 'Feeling like a woman' links to many arousing emotions/states of mind, such as feeling desirable, feeling weak or submissive, and feeling that you’re taken care of.
Is there something I’m missing here? If any amab people experience autogynephilia, does it seem like what I’m describing above?
There is a construction of female sexuality which women, as well as men, are conditioned by socially. Since men (until recently) have not been presented as sexual objects of desire in imagery by the mass advertising media, movies and the other elements, what both "the male gaze" and any women consuming such media imbibe is a particular notion of femininity.
We can see this in its most exaggerated form in drag, but if we look into what is considered 'sexy' or 'appealing' then we have to question how standards of what is considered erotic or arousing arose. There are arguments around high heels, even dragging in 'evolutionary scientists' to back up that Science Has Spoken on this:
But why fishnets? Why thigh-garters? Why a particular face-full of makeup? Once you look into it, there's less nature and a whole lot of artifice. And, as I said, this is in the cultural water. Growing up, both boys and girls learn that this is what is sexy, this is what sexiness is about. For men, attaining an object who ticks all the boxes of what is culturally and socially considered highly desirable and sexy, dressed appropriately for the evocation of lust, is the goal. For women, being or becoming that object is the goal. A woman knows she is hot or sexy when the stimulus evokes the response of desire in herself, and she is taught to desire this model of femininity by existing in the world where this is the model of sexual feminine. So for some women, maybe a lot of women, of course living up to the ideal will evoke arousal, since all our responses are being conditioned to find "this is what is arousing, this is what should arouse you" (now is where "cis hetero-normativity" as a useful phrase comes in).
Okay, that's women. What about men? Men don't have a model of "hot sexy arousing" unless it's "be the type of guy who's tall with big muscles who is attractive to women". But they do have a model of what is arousing, and is expected and intended to evoke arousal in them, when it comes to the Feminine Image - the pouting blonde with big boobs and tiny waist in corset, push-up bra, thigh-garters, stockings and heels, wearing makeup, long nails, jewellery, perfume, and so on.
Here's where the theorising comes in. If you're a man who is not sure about being able to attain the masculine model of 'hot sexy', then it's hard to feel desirable. But the same way that women can feel desirable, by performing femininity by dressing up in lingerie etc. and evoking the sensual reaction of desire in themselves, a man who has accepted that this is the social model of what is 'hot sexy' can, by performing femininity himself, evoke that same feeling of desirability.
And if he successfully evokes the sensual reaction of desire *in himself* by makeup, lingerie, heels, skirts, dresses, and so on - then it's reinforcement. He feels good, he feels desirable, he feels like he is succeeding in that social role, by 'becoming' a woman. Where we move on from cross-dressing to trans autogynephilia is where becoming a woman and arousal are inextricably intertwined, so the man who feels he may not be a sexually successful man as a man, can feel like he will be sexually successful as a woman, and should be/is a woman, in reality. And how (s)he succeeds in being a woman is measured by the sexual arousal and desire the performance of femininity evokes in him/her: if (s)he doesn't find her/himself aroused by dressing up and putting on makeup and taking a new, feminine, name, then that is failure.
(By "sexually successful" I don't mean "attracts a lot of partners, has a lot of sex", I mean "successfully fulfils the role of being a sexually desirable object").
But all this is just pulled out of thin air, so don't take it any more seriously than the usual kind of hypothesis with no data to back it up.
The question I always have about this hypothesis is: if this is the full story, then why do a lot of people (e.g. many people with fetishes) have an idea of sexiness that is seemingly completely disconnected from what society says it should be?
I think you have to go to Freud for that one. I'm definitely not saying it's the full story or anything approaching it but with all the talk of trans rights and "gender is a social construct", there's a part we haven't approached about sexuality being a social construct in part as well.
I think maybe because people don't want the argument about "if you can choose to construct your sexuality in a non-conventional way, you can choose to construct it in a conventional way", hence the 'born this way' argument and the 'born in the wrong body' argument in early trans activism (it's my understanding this has been dropped now).
But there do seem to be some trans people for whom the appurtenances of current socially approved femininity* are what matters: long hair, facial makeup, jewellery, skirts, a very 'pink and fluffy girly' style. This doesn't seem to have so much to do with 'passing' (you can 'pass' by wearing a much more toned down style) but with a model of 'sexually attractive hot femaleness' in mind, and I do think that is at least in part mediated by what all of us, male or female, have been raised on in the media and around us as what constitutes the kind of stimulus to evoke (male) sexual desire and arousal.
So for *some* trans women, I suggest that there *is* an element of "to be a woman, to pass successfully, is to be an erotically attractive woman; this is expressed by dressing and behaving in such and such a manner; if I dress and behave like that, *and* evoke the erotic response in myself, I have succeeded in presenting myself as a woman/the woman I am".
*Whatever about high heels and red lipstick as mimicking biological markers of oestrus as in female apes, why are stockings and garters and lingerie considered sexy, why the whole Victoria's Secret kind of branding? It's a form of fashion that has cultural overtones, and in the past would have been different, and in the future may be different as well.
> Cis people have a shockingly high amount of cross-sex-identifying sexual fantasies, to the degree that I wouldn’t consider it to be a particularly significant differentiator between cis and trans people. The best differentiator between trans and cis people is looking what they don’t like; trans people are much more opposed to non-gender-affirming fantasies than cis people are.
The argument is not "these men fantasize about being female and feel aroused by these fantasies, which women don't do, so they are not really women". The argument, as I understand it, is "their yearning of being seen as women, by themselves and others, starts out as a sexual fantasy and is then reconceptualized as actually being women, the newly invented concept of gender serving to explain why it's possible".
Personally I mostly agree with you, but: there's a norm currently that it's somewhere between crass and literal rape to involve people actively in your kink without their fully informed consent, even when it doesn't involve something people normally consider as sexually charged, say by having them call you by feminine pronouns and titles when you are "actually" [1] male.
It also gets brought up to delegitimize things like bathroom access and similar complications, by arguing that even if you respect people's right to have sexual interests society shouldn't go out of its way to actually *satisfy* such interests. And to delegitimize GAC given that doctors don't offer their services for body mod paraphilias generally.
Further, there's just a horns effect around men who are constantly horny in public which then gets transferred to trans women.
Yeah, I really think this isn't generating the same set of images and associations in your mind as in that of the (stereo)typical AGP believer. They pretty much seem to picture either all or all "population 2" (later-transitioning, mostly lesbian) trans women as walking around in a pseudo-masturbatory haze 24/7 basically getting off every time they pass a reflective surface or hear their own name.
Ah, I thought you were more in a "what is going on in people's head that they think this a good argument?" space. If you're not, well, the middle points are the sticking ones. If the primary motivator to transition is AGP rather than dysphoria, it's arguably harder to square GAC with mainstream medical ethics, and it's also harder to argue in favor of everyday accommodations or even against people who stubbornly misgender ("if you find someone who wants to call you a woman more power to you but I don't"). It basically takes away one of the main arguments for allowing social or medical transition at all, because sexual frustration is not a class of suffering that is socially afforded sympathy.
Does anyone have good strategies on doing the personality/management type questions when applying to mechanical engineering internships. Having completed and been rejected from a few (they are among the most soul sucking things I've ever done) I get the sense they are looking for utmost rule following, snitching, and conformism in every sense. Am I correct here?
Hmmm, this has been implemented in a few places to unimpressive results. I believe Berkley and some surrounding areas have been doing this for years for municipal races and have not shown significant improvement.
(mind you, for there to be improvement it would have to been broken in a way that can, in large part, be blamed on the voting system BUT NOT on the lack of proportionality in the voting system, since ranked-choice is nonproportional. So I expect state/national elections to be improved more by ranked choice than local elections, though none of the ranked-choice systems are ideal)
They're non-polarized but also highly heterogenous. Vote Blue no matter Who is a thing but within Berkley, and the edges of the Blue Tribe generally, you've got a lot of diverse options like the Green Party, socialists/communists like DSA, and even techno-libertarians.
So, the argument for these places being the best place for third/niche parties to break through is, quite frankly, that if the Green party could win anywhere in America, it should be Berkley or a similar places. If open socialists are communists could win anywhere, it should be Berkley. I think a lot of times ranked choice voting is sold as a potential moderating/centrist force is politics, and in the long-term it may well be, but in the short-term it's going to be based off existing third parties like the Libertarians and the Greens.
Great points! I definitely agree about existing parties being the most likely vehicle for rank choice involvement. I also expect fringe parties to benefit more from RCV than moderate centrist start-ups; But Also that siphoning off of activist energy to the other parties (which still preference back towards the centre right or left) will allow the duopoly to focus relatively more on the median voter than at current
Generally speaking I like the spirit behind this initiative but I have a lot of reservations about the implementation. The open primary with a single vote I honestly have little idea of the game-theoretic consequences of. But the ranked-choice/instant-runoff voting suffers from logistical problems (for a position with 5 candidates a precinct has to report 325 different numbers to enable the final tally to be carried out). It also does not always elect the Condorcet winner (candidate who would win a head-to-head contest against every other single candidate) if the Condorcet winner exists. And if you think "at least it will have some effect against gerrymandering by splitting the vote more in those 55-45 districts", think again, because a "mutual majority" is safe in RCV/IRV.
It might still be a good idea, though, as an intermediate step in a process of picking the best ranking-based method. I don't know whether Nevada voters are more likely to back out of things or double down on them when they try them and have problems, that would be crucial in figuring this out.
Agreed that it may be sub-optimal, but like you said- it's progress.
I'm from Australia, so we're used to RCV and have the infrastructure to handle the logistics easily enough, and figure the most powerful country in the world can manage it. But I also get that it would be a definite step up for places new to it. The 5 candidate system with the earlier vote would be a novel source of extra work and hassles too!
I like the idea behind the 5 candidate system though, as would also kick-start the breakup of the binary blocs as rival factions within the two current parties would go head to head in the general election (even as they're competing against the usual partisan enemy), and might also benefit from courting voters from 'the other tribe' if those candidates are eliminated first! It's like a recipe for in-tribe conflict and inter-tribe grudging tactical niceness, which sounds like a net win for societal cohesion.
Design-wise, I think (at the expense of having an even more complex thing to pitch to electorates)- the first two eliminations could be done with approval voting, counting the number of 1,2&3 votes each candidate got. Not sure if it would meet Condorcet standards, but I it think it should prevent the most polarising, maximally love/hated candidates from dominating their way to the final showdown?
Simple example with three candidates named L for left, C for centerist, and R for right:
35% R C L
16% C R L
16% C L R
33% L C R
The centerist is the Condorcet winner (C beats R 65-35, C beats L 67-33), but is knocked out in the first round in an instant runoff. To avoid that outcome, the 33% of the voters who preferences are “L C R” should vote “C L R.” But if you think voters should be expected to vote strategically, rather than voting their actual preferences, the first past the post works pretty well. Why bother with IRV?
This example involves a fairly polarized electorate, where well over half the voters identify as left or right, and prefer a candidate who aligns with their views over a centerist compromise candidate. I see no reason to think that this doesn't describe the electorate in the United States, so I don't think I've tortured the distribution here.
Being in the top 2 doesn't matter if you're not in the top 1 tho. (You probably have a better argument when using Single Transferable Vote for multiple offices.)
I'll be interested to see if the comments reach the goal of "nicer, politer, higher effort" but fail harder on the goal of "interesting and good in the way that organic comments from a relatively smart commenter community often are". I think there might end up being an effect where everyone is eager to prove they can play with the big kids, and we get a larger amount of small kids trying to prove themselves as a result.
Scott did mention (explicitly in the previous open thread) he's binning compared to a *normal* open thread, so presumably such a comment wouldn't have much of an effect, expect insofar as it affects Scott's mood-dependent memory retrieval.
After reading SSC and then ACX for a few months I got major cognitive dissonance from learning that Scott favours libertarianism. Personally it seems just as likely to result in dystopia as communism, since people are just seen as cogs in the machine in both cases. Has Scott ever given a detailed argument for favouring libertarianism?
Update: Thank you all for the clarifications! It seems Scott doesn't unconditionally support what I thought was the central theorem of libertarianism, that unregulated market forces is the path to paradise.
I believe Scott endorses Hayek-derived libertarianism as opposed to Locke-derived libertarianism. Very briefly, the former advocates the use of markets as information aggregators designed to efficiently allocate scarce resources towards satisfying human preferences, whereas the latter views individual liberty as an axiomatic good to be maximized for its own sake (or government power as an axiomatically bad, to be minimized).
I recently saw a tweet that said "to understand how any argument in political philosophy sounds to someone with radical libertarian instincts, replace 'government' with 'Tony Soprano'." That's closer to Locke-derived libertarianism in your classification, but I think "government is a criminal gang" leads to different outcomes than "individual liberty should be maximised" - in the latter case, government can still have a role as a guarantor of liberties or a coordination point.
Thanks, I endorse this correction as probably closer to how most radical libertarians actually consider the situation. Maybe instead of Locke I should’ve gone with Nozik or Rothbard. The Tony Soprano thought experiment is pretty immediately illuminating, though.
And they're not entirely wrong - AIUI a common theory about the origin of government is that it evolved out of bandit groups who settled down, and organised crime does provide some government-like services (indeed, this is a key part of the Maoist playbook for guerrilla movements). And (again AIUI) there are too many examples of corrupt police forces acting like just another gang.
Usually, one of the arguments I hear against libertarianism is that people aren't viewed *sufficiently* as cogs in a machine. Not wanting to be seen as a cog in a machine not of one's choosing sounds like a motivation towards classic liberalism as opposed to most other philosophical systems.
In left politics, there's a distinction between socialism and communism. Sweden is socialist while China is communist (or at least was in the past). I don't know if there are analogous words for libertarianism, but the analogous concepts certainly exist. The "maximalist" version of libertarianism does sound dystopian to me, in complementary ways to Communism. But as far as I understand what Scott (and most rationalists I know who lean libertarian) believe, it is a "soft" version of libertarianism, analogous to socialism, which is the idea that pragmatic libertarian policies can make people's lives better on the margin in most Western countries. It might be wrong in many instances, but it doesn't inherit the apocalyptic nature of "hard-core" libertarianism, any more than socialism inherits the apocalyptic nature of communism.
No-one seriously considers Sweden to be "socialist", except for Americans )both left-wingers and right-wingers)…unless a welfare state is automatically considered "socialist", which is wrong IMO...
Sweden used to be much more socialist than it currently is. All of the cabinets were social democrat from 1936 to 1976 without a break, and that was time when "social democracy" still had more brand recognition as a form of socialism than as "social democracy" as its own thing. Since then there have been periods of the right-wing governments, but social democrats had the government for significant part of the 1980s and then later on.
There was a period when the Swedish income marginal tax rate was over 100%. In the 1980s there was an explicit attempt to socialize private companies with "Löntagarfonder", were ownership of the companies were to be siphoned into trade union controlled wage-earner funds. The plan did not work out for various reasons, but the attempt was there.
The welfare state of Sweden was more expansive in the 1980s than today, due changes in the government.
However, one could make the case the post-WW2 UK was a better example of state socialism than Sweden, with National Coal Boards, British Steel, Energy Authority .... In Sweden, the state ownership does not appear to have been as all-encompassing as the UK nationalizations.
If I'm being snarky, the 'soft' version of libertarianism is "don't interfere with me making money investing in the stock market, don't interfere with the stock market so I can't make money off it, and let me legally smoke weed/take soft drugs recreationally".
Not the worst version, when compared with "contracts rule everything, including legal assassinations, and the weakest go to the wall and the devil takes the hindmost" harder versions.
"and let me legally smoke weed/take soft drugs recreationally"
Considering how many club drugs are being conscripted for therapeutic use, it's worth questioning just how much of what's labeled as 'recreational use' is an attempt at self-medication.
But snarking classic liberalism is rather cliche. Steelmanning the position would probably be more conducive to an interesting conversation. For example; Scott noted how many individuals took measures to avoid Covid prior to lockdowns. And some studies rolled the benefits of those private activities in with 'the benefits of lockdowns.' I find this kind of bias, which gives far too much credit to coercive measures and zero credit to consensual private action, to be common in the formal literature. That's a bias and a problem.
To give another example; In America in the early 20th century there was a temperance movement and a prohibition movement. In the UK there was just a temperance movement over a very similar period. The UK saw a greater relative reduction in alcohol consumption, which endured for a longer stretch of time, than the United States did. And the UK secured this benefit without the side effects that the US saw. (Government poisoning of citizens, increased crime in regards to bootlegging, decreased taxes in regards to bootlegging, produce gluts from excess agricultural products which could not be fermented and preserved, etc.)
And yet there are a great many studies which assign 100% of the reduction in alcohol consumption in the US to prohibition and 0% to temperance. This is a bias that is worth addressing. And it's almost exclusively those who identify as some flavor of classic liberal/libertarian who bother to address it.
"including legal assassinations"
Who are you referring to? I've never heard such a view presented by any self-described libertarians.
The classical formulation of libertarianism is that "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose". A common criticism of libertarianism is that, taken strictly, this means it's legal to request an assassination, offer a contract for it, provide a weapon and pay someone to do it, even if the assassination itself is illegal.
Describing this as "legal assassination" is strictly incorrect, but it's my best guess as to what Deiseach intended. Deiseach, would you like to correct me if I'm wrong?
No, you're correct. The idea of hiring private enforcers once the government monopoly on violence is broken, and the right to self-defence being taken to the extreme - the jokey "why can't I have a private nuke in my backyard to fire at the neighbours if they infringe on my rights?" idea.
I talk to a lot of libertarians and I have literally never heard of this before. At absolute worst, this guy seems idiosyncratic and there's no organized group of libertarians (or people, for that matter) advocating for 'legal assassinations.' Classic liberalism holds to a notion of individual rights, minimized coercion, and self ownership which would strongly preclude any form of legal assassination.
The idea of socialism as a softer version of communism is poorly supported by historical usage. I've seen, for example, French propaganda circa 1942 claiming that the strength of "socialism" (meaning the philosophy of the National Socialist - i.e. Nazi - government in Germany, and its puppet Vichy government in France) would triumph over "Bolshevism" (meaning the Lenin-inspired communist government of the USSR).
Why do you say that people are just seen as cogs in the machine under libertarianism? That just doesn't match my experience at all, having moved to a country that has some libertarian aspects in comparison to my country of origin.
This piece isn't so much an endorsement of a libertarianism that exists as a description of a libertarianism that he would endorse (with the caveat that it's from nine years or seven-and-seventy generations of Discourse ago), but it's definitely relevant and may contribute to a fuller picture.
He's given arguments for specific ideas (e.g. why he thinks jobs guarantee programs are worse than just doing UBI). Afaict he mostly favours libertarian-ish directions (which I mostly personally agree with), but wouldn't support following the ideology off a cliff.
I'm honestly not sure how pragmatic libertarianism sees people as cogs in machines (except to the degree that all political or economic theories kind of do). Can you give an example of what you mean by that/somewhere where you think a pragmatic libertarianism would still reach a wrong object level policy for these reasons?
Speaking for myself, I think libertarianism is an elegant idea and a useful corrective to the statist instincts of many politicians, and it's good to have libertarian voices in the debate. But I would be very surprised if a place ran on full-blown libertarian lines worked well.
> To many people, libertarianism is a reaction against an over-regulated society, and an attempt to spread the word that some seemingly intractable problems can be solved by a hands-off approach. Many libertarians have made excellent arguments for why certain libertarian policies are the best options, and I agree with many of them. I think this kind of libertarianism is a valuable strain of political thought that deserves more attention, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with it and find myself leaning more and more in that direction myself.
> However, there’s a certain more aggressive, very American strain of libertarianism with which I do have a quarrel.
Scott, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that you're reading this Open Thread more carefully to specifically recommend to you a book: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barret.
I'm making this recommendation in a bit of a rush: I haven't finished reading the book yet, and I haven't yet read your "Can People Be Honestly Wrong About Their Own Experiences?" article, but the brief skim of part of that article, plus what I have seen you write about Jhanas, and what I've read of the book so far, suggests this might help fill in a missing piece of the model you seem to be trying to build. (Assuming the psychological science in the book holds up, I'm not an expert in this area.)
My layman's understanding of the gist of the book is that it argues that people don't all feel emotions in the same way: they might have drastically different bodily sensations and brain activity patterns that they decide to label with something like "anger" or "happiness" for the purpose of communicating between people. And that we take into account context a lot when "constructing" these emotional labels.
Worth a book review maybe? It's an interesting hypothesis at least, and it could be good to get another opinion as to whether it's a solid one or not.
A tag filter like lobste.rs story filters would be fantastic for open-ended discussions like this, to exclude whichever subject threads (crypto, AI, meditation, meta, what have you) I'm just not interested in. In this case in particular it would be really useful to exclude all the meta.
One way would be for anyone reading comments to help moderate by tagging them. In a high-volume blog like this that could be enough to get decent tags, similar to Stack Overflow.
I remember when the forum Sufficient Velocity did something akin to Challenge Mode, it didn't work very well. I'm slightly more optimistic about this case, both because of the basic nature of the commentariat and more obviously, because while Scott has repeated the SV admin's step of asking for criticism of the "delete low-quality comments" area *in* the "delete low-quality comments" area, I don't think he's going to delete 90% of the criticism as "low-quality" the way said SV admin did (this is, um, not a good way to make a project succeed).
I have a high degree of trust in Scott's judgement, and especially his willingness to accept criticism. Very few people keep a "mistakes" page, and I don't think anyone else is so quick to add items to it.
That said, I do wonder if Scott is going to delete many/any posts? He's remarkably kind-hearted, and removing any good-faith posts would probably bother him. Of course, that may have been known to him and he only actually plans to delete obviously bad faith posts, and this is just an experiment to see if we'll post better mostly because he asked us to. If this is the case, he would probably also want to delete any posts that seem to recognize this, as that would defeat the purpose. I guess we'll see if my post sticks around, and if not, have to determine if it's just not very good, or too good!
For a while I have not been receiving notifications related to comments on this Substack, but I do receive notifications regarding comments on other Substacks. Does anyone know why this might be and how to rectify it? Thanks!
I’m reading The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan. A central argument is that America will stop policing the ocean / shipping lanes, and global trade will collapse to regional trade and there will be lots of pirates and state-backed piracy (of things like oil and bauxite).
I feel like I missed the part about why America is going to stop policing the oceans. He goes on and on about how the US Navy is 6-10x as strong as all other navies, but not why we would stop.
Is anyone else reading this or familiar with these arguments?
I find his naval argument somewhat unconvincing, after the multilateral response to Somali pirates. They found a niche for a while there, but the global system couldn't allow them to continue and didn't; multiple nations stepped up to keep shipping lanes open, while companies worked out a way to defend ships with security contractors. Capital dislikes uncertainty and will find ways to avoid it. He may be prescient with regard to demographic change in East Asia, though, and he does have some interesting ideas that I found more compelling before the midterms. The idea of an isolationist US seems slightly less likely after the rejection of the populist right in the midterms, and the tone of the recent German-Chinese talks was somewhat reassuring with regard to the idea of a hostile Chinese-Russian trading bloc hastening the end of globalism.
Well, Zeihan's entire "thing" is the 'end of globalization'. He takes this idea to the extreme and literally means the US will choose to stop doing that because we will judge it to be in our national interest to deglobalize to the greatest extent possible. I don't mean that he thinks we will do this unilaterally, just that we won't have much to protect anymore as globalization unwinds and we will stop investing in it.
In the last few years there has been a flurry of research on this and on hyperphantasia, the opposite condition.
I’ve devised a “virtual Stroop test” for those who want to try:
Imagine someone using a red marker to write the word “blue” on a whiteboard. Easy for some to imagine, challenging for many and impossible for a few. Some people report seeing purple!
Recently discovered that someone with intense olfactory imagery (think involuntarily smelling toasted baguette) was able to halt the imagery by holding her nose closed.
As all the other commenters struggled, I'd better mention that I didn't.
I think I have total or near total aphantasia, so when I "visualise" something, it's conceptual. In that sense, I have no problem "visualising" the word blue written in red ink on a whiteboard.
First I want to point out that the word 'imagine' is quite ambiguous here: I can generally 'imagine' any arbitrary object or scene including its visual properties, but I can't/don't 'see' anything in my 'mind's eye' because I'm completely aphantasic. So for me, *metaphorically* imagining a thing is easy, but unless I'm asleep and dreaming, then literally rendering it in my mind as a mental *image* is beyond my capabilities.
Anyway, that said, I initially thought it would be trivially easy to conjure up this red/blue thought experiment as a mental concept and then proceed to think about it (albeit without any actual visual mind's eye 'image'), but to my surprise it turned out to be impossible! Like Matthew Talamini below, I found it literally unthinkable. The concept just wouldn't gel. The visual attributes were ungraspable. It felt like I was trying to hold the north poles of two magnets together; the colors and meanings slipped past each other and wouldn't stay put. I could *only* conceptualize red written in red and blue written in blue. If I tried to change the combination, my mind balked and the mental construct collapsed.
It was also a little bit like trying/struggling to get my head around some slippery physics demonstration, like eg the double slit experiment, or spooky action at a distance.
I think in this particular red/blue case though, it must be something specifically to do with the contradiction between the sensory content and the semantic content, because it turns out I can (metaphorically) imagine the word 'white' written in red on a whiteboard without any problem.
I think I have severe aphantasia, but I don’t know how to fully convince myself. It seems easier to prove to oneself that they have hyper-phantasia. Testing a positive seems more tractable. I can’t even imagine a flat color in my head— it’s all darkness.
I don't seem to be able to. It's difficult to visualize any word. I have to stop, close my eyes and concentrate. If the word I'm visualizing is the same as the color it names, I can do it. If not, I can't seem to.
Oh! Hmmm. Except in the case of the color black. If I imagine it in a typewriter font, I can picture the name of any color in black.
It might be a hang-up about the look of handwritten words? I was just able to visualize the word "red" written in black spray paint on the side of a building.
Tried it. The first attempt, I visualized holding a red marker. Started writng 'blue' and the marker instantly changed itself to a blue marker. Went back to instructions to double check, what I was supposed to do. Then mentally loopied instructions, so that the marker didn't get replaced. Computing 1 in blue and 4 in red would be more annoying, as I trained myself into a specific digit-color synesthesia, where red is 1 and blue is 4.
But because my full synesthesia system is very complex and I made lots of refactoring for optimization over time, I am quite used to having old versions giving me conflicts. I learnt some flexibility in that regard.
That is fascinating as a test of visual thinking, but I wouldn't call it a Stroop test. I can *read* colour words just as fast whatever colour they are in, but I can't imagine the word red written in blue to save my life, which is surprising because I could imagine the person, the whiteboard and even the whiteboard marker in its red plastic case which inexplicably left blue writing! My brain decided it must have been an error at the whiteboard marker factory - there is clearly no other explanation :-D
I'm trying to see if anyone knows a way to look up really obscure songs. I've had a fragment of a song stuck in my head for about twenty (five?) years now. I heard it once on satellite radio while driving through Western Canada/Upper Western United States, and I'm pretty sure the radio announcer said it was "amateur hour" when they played it. I remember a facsimile of the main beat, and the tune and lyrics of a single line of the chorus, which hasn't show up in Google searches.
I figure at the very worst it's probably got copyright somewhere, but I don't know which country it would be in. I might be able to talk myself into combing through that if someone knows where I would even look.
(This is assuredly the content Scott was hoping for for Challenge Mode.)
There are 'identification of music' groups on Facebook which tend to work much better than programs like Shazam. It reaches a lot of people and everyone wants the prestige of getting the ID. Try posting in a few of those
There's an old episode of Reply All (now defunct podcast, but episodes still findable) where someone was in the same situation as you. They eventually tracked down song. I can't remember much about how they did it, but if you listen to the episode you might get some more ideas for searches.
Yes but there’s was more. Guy who was looking for the song had actually had some musicians record his remembered version and they played it for some people in the music industry. And I think it was a disc jockey who had played or heard the song a couple times who finally recognized it. Yeah, great episode
"(some. thing something), I don't. mean. to bo ther you, but-there's some. thing. on. my. mind." High note on whatever the first syllable was, high note on 'don't' that descends pretty smoothly to 'you', same high note on 'something' and 'my'.
And I'm realizing I'm probably way off on when I heard it. I made that trip a whole lot of times.
I don't listen to enough genres to know. The main beat made me think "JRPG Robot Village music." Then the lyrics were smoother over the top of it.
Trying to play it on Virtual piano gets me G g d f, d g f d# d c a# lower g x2 gx2 f g f for the lyrics. I remember the main theme being g a# g a# high f high d c low dx2 low fx2.
I'm trying to jump around some genres to find something close. So far, the closest thing to the song's clunky main rhythm is, like, techno music, or alternately Stomp playing with hosepipes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-0lrHhpvGM&t=375s But my memory of the lyrics is closer to Simon and Garfunkel.
Some musings on FTX and EA. My parents started a non-profit in India that builds healthcare and physical infrastructure in poor government schools since 2013. They've also partnered with an ex-IIT professor for the past five years on a talent search-nurture program in my hometown.
I happened on the FTX Future Fund earlier this year. Long-story short, we are running a much larger program that identifies top performing rural students (15-16yrs) in logical reasoning and STEM ability in Northern Karnataka with an annual family income <$2000. We provide them with tabs+internet and connect them with top teachers and well-connected mentors, the latter of whom will support their future college tuition. Based on the reception so far, it seems likely we have raised aspirations+increased probabilities of the students having careers with larger impacts for their families and communities.
Granted the FTX situation is still evolving, but it does seem somewhat likely that the money in the Future Fund was not sourced ethically. Possibly, tons of people will lose a bunch of money they invested through FTX.
I'm not how accurate of an equivalency this is — the money helping bright rural kids comes from 'defrauding' innocent crypto investors. Even if such is true, I'm unsure of whether it's still in some sense ethical - seems true in the classic EA utilitarian sense but not in a deontological framework. I vaguely recall an EA vibe-shift that changed people's priors on earning to give, where being a top executive from *insert evil big consulting company* so as to give away million stopped being the recommended choice. Anyways, this doesn't affect any material decisions but curious to know what folks think.
Congratulations on your programme. As an adjacent-EA working in crypto, I feel particularly well-placed to comment on the FTX aspect.
Tldr. The money in the Future Fund comes from retail traders, a portion of which is just normal fee revenue, and a portion is from taking the winning sides of bets made by retail traders. Depends on your perspective, but the arg they were exploited would be convincing to most people I think.
Most of SBF's wealth comes from FTX, specifically fee revenue, which is fine, and taking the opposite sides of the trades made by retail traders, which is more questionable. Given that 80% (roughly) of retail traders lose money, and SBF spent many years working at Jane Street before founding Alameda, those bets are largely only ever falling one way.
There's a bunch more allegorical claims that I'm aware off which seem plausible: pushing exotic options on inexperienced traders, exploiting the benefits of being largely unregulated, and of course, the FTT token, which FTX inflated to the great benefit of SBF and other early/whale holders.
The implied SBF argument, I believe, is that a million retail traders would allocate the money less effectively than the Future Fund. This argument is convincing to me, so given that SBF is a Benthamite utilitarian (see Cowen interview: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-fried/), I think he probably feels morally complied to pursue it. At huge scale: FTX was making tens of millions a day, and still felt the need to pursue high leverage that has now brought everything down.
But beyond questionable retail activities, FTX was also a very big exchange that made a lot of money from legitimate fee revenue as well.
I will stop short from offering a judgement on the morality of the FTX money. I have heard there is an $8bn hole in FTX
FAO Scott: Challenge Mode prompted me to include sources, moderate the extent of my claims, and not to speculate on the morality of FTX money (because I didn't want to give briefly-considered judgement)
I also live in India and am very curious to learn more about the workings of this talent finding program. Could you elaborate, either here or over private communications?
Sure thing! The basic premise was that many bright rural kids studying in government/aided schools were likely not being challenged intellectually or exposed to models of success. We focused on Northern Karnataka because that's where the foundation has been based and is well connected.
We did the selection in two phases. first using data from the National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship Examination (NMMS) conducted every year by the government. Only students having family income of less than INR 1.5 lacs ($2,000) per year and studying in Government or Government-aided public schools are eligible to write the NMMS Examination. The NMMS had two parts - a quantitative reasoning section (very similar to IQ tests) and a subject-based section, we weighted the former more highly (one reason being schools often engage in malpractice by dictating answers to students) and shortlisted students district-wise. In the second phase, we conduct an independent test where we teach a small new topic and assess their ability to understand and apply the concept to solve non-trivial and practical problems.
Selected students were given Samsung Tabs and a SIM card with stipends for data. We then setup an online classroom using TeachMint and hold daily classes on Math, Physics, English and logical reasoning, taught by highly experienced teachers. The emphasis is on teaching from first principles, primarily through questions, and focusing on applications. We also facilitate weekly sessions with volunteer mentors, who are engineers/scientists/professionals, and who have pledged to support batches (8-10) for their college tuition.
I'm ignoring the question of whether FTX "defrauded" investors, or whether investors took a risk and lost for now. But to the interesting question of ethics: even a deontological framework can allow for "non-ethically sourced" money to be used ethically. After all, if agreements were made between FTX and the beneficiary of the money in good faith, it really isn't clear said beneficiary has *any* responsibilty to give back any money. After all, they acquired the money legally, that the money was involved in fraud at some point (even directly) before shouldn't matter. And indeed, this is how legal systems - which are in some sense deontological - often deal with cases like this, though there are of course lots of variations and gray areas.
Then quiz them on what they “see” - you’ll be amazed by the diversity of response, from a detailed picture of a specific bicycle against a known remembered background to nothing - no images. I’m in the latter camp having only a few bytes of fleeting visual memory.
Ask where the image is located - for some it is in the back of their head, for others it is floating in front of them. For those, ask if it interferes with their image of the real world and watch their puzzled expression.
Recently it’s been found that most people when asked to imagine a bright light will dilate their pupils. Those with aphantasia (no pictures in head) do not.
Any other aphantasiacs here? Only a few percent of the population. Think of all the gigabytes of brain storage that can be dedicated to other stuff!
People assume that others think like they do. Most aphantasiacs are astounded to find out that they are different from the rest of the world.
I cannot conjure anything visual in my mind, nor do I dream the vast majority of the time. I do imagine talking to myself constantly though, not in an actual audititive way, but certainly verbal. It’s constant. My every thought is projected into my consciousness as a narration.
I do a lot of maintenance and repairs on my bicycle. For this test I first see a very simplified and wrong form, that rapidly gets overwritten with correct details as I remember various characteristic parts. It's almost like a level-of-detail jump in a video game.
Curiously, the details do not come from my bicycle, and contain parts (such as a chain guard) that none of my bicycles ever had.
That seems fairly similar to me - I start with an outline that gains details over time, and it ends up as a portmanteau of bikes that I have seen or owned. (Though I haven't had or ridden one in decades.)
It's in front of me, by the way. Not floating, but on a floor, propped against a nominal wall. I don't see the floor or wall, but they are understood.
I'm skeptical of this "only a few percent of the population" claim; my hit rate when asking people about aphantasia is something like 30%. (Maybe it's just very overrepresented in the kinds of environments I happen to hang out in - most such environments do filter for psychological weirdness in many ways - but I'm skeptical because I have unusually *good* mental visualization and seem otherwise pretty typical in these social groups.)
In my experience the degree of aphantasia varies wildly from both person to person and depending on the object pictured. I, for example, can picture a bike mostly fine, but have almost total aphantasia when it comes to faces, to the point where (much to my brother's frustration) asking me to describe the hair/eye/facial features of someone I've interacted with less than daily is almost totally useless.
That's how it is for me. The only thing I can reliably visualize while awake is motion; no colors, textures, or really any features at all unless I 'trace' them mentally and visualize that motion. But I have, at times, observed myself falling asleep where at some point there is a 'switch' thrown and I see exactly what I am thinking about with full texture, color, and contours. Then I wake up (or forget and go back to sleep, probably).
Relatedly, the only sounds I can imagine are ones I imagine making with my own voice. I can imagine myself humming a song (and hear it nearly exactly as if I actually were humming) but not the actual vocals and instrumentals. But when I am drifting off to sleep, sometimes I hear beautiful music playing, as if a full symphony were present. Noticing it is enough to wake me up, though. I think this happens earlier than the visualizations becoming real.
As little OtT (Off this Topic), but I remember as a child being very puzzled when my parents told me that it was a dream and not real (whatever "it" happened to be).
Curious about this experiment. My expectation is that average comment quality increases, but variance goes down.
The seen may be better comments on average and fewer terrible ones, but the unseen may be fewer potentially high-quality comments from low-confidence people because a) there's a chance the comment will get deleted so there's a lower EV of posting, and b) that person with low-confidence will not want to risk getting their confidence lowered any further.
This is kind of a random/open-ended question, but- is the arms/defense/weapons industry basically the most technologically sophisticated industry, or at least in the top 3? I've noticed that a small number of countries dominate global arms sales- some of them like the US and Russia have strong militaries, but I notice that Germany consistently pops up as a major international arms dealer, despite having a fairly weak military. Germany seems to produce a large array of missiles, rockets, and tanks that are sold all over the globe, and of course they're famous as being a major industrial power- just not a major military one. I've also noticed Norway and Sweden appear to have a very sophisticated arms industry, and while they do have a military tradition, they're absolutely tiny countries- but are quite wealthy and technologically sophisticated. Norway has been making a number of the rockets used in Ukraine, and I recently learned that for a time the missile defense system that protected Washington DC was actually manufactured by a Norwegian company!
So- is the arms industry a function of a country's technological/engineering sophistication, and *not* a function of how strong or prominent the home country's military is? Is making rockets, missiles, tanks, warships etc. *more* challenging or sophisticated than manufacturing say laptops, home appliances, automobiles, cell phones, electronics, and so on?
To answer the initial question, yes, it very much is. Modern weapons are incredibly sophisticated, with top of the line warships generally holding the title for most complex things built by man. As for who does the work, well, that's going to be a question of who has the skills, which in turn is going to rest on who had the skills 10 years ago, and then 20 years ago and so on. Oh, and because this is defense, there's a lot less incentive to offshore stuff than there is in most places. Germany survives because it has an arms industry left over from the Cold War, and can sell stuff to other countries.
This isn't to say that we in the defense industry is perfect. There are lots of structural issues, many of which come from the fact that the government is a terrible customer and we're often forced to be terrible in self-defense. We can't go find other customers, and they have limited options to take their business elsewhere. And we're doing really complicated work that usually has life-and-death consequences, To put it simply, it's the kind of system where you can get yelled at for being under budget, and it kind of makes sense given everyone's incentives. (He assumed that we'd padded our estimates to inflate our fee, which was a fixed percentage of the bid. We hadn't and had just been efficient, but it wasn't a completely crazy idea.)
(Epistemic status: based on anecdotes.) The defense industry is very sophisticated in some specific ways. They are very good at systems engineering (they invented it). They are very good at aerodynamics. They are very good at radar and electromagnetic waves. They are very good at explosives (duh). If you want the best people in the world on these topics, you should look in the defense industry. These are skills that have been culturally ingrained over generations (no country that didn't build fighter aircraft during WW2 has ever built a decent fighter). These skills are also highly dependent on intelligent engineers spending most of there working life in the field.
The defense industry is pretty unsophisticated in some other areas. Software engineering is the biggest part (as it is in most non-software industries). A DevOps engineer from a Silicon Valley unicorn would not be impressed with the delivery practices at your random defense contractor.
I think the reason why a random second-world country can't start producing high quality weapons is that it would require training a generation of engineers in some highly specific skills that are not really relevant in other industries and will not be relevant if your industrial experiment fails. The risk and lack of transferability will make it hard to motivate engineers to start the training, which makes it hard to get the best engineers, which reduces your chance of success.
Making weaponry is, as far as I can tell, differently challenging - not necessarily more so - than the other machines you list. It often must be made to exacting standards of quality, the components are dangerous and must be handled with (expensive) care following strict protocols, and the batch sizes may be small enough that a full automated production line is out of the question. (Citation: did engineering in a missile factory for one of the American prime contractors. Not a wide perspective, but perhaps useful.)
My impression is that an arms industry is less a function of the state of a country's military - there are plenty of militaries and plenty of customers - and more a function of their... cultural view of the worth of precision/exactness, perhaps. The US would break that pattern somewhat, but I don't think military size is nonnegligible, and the States certainly have one big enough to push the bounds on that function.
A big part of it is how *independent* a country's military is. If, like pre-2022 Sweden, you have a fairly small military but you're deliberately standing outside of the local alliance structures, you'll want to maintain your own production capability for just about everything up to and including modern multi-role combat aircraft if you can. And Sweden, albeit barely, can.
See also Israel and Taiwan. Also Ukraine from independence to 2014, a major exporter of a broad range of weapons - no jet fighters, but e.g. pretty good affordable tanks. After 2014, exports went down as they kept more of their production local for obvious reasons.
The US, UK, and France are all in the "NATO needs us, we don't need NATO" game, so they set up to build everything in-house (or in France's case, as the lead player in a multinational European consortium).
Germany, I think underproduces in range and scale relative to its general position as an advanced industrial economy. Japan produces a pretty broad range of armaments domestically, but for political reasons basically never exports them.
As for Norway, that air-defense missile system uses missiles made in the United States that Norway can't duplicate; they just built a new ground-based launcher because the United States basically doesn't do serious ground-based air defenses. Norway and Finland do jointly produce a lot of ammunition through a consortium called "Nammo" (for "Nordic Ammo"), but aside from that it's just small arms and a few specialized bits of gear. They do have pretty good small antiship missiles optimized for shooting at targets in tricky fjords and whatnot, because nobody else was going to make that for them. We do buy a fair bit of stuff from them when their narrow specialties line up with our needs. Including, yes, air defenses for the White House, because that's the one place in the US that even the USAF admits needs serious ground-based air defenses.
Thanks. I considered @'ing you when I wrote this, because this question was specifically designed with you in mind :)
Other questions, if you don't mind:
1. Why doesn't the US 'do serious ground-based air defenses', out of curiosity?
2. I've read that the US has over the decades basically lost our entire diesel submarine industry/knowhow of how to build them. Is that true? Kinda sucks. Of course we're experts at making nuclear submarines, but I guess just due to our lack of needing diesels for anything, we seemed to have lost the capacity. (The Japanese are supposed to be real pros at it, including having the world's quietest diesel submarines from what I've heard).
It's hard to understand why, politically, the US wouldn't want to manufacture even more weapons systems (like diesels) here. They're skilled blue collar jobs, Congresscritters tend to like these kinds of job programs, and as I think we've all heard a thousand times 'the defense/aerospace industry knows to scatter a little bit of every weapons system in every state for Senatorial support', etc. etc. Why don't we just.... build diesel submarines here, if just for sale to other countries if nothing else?
While I endorse what John says, I think the stuff on diesel submarines bears elaboration. The USN very much does not want the US to have the ability to build diesel boats, because then Congress would probably buy some. A diesel submarine is very much not like a nuclear submarine. It's been memorably described as a mobile minefield, and that's pretty accurate. It can't move fast, particularly if it's being hunted, but it is very quiet. A nuclear submarine can stay at 25+ kts for weeks at a time if necessary and never has to come up for air. This is quite useful tactically, because if you want endurance on a diesel boat, you're limited to maybe 5 kts. But the nuke boat is also very expensive and somewhat louder. For the USN, nuke boats are very much better, and the only real case for having diesel boats is for training purposes. We've found that the best way to do this is to borrow them from our friends, because then there's no risk of Congress getting confused and deciding to save money by buying diesel boats.
Also I’m confused about the antecedent in “It's been memorably described as a mobile minefield.” I’m thinking it’s the diesel but I’m having trouble making it out.
"kts" = knots, nautical miles per hour. Nautical miles are about 15% longer than statute miles (or ~1.8 km), but they are conveniently one minute of arc on a Great Circle route so they are traditionally preferred by people who navigate over long enough distances to need spherical trigonometry.
And "mobile minefield" because a diesel-electric submarine effectively defines a modest area of the sea wherein any enemy ship is likely to suffer an underwater explosion without warning, but outside of which area nothing happens. Unlike fixed minefields, this sort can be shifted if you don't like where it is right now, but only at ~5 knots. That's much slower than any of the ships that will be trying to avoid the minefield, so in strategic terms "We need to block the Macassar Strait, not the Sunda Strait" is a thing a diesel-electric submarine can deal with given a bit of notice but the tactical problem of "oops, they're going to sail past us thirty miles away" is not.
Knots. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me; thanks. And I guess the greater speed of a nuclear sub is what keeps that from also being a mobile minefield.
I don’t know anything about the relative speed of a nuclear sub and a surface ship. I would *guess* the latter is faster, but I could easily be wrong, and if not I still don’t have a clue about how much.
The US doesn't do serious ground-based air defenses because the USAF has several thousand wannabe Mavericks and there aren't enough MiGs to go around. Letting some Army NCO take out a MiG with a ground-based missile is low, crass kill-stealing that would deprive some hero fighter pilot from his shot at making ace, and it demonstrates a profound lack of confidence in the ability of the almighty Air Force to maintain full air dominance without anybody's help. The Army can have Stingers, which are mostly for shooting down mere helicopters, and they can have Patriots because those are mostly for missile defense these days - can't dogfight a ballistic missile warhead, so that's no loss. And the Navy can have whatever it wants, because Air Force fighter pilots aren't going to be flying combat missions in the middle of the ocean.
But for land-based missiles designed to shoot down enemy jet fighters (or bombers), it kind of does come down to that being an affront to the Air Force's ownership of that mission. And they'll spend their political capital on that, if they have to. So the Norwegians had to buy a bunch of missiles designed to make USAF fighter pilots super awesome at shooting down MiGs, and figure out how to let a Norwegian (or Ukrainian) Army NCO shoot them from a truck.
As for diesel-electric submarines, in the modern era those are only really useful (or at least cost-effectively useful) in your own coastal waters or not too far beyond. So, very good for countries like Japan, Sweden, and Germany, which are major players in that industry. The United States Navy isn't plausibly going to be fighting serious naval wars anywhere within a couple thousand miles of the US, so it makes sense for all our boats to be nuclear. A conventional sub very likely wouldn't reach the war zone before the war was over.
If we built diesel-electric subs it would be only for export - or possibly because some idiot congressman wanted to saddle the navy with a bunch of subs it doesn't want and can't put to good use. US submarine builders whose bread and butter is nukes are not going to be able to compete effectively with people who specialize in diesel-electric subs, and the Navy doesn't want an economically uncompetitive US diesel-electric sub industry whining to idiot congressmen about how the Navy should be buying their useless boats.
This is protecting a piece of real estate from air attack via equipment on the ground. The USAF thinks this ABGD is stupid because it's better to use planes and pilots to counter that threat, the US Army thinks that ABGD is stupid because 1) that's what they put up with the USAF for and 2) it's better to use people and equipment to attack instead of defend and 3) it's even more stupid to commit to defending a specific strip of land (rather than maneuvering to a better position for reattack.) All of this makes more sense when one realizes that the USAF is in the business of blowing up stuff (preferably other aircraft) with aircraft, not in the 'living on an airstrip' business and that the USArmy has not had to deal with an environment not controlled by the USAF for a couple generations now.
Before one gets worked up over fossilized attitudes, remember that we have not gone back to using mules. Some tech changes last.
Re diesel subs - because there is nothing they do that nukes don't do better. And the American taxpayer isn't actually made out of money.
Belgium punches way above its weight in terms of selling weapons vs having much of a military. For a long time in the Cold War the FN-FAL was known as the "right arm of freedom" vs the AK-47. I only know of their history of producing small arms though, rather than artillery/rockets.
Winner-take-all voting systems, like in the US, naturally produce two parties that roughly evenly divide the national vote. Forms of media that emerged in recent decades, like cable TV, talk radio, and social media, give people more choice to absorb news the way they want, and lead people to self-segregate into echo chambers and vote for more polarized politicians, driving these two parties further apart and making it harder for them to compromise and thus pass laws. Citizens are frustrated by this deadlock. One way to reduce it may be to introduce national propositions so that we can directly vote on laws, like many cities, counties, and states already do.
Why would voting directly on issues be any more successful than voting indirectly, by electing our Congressional representatives? As citizens, we have diverse views, but to elect representatives in a two-party system, all these views on a huge range of issues must be sorted, often arbitrarily, into just two boxes. It’s not just squeezing a square peg into a round hole; it’s putting a hypercube with hundreds of dimensions into a dot. An analogy would be a supermarket that offered only two choices: a basket on the left or one on the right. If you want cabbage and cashews, but don’t want kiwis and cookies, tough luck; cabbage and cookies are in one basket, and cashews and kiwis are in the other.
There are issues that majorities of citizens agree on and want action on, but which aren’t acted on because of the representative system. Voting directly on these issues would get things done that majorities want, relieving some of our frustration. Another benefit of offloading some of the contentious issues from Congress would be to reduce pressure on representatives and perhaps let them relax their adversarial stance and cooperate more to get bills passed.
Propositions aren't radical. Many local and state governments in the US already use them, as does Switzerland, which is pretty conservative, stable, and successful.
Another way to reduce political polarization may be for politicians to pledge to simply represent constituents’ views by polling them on major bills or issues. This might be done by an app on which the representative would ask constituents how they should vote on each pending bill. Two potential problems are too much or too little participation: by people either trying to stuff the ballot box or people not responding. I don’t know much about internet security, but I suppose there are technical ways to verify participants. On the other hand, if few constituents express their view, particularly on minor issues, that could be dealt with either by simply following the views of whoever responds, or by actively polling constituents to get a more representative sample, or by the politician trying to predict what constituents would want.
This pledge seems bizarre compared to our current tradition, where politicians declare their platforms, and voters choose between two. But if we compare with the relationship between employees and employers, the current political tradition seems strange. Typically, employees don’t declare what they’ll do if they’re hired, take-it-or-leave-it as one fixed package; rather, they generally do what employers want—either asking what to do for major issues or predicting what employers want on minor issues. Why not shift to such a tradition for our elected representatives, who are our employees in government?
I think the natural drift towards 50/50 splits is actually a basic aspect of politics (people tend to polarize on an underlying composition of issues, and parties/blocks move positions until they just about hit the 50/50 equilibrium).
As a case in point, take the recent Israeli election - it's multiparty proportional representation, but the vote split between the pro- and anti-bibi blocks still ended up almost exactly 50/50 (Netanyahu block ended up a bit better in terms of seats for rounding reasons). Seems like most countries end up somewhere like this (with a few exceptions like Japan and Singapore, but that seems independent of voting algorithms).
That does seem to be the natural tendency. The exceptions that you note often are when one of the parties grabs the center position, like the LDP in Japan, or for decades the PRI in Mexico (with the PAN on the right and the PRD on the left), or now Macron's party in France.
The tendency of politics to drift toward a 50/50 median is a specific instance of Hotelling's Law, which describes how products in a market tend to become less differentiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
Compared to the scope of possible positions, or the range of positions held by individual voters, they're pretty close to identical. I suspect they're also presented in campaigns as being more distinct than they actually are.
The confusing thing for me is why they are not even *closer*, as Hotelling or Median Voter Theorem would predict. Surely you can imagine some difference between parties/candidates that one of them can narrow. In other words, where does the need to be distinct feature in your model? I wrote about it in more detail here:
Referenda have lots of practical issues, and I think the sheer number of them in California is usually held up as an example of why it's a poor system. You have to somehow decide which items get on the ballot, which tends to favor a raw number of signatures for this or that issue, which tends to favor very wealthy people or groups who can afford to pay thousands of staff to gather signatures.
A lot of people don't want to hear this, but tons of regular people hate politics, hate thinking about it, and simply don't have strong opinions on most policy issues. You can poll them or give them an app or something, but they can simply dodge the call or not use the app- they do this because they.... really don't care. I find this is really tough for high-information voters who love & follow politics to understand, but a huge number of people just don't want to be bothered with making these decisions. Sorry.
A much more efficient way to find how voters really feel on issues would be to use a proportional multiparty parliamentary system, and not just FPTP with only 2 parties. This is the system that actually works in practice, not endless referenda
AIUI the big problem with California's ballot measures is that they're very hard to repeal. Switzerland holds referenda all the time, but I don't think they have this problem because most Swiss referenda propose normal laws rather than constitutional amendments. That said, from a quick skim of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Swiss_referendums and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_ballot_proposition the two systems look pretty similar, and I'd love to hear from someone with direct experience of the Swiss system!
I agree that a proportional multiparty parliamentary system would be better than FPTP. I was just trying to think of improvements than can be done in the US without changing the constitution (which is now practically impossible to amend).
And I agree that most people don't care much about politics. But that's fine. For most issues, only a small fraction of citizens will be interested enough to use the app, while abstaining by not using the app will express an opinion, too: that this particular issue doesn't matter much. Occasionally, an issue will arise much interest, and the app would be there to show the public opinion.
1. Have open primaries, with as many candidates from as many parties -- think the New York Mayor's race. This means that all candidates have to appeal more to the median voter than the extreme in their party.
2. Implement some form of ranked choice voting.
3. Eliminate gerrymandering by requiring (1) electoral districts that reflect the percentage of the political vote in the last 5 elections (that is, if your state goes 54% R and 46% D, then your statehouse must reflect this as well as your congressional delegation), (2) cross a minimum of political boundaries, and (3) do not advantage one party over another (i.e., party X's districts are all toss-ups while party Y's are all certain).
>For most issues, only a small fraction of citizens will be interested enough to use the app
Yes- this is the exact issue- this is what leads to polarization and political tribalism. You're optimizing for hearing *even more* from the highly ideological, slightly crazy voters who have Really Strong Opinions On Everything, who view every single issue as Unrelenting Ideological Combat. You're making the situation *worse*, because now politicians hear directly and constantly from what political scientists call 'intense policy demanders'. Outside groups will optimize to get their fanatic voters to click this way or that on the app- nutso ideological groups or nutso ideological wealthy people will spend money and media coverage targeting their voters to influence the politicians even more.
Again, a lot of people don't want to hear this, but the real solution is to make American politics a bit less democratic and a bit less responsive to the voters, 20-30% of whom are raving ideologues. Build stronger political parties who can tell the intense policy demanders to cool it a bit, who can strike bargains without highly ideological voters breathing down their neck every day. Garret Jones wrote a great book entitled 10% Less Democracy, I highly recommend it
You make an excellent point. Another solution may be to conduct frequent, small surveys on bills coming up for a vote, to get a representative sampling of constituent opinions.
The U.S. House of Representatives could get most of the way to a proportional system (where each state is one multimember district) based on a simple act of Congress. Now, if you want to assert that getting a majority of Congress to vote against their own incumbency is unlikely, I won't disagree! -- but still easier than a constitutional amendment.
In 2014 our founder Dr. Tara Thiagarajan, a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford, was running a microfinance company called Madura that was working across 25,000 villages and small towns in India. ... A large field team gathered data on ecosystem and individual level variables to identify those that predicted the economic success of both individuals and entire villages. …
One Saturday they recorded a few minutes of resting brain activity [EEG] from themselves and some friends and colleagues and then drove a couple hours on Sunday to a small village where they spent the entire day recording brain activity from any willing adults. ... The brain activity from the village brains was very distinct from the urban brains. The differences could be several fold, and in some cases distributions between the two groups barely overlapped.
</QUOTE>
Their postings, which are mostly on biorxiv (not peer-reviewed, which is why I don't call them publications), include the following:
<PAPER SUMMARY>
Complexity of EEG Reflects Socioeconomic Context and Geofootprint
Dhanya Parameshwaran and Tara C. Thiagarajan, 2017
This paper looked at EEG studies of 402 adults from 48 locations in Tamil Nadu, an Indian state, ranging from small villages with no electricity or motor transport, to large modern cities. Subjects ranged in income from $300 to $150,000/yr. The study concluded that their measure of EEG waveform complexity (based on correlations of different points in time of the EEG signal) showed that EEG complexity correlated very strongly with the "modernity" of the subject's hometown, and even more-strongly (r = .93) with performance on Raven's progressive matrices. That is (roughly), city folk had much more-complicated EEG signals and were much smarter.
</PAPER SUMMARY>
<PAPER SUMMARY>
Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG
This is based on the same subject sample as the 2017 paper.
Its abstract says, "Oscillations in the alpha range (8-15 Hz) have been found to appear prominently in the EEG signal when people are awake with their eyes closed, and since their discovery have been considered a fundamental cerebral rhythm. ... It has been shown to bear positive relation to memory capacity, attention and a host of other cognitive outcomes. Here we show that this feature is largely undetected in the EEG of adults without post-primary education and access to modern technologies."
</PAPER SUMMARY>
Rural pre-modern people don't have alpha waves?! These claims are startling enough that we all should have heard of them if they're correct. I only skimmed these papers, but they look pretty good. And as far as I know, the authors are correct in their observation that no previous researchers have ever gone out to remote, poverty-stricken, uneducated and unmodernized villages to find subjects for EEG studies.
My first guess is that it's due to nutritional deficiency. Many poor rural areas of India suffered greatly from hunger in the past, and hunger during gestation or childhood has devastating, permanent effects on IQ.
My 2nd guess is that it's because the smart people left the little pre-industrial villages.
Supposing rural agricultural or cattle-based village does stultify intelligence, I bet you'd find no such effect in tribes without cattle or agriculture. Getting your food from nature every day is IMHO far more mentally challenging than most city lives.
I have some ideas about this. My (admittedly very naive, I’m by no means a neuroscientist) first thought is that maybe “modern” brain activity follows similar patterns precisely because they’re modern, and the types of activity we’ve identified as correlated with intelligence could be more accurately described as correlated with “modern” intelligence, and that if we went backwards in time and scanned Socrates’s brain it would look more similar to these rural Indians than to a modern philosopher. Sort of reminiscent of the idea of Bicameralism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
I wouldn’t think they are less intelligent, although the word “simple “ is used to describe such people. A less abstract world breeds different brain patterns. That’s my take.
Don’t know about Socrates but I bet Archimedes’ head was full of alpha.
Zvi's conflicted review of Marvel Snap actually convinced me to try it, and I love it, despite his criticisms being largely accurate. The card acquisition mechanic is truly terrible, but I don't honestly feel like it's out of greed, in particular. It's extremely difficult to get cards quickly, and impossible to target anything in particular that you want for a specific deck. But they've stated that the goal behind it is to try and keep people's collections somewhat unique, and if I view the acquisition process as a general strategy for keeping the game fresh, there are definitely some really clever ideas:
In particular, I'm really intrigued by your collection level increasing as a result of upgrading the cards. On its own, this is incredibly dull, but one of the criticisms the game regularly gets is the way each card has to have its own specific boosters to be upgraded. These boosters are primarily earned by playing the cards, and you get relatively more collection level points the first time you upgrade. In other words, they've developed a system that actively incentivizes you to play with every card in your collection. Every time I get a new card, I actively slot it into a deck to get enough boosters for its first upgrade. Regardless of whether it's any good, they've convinced me to at least give every card a chance. This is cool!
They didn't quite manage to kill off netdecking, but they did better than average. I see a lot of variety on the ladder. I think it also helps that they rotate the locations you have to win, which means the fundamental rules of how the game is played are in a constant state of flux. It's largely impossible for any one rock paper scissors to develop in an environment like this. I can see this actually being off-putting for a lot of players who like honing and developing a single archetype they can grind, but for me it's much more fun for every game to be a test of situational adaptability.
Zvi also mentioned how much he like the cube snapping, and frankly, I don't know if he went far enough. Between that gambling mechanic, and the very short games, laddering feels more like poker in some ways. Going up the ranks is not in any way about winning every game, the sky-high variance makes that impossible. Instead they've given players a way to assess their own confidence of victory, bet accordingly, and to fold when the opponent raises too aggressively.
In spite of all this progressing your collection still feels terrible. I don't know exactly what the solution to that is, because I like the philosophy behind it all, and I can see how it's all supposed to work, but somehow the way it's locked down still just doesn't feel good.
Just a musing: If the game mechanics are good but the monetization sucks, it should be quite easy to just create a game that copies the mechanics directly. You will need to reword some terms, but game mechanics don't fall under copyright (as of my understanding). Then you replace the Marvel theme with a general superhero theme and you have an actual good game. Funding the development for such a game wouldn't be that expensive: the mechanics seem quite simple, I wager the art would be the largest part of the budget (and you can do with stock art or DALL.E at the beginning). A couple of superfans could probably fund (and or develop) the entire game themselves. The only issue would be that the player base for the copy game would be smaller, but likely not small enough to make the game repetitive or unplayable (I've played some pretty niche online card games and they have worked).
2. After 10+ hours of play, progression stops very abruptly, unless you pay. It really feels like a gacha game for the first 5 hours though. I think this was Zvi’s main concern.
3. The design space feels very limited. Destroy, move, reveal, ongoing, discard. Those are the current mechanics and cover pretty much everything you can do with the board. I’m really curious to see what else they will add. Factions? Spells? Mana generators? The total space of things they can do doesn’t seem very wide IMHO
I imagine they'll stick with just creatures for a while. Could do some Morph/Trap creatures that flip if the opponent triggers them. Kicker costs. There's a lot of room in the Merge space they haven't explored, too. I think the biggest danger will be the temptation to release cards that kill variance, like a Scarlet Witch that always changes it to a specific location with a beneficial effect
Question for Scott: Is there going to be a collection of deleted posts kept/posted anywhere (anonymized, if appropriate) so folks can see what didn't make the grade and calibrate accordingly in future?
One of my earliest Internet memories was the Dysfunctional Family Circus, in which people submitted alternative (usually dark) captions for the painfully-wholesome newspaper cartoon The Family Circus. Accepted captions went to the Green Zone, captions which needed more work went to the Orange Zone, the vast majority of submissions went to /dev/null, and a handful of submissions which were so bad the mods wanted to hold them up to ridicule ended up in the Red Zone. Of course, the very rarity of Red Zone captions meant that people started trying to compose them deliberately, driving the mods insane. I suspect something similar would happen here.
When Andy Weir had no time for his webcomic "Casey and Andy" and therefore let his readers submit their self-made strips, he published this one, which is its own piece of art in a weird way:
Several Red Zone captions were brilliant (possibly unintentional) absurdist humour in their own right, and many became DFC in-jokes. Say "poop keeps the tent wher it is" or "I think my hands are made of wood" to a former DFCer and watch them dissolve into fits of giggles.
(Alert DFCers have noticed that since Jeff Keane took over, occasional references to DFC in-jokes have appeared in the strip. We think he used to be a lurker.)
Hm. Substack doesn't have a public API, but it appears it *does* have a private JSON API to dynamically fetch comments[1]. It should be fairly trivial to make a script that Scott can run once before pruning, then run a second time afterward, and it'll just do a tree-traversal diff on the two responses and output anything missing from the second comment tree to a file. It'll probably miss some comments, since substack collapse long threads under certain conditions? But that still puts us in the ballpark of "good enough". I might code this up some time after work or this weekend, if another commenter doesn't want to beat me to it.
Scott, what computing platform do you use when you're moderating, and/or what OS is your desktop if the answer is a mobile platform? Because it'll probably need to run on a desktop computer, but that can be separate from the device you do your moderation on.
Well, you could do this in two stages. In Stage 1 (say the first 12 hours) you simply add a comment to every post you feel like deleting: "Going to delete this." Don't even bother saying "why" because (1) it takes time, (2) it takes away from the value of the experiment, which is to see if people can figure out on their own what is/is not good, and more interestingly (3) you might be wrong about your own motives (or not express them clearly) and the comment less helpful than one might hope.
Then in Stage 2 (say after 12 hours) you just do all he deletions. You can put as much or as little time between the stages as you like, and you can repeat them or not, depending on how much time you want to spend on this (and honestly it sounds like you are already spending a ton of time on this, way more than I would be willing to spend if it were my blog).
I think for this to work and not just degenerate into a thousand arguments you'd have to be really rigid. *Never* explain, never respond to arguments about a particular comment once its tagged, and always follow through. But I personally would be quite interested to see what happens, it would be a cool social psychological experiment.
One of my friends has a stats assignment where she needs to find an example of a bad graph with an accessible dataset so that she can make a better one. Anyone have any favorite (semi-recent) bad graphs?
I wrote a 2010 lesswrong post about a bad graph, "Subtext is not invariant under linear transformations". It talks about how a person can change the subtext of a graph by rotating it around an axis, or around y = x. Unfortunately the graph it talks about was in the linked pdf, which no longer exists!
But while searching for that graph, I found this tweet with another terrible graph:
Yesterday someone posted on Twitter about traditional Burmese weight measures. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_units_of_measurement, you'll see that in the list of weight measures (which Burma/Myanmar is still using, although they plan to go metric)
1 mu = 2g (approximately, see wiki for exact numbers; I also took off the -tha counting suffix)
1 mat = 4g
1 nga-mu = 8g
So what exactly is the problem with 1 mu being 2 grams and 1 nga-mu being 8 grams? The problem is that "nga" means "five" in Burmese. And no, there's no other meaning of "nga" that applies here. The wiki notes this in a footnote - "literally five, but in fact is only four", but doesn't explain how this situation could arise.
How *could* something like this have happened?
Someone asked this on Twitter without an answer. I couldn't let it go, so, after several hours of reading and looking up what I could find about the historical measurement and monetary systems used in Burma (I must admit to knowing next to nothing about the country and literally nothing about the language and writing system), I have a theory. It's just a theory, mind you, because I didn't find a source that would outright say "this is why". But I find it convincing and pleasant. So, here goes. Your last chance to try and guess any major ideas on your own ends with the next paragraph.
I'll try to be brief, and I think numbering paragraphs might help with that:
1. Burma was independent for a long time, and was only conquered by the British in 1885, at which time they aligned their monetary system with colonial India. But the weird thing we're discussing was already evident as early as 1850s, when second-to-last Burmese king Mindon started minting coins for the first time in Burmese history. Coin collectors made sure lots of these survive and are catalogued and weighed. As an example, in this catalog https://en.numista.com/catalogue/myanmar-1.html
you can see that a silver 1-mu "Mindon Min" coin weighs ~1.5g, and a silver 5-mu coin weighs 4 times that, ~6g. Only the 5-mu coins are like that, other silver/gold coins seem sane.
2. Before coins, the Burmese used straight-up ingots of silver/gold for their monetary exchange, and they weighed them. Two interesting things about that which have nothing to do with the main problem: one is that a special class of weighers/assayers developed, and 2.5% of value was written down on each occasion (1.5% as payment to the assayer, 1% presumed wear&tear). Two, weighing was done by comparing to sets of standard weights which were animal-shaped, typically birds. These survive in large numbers from many past centuries and by weighing them we know which sets of standard weights had been used and how they changed with time.
3. The measures of weight were developed/used especially often for weighing gold and silver, so e.g. "1 mu" was both weight and monetary value (the context supplied, silver or gold, or it could be specified; typically an exchange rate of x16 or x17 between gold and silver was maintained), and the measures changed and developed according to monetary needs. The chief standard measure was in fact the silver kyat, which was equal to about 16g of silver, and more importantly for trade, at least in the 18th-19th centuries was kept equal to the Indian rupee; it was also known as the tical, and the British used this name most often. Interestingly, it used to be a lot less, 11g many centuries ago, and slowly rose in weight, as attested by the bird weights; it seems that kings found it useful to raise the tax income by very slightly upping the standard weight without changing the nominal burden).
4. Now given a kyat that's set at some fixed measure and in harmony with neighboring countries, you can build other measures up (2 kyat, 4 or 5, 8 or 10 etc.) or down (1/2, 1/4 or 1/5, 1/10 etc.). And it appears that, building down, both a binary system of 1/2 1/4 1/8 etc., and a decimal system of 1/2 1/5 1/10 etc. was in use in different eras in Burma (I find this alluded to in several sources but didn't find an authoritative list of which was used when). The binary system was influenced by India, and the decimal by China. Using the standard names for measures smaller than kyat, they went like this:
1 kyat = 4 mat = 8 mu = 16 pe = 64 pya (binary)
1 kyat = 5 mat = 10 mu = 20 pe = 80 pya (decimal)
5. We're set to introduce The Theory. At some older time, the decimal system was in use in which 1 mu was 1/10th a kyat. Then nga-mu, literally 5 mu, was half a kyat, and I suppose this could be an especially convenient unit of measure, used more widely and often than 1 mu itself. In time, the actual word "nga-mu" came to mean or at least strongly connote "half a kyat" in people's minds. Then later, perhaps in the 19th century, there was a reform to the binary system, and 1 mu was re-evaluated as 1/8th a kyat. The name "nga-mu" stuck by that time and it remained half a kyat, which now was, by weight, 4 mu. And that's how this came about.
6. A competing hypothesis would be that the decimal and the binary system were in use *at the same time* somehow. And wouldn't that be fascinating! But two arguments speak against that; first, the weights of the coins mentioned above. Second, the contemporary accounts of Englishmen travelling/trading in Burma in the 19th century - and there are quite a few - as well as dictionaries of measures, trading guides, etc. etc. nearly unanimously document a binary system: 2 mu = 1 mat, 4 mat = 1 kyat. I found one contrary source that seems to say "10 mu make up a kyat", as well as a definition of mu (မူး) on wiktionary.org that says "1/10th a kyat during the Konbaung era" - that's the era prior to the British conquest. But these are rare exceptions, and I want to explain them away by saying that if one didn't know about the discrepancy, one could wrongly "deduce" this from the 5-mu coin being half a kyat.
7. A strong affirmative piece of evidence, I think, is that the definition of "nga-mu" (ငါးမူး) in a Burmese-English dictionary, both wiktionary.org and a "real" one at http://www.sealang.net/burmese/dictionary.htm, gives several different meanings of "half of": not just half a kyat, but half an inch, half in acre, etc. This makes me think that literal "five mu" could in fact have developed towards a presumed meaning of "half a standard unit". But I didn't find a source that outright says that, or confirms my theory of the decimal->binary switch being responsible for this.
That's it! If you're an expert in historical Burmese monetary/weight systems or know one, I'd love to know what you/they think of this!
Sounds plausible! Reminds me of the 1824 Weights and Measures Act in the UK, in which the gallon was redefined to be the volume of ten pounds of water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units
In this case, there was a power of two and a power of ten that were similar in value (10³=1000 and 2¹⁰=1024). As these differ by only 2.4%, people were sometimes happy to use them interchangeably, even though they are, in fact, different quantities. As a result, there's some confusion when someone says "my Internet connection lets me download at a megabyte per second" or "my hard drive has a capacity of two terabytes".
> Some systems are based on powers of 10; other systems are based on powers of 2. Nomenclature for these systems has been the subject of confusion. Systems based on powers of 10 reliably use standard SI prefixes (kilo, mega, giga, ...) and their corresponding symbols (k, M, G, ...). Systems based on powers of 2, however, might use binary prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, ...) and their corresponding symbols (Ki, Mi, Gi, ...) or they might use the prefixes K, M, and G, creating ambiguity.
Your theory also describes essentially the same kind of ambiguity, albeit apparently based on the similarity between 2³ and 10¹.
1. The units started out with a 5:1 ratio, but had poor standardization, and drifted separately over time, until most people were using approximately 4:1 at whatever point in history someone standardized everything.
2. Someone did it on purpose to give themselves a way to state quantities in a misleading fashion.
3. The unit was associated with 5 of some other thing, in some historical accident whose details would be impossible to guess. For instance, maybe 1 nga-mu of spice was traditionally sold in a 5-sided container.
4. The original word wasn't "nga", but someone had bad handwriting.
I woke up Sunday morning so happy to finally be back on Standard Time. Since then, I keep reminding myself, “What a relief to be back to reality!”
If only we could drop DST, that would be the greatest. I’m very aware though that most of the country is in favor of permanent national DST. Sleep scientists seem to agree that that appears to be an unhealthy choice, but I can understand people wanting sunlight at the end of a workday.
I’m bummed to be in the distinct minority. I’ve thought about moving to Arizona. I don’t think my GF would join me so that’s out.
I kind of like DST during the shortest days of the summer. I don’t want to mess with installing blackout curtains for the three weeks or so we’re the sun rises very early at my latitude.
Screwing with the clocks is evil. But perhaps I would have been crabbing 150 years ago when "railroad" time started the evolution to time zones we have today. Damn it, noon is when the Sun is overhead, why should I agree it's when the Sun is overhead in some burg 200 miles away?
Maybe we should all just use UTC, and develop ideas about what the meaning of "0800" is based on our regular location on the globe, and our personal situation. Is it really necessary for everyone in the same shtetl to agree on the psychological connotations of "8 am?"
Daylight savings time means everything happens earlier in the sun-cycle. We all wake up closer to daybreak and we all go to bed earlier. So it makes life more comfortable for morning people and less comfortable for evening people. So I think Phil is right. (But Phil retracted so am I missing something?)
Most people set their lives by the clock, not by the sun. Daylight savings time means that it stays light for longer in the evening, so evening people get more daylight when they want to do things. This is particularly noticeable at high latitudes, when DST ends and suddenly it's getting dark in the middle of the afternoon. Conversely, we get less daylight in the morning when we're trying to sleep. Historically, early DST advocates seem to have been evening people who valued after-work daylight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History
Yes, people set their lives by the clock, but their bodies still respond to the sun (in fact I'd argue it's your body's response to light that determines whether you're an evening or a morning person). I'm more towards the evening end of the spectrum, and when all the clocks go forward I feel like I'm being dragged from my bed before my circadian rhythm expects it.
At my latitude (56 degrees) there's basically no evening light for half the year anyway. The clock change just changes when in the afternoon it gets dark - the evening is dark anyway.
(Edit - I see from your other comment that you're also an evening person at 56 degrees North. Now I'm even more confused that we seem to disagree! :))
My perspective is: getting up in the morning is miserable anyway, but when the clocks go back it feels like the government is calling time on me just as I'm getting functional. This was particularly noticeable before I got a car and used to access the hills by public transport. Under DST I could get up a bit earlier than normal, catch a train or bus to the Highlands (in the dark if it's late in the year, but that doesn't matter), snooze on the train, get out at my station with a decent amount of daylight ahead of me and do a full hill day before either my return train or the sunset called time. But then the clocks go back, and suddenly I'm wasting precious, precious winter daylight sitting on the train rather than hiking, and I have to heavily curtail my hill day in order to be safely off by nightfall. But even on office days, dragging myself out of bed is a pain even at midsummer, but cycling home in the daylight is a joy and cycling home in the dark is depressing.
Evening person here: I care *very much* about sunlight. I just feel like a zombie in the morning, which is why I'd rather have the sunlight later on in the day when I can make use of it.
It's so weird to me that we invented time of day with noon defined to be when the sun is highest in the sky, and then didn't like our own definition so we change that to be 1pm sometimes.
The sun doesn't know what time it is. It rises when it rises and sets when it sets. We can change when we do things based on what the sun is doing, but we've decided that's too hard and stick with doing things when our made-up time of day says we should do them instead.
Reducing the coordination problem of “everyone shift what time of day they do things during the winter/summer” to “increment/decrement a measure by one” is a vast simplification. As witness that we do the latter regularly with little more than some biennial grumbling, where I suspect the former would be basically impossible.
(You could have government entities shift their hours by legislation, but that would either straitjacket the departments or have a de minimis effect. The knock on effect would be far less than DST. And regulating private activity would be far more intrusive and demanding of resources than resetting the clocks.)
I’m an evening-oriented person by nature. (So I don’t personally care if it’s dark in the morning, since nothing makes mornings good as such.) would happily take year round DST or even double DST if it we’re offered, and I’d find year round standard time crushing. I’d certainly vote and donate against losing DST entirely if it came to it.
I recognize that many people have the opposite response, and that there are practical issues with schools, etc. (School should probably start later, but that leads to knock on issues for parents’ work schedules, etc.) I lived through the “going to school in the dark” years of the 70s and didn’t find it measurably worse than getting up for school otherwise as far as I recall, but the remembered consensus is certainly that it was bad.
I suspect that the current compromise (give or take moving the date of the change back and forth) is probably pretty close to the compromise we’d wind up with if we opened it up fully to renegotiation.
Unless you are living on the meridian of the time zone you are in you will be off by +/- 30 minutes. If your time zone is accurate. In some parts of the world, like Spain, in standard time the country is +1 from solar, and in summer +2. Want solar time in Spain use a solar clock.
DST makes a lot of sense in northern latitudes. Where I live, with 17 hours of sunlight mid summer the sunset should be 8:30pm. ( 1/2 daylight). The sunrise should be 3:30. (12 - 1/2 daylight). Instead by being in DST and 30 minutes west of London sunset is at 9:50pm and sunrise at a more respectable 5am.
All good
DST would suck all year around though, so the clock change is a good idea.
Before European time arrived in Japan there were 6 day hours and 6 night hours that adjusted for length of day. The first western clocks were regarded as defying both sense and reality. A few decades later temporal colonisation was complete.
For a while the Japanese made mechanical clocks that changed speed at sunrise and sunset in order to keep the six daylight hours and six nighttime hours. You had to keep adjusting them as the seasons changed.
It's really just about your goals. If you can meaningfully highlight where you see yourself and where you'd like to be and whether you're on track to getting there, as long as that plan is working what you do with the rest of your time is not relevant.
That said this can get very fuzzy at high performance/expectation levels. At one point when I was preparing for interviews I came across this study plan: https://github.com/khangich/machine-learning-interview/blob/master/how.md . What I found most interesting however wasn't the 'what to read' part, but the small section on 'how to read' which is what I've linked. One linked article talks about the capability of highly performant individuals to treat complex concepts as incredibly basic. They've thought about and learned about and obsessed over them to the point that the complexities become the building blocks that define their approach to learning new things. Which obviously makes learning new things a lot easier! But also clearly requires a lot of effort, so much so that to execute it you might be asking yourself to be a completely different person. Balancing relaxation and effort doesn't make too much sense for this state/goal.
So it depends? I apologise for this incredibly cliched conclusion. I personally push myself as hard as I can without punishing myself for failure.
Well in this particular case I was traveling and wasn't able to do very much as I was boarding, so I quickly typed that out. I have things I want to learn and do but don't have much success forcing them into the spaces between things. Most of what I want to do requires focus, so I don't try to do too much when traveling or waiting.
I should also mention that the whole statement is subjective and very deliberately so. Maybe for you this _isn't_ what pushing yourself hard looks like at all and that's cool. Whatever lets your actions align with your thoughts and gives you peace of mind works.
I do. I may be transitioning to “work to live” mode from “live to work”.
I do pine for the excitement/glory/self-fulfillment of some of the careers I hear about here and elsewhere. But I don’t miss being “smart male software guy #8” which would be my life in SF type places
Not sure if this helps, but in my experience the people who are 'maximally ambitious' don't seem to have actually made a conscious choice to be that way.
A common analysis of last night's election is that moderates have rebuked the GOP for running candidates who are too crazy, and the party needs to forsake (some extreme version of) Trumpism.
Is this a thing that can happen? Is there some sense in which there are some Republicans in a room somewhere who can say "We've been rebuked, let's start running more moderate candidates"? Or is it just that more extreme candidates can run, will win among primary voters, and nobody thinking of "the greater good of the party" has any way to stop it?
Any party in the U.S. can choose to have a primary where its own members do not select the nominee by voting and the nominee is chosen some other way -- even by "a bunch of guys in a smoke-filled room." This right -- to use a method of choosing a nominee other than by vote of the party members -- is a First Amendment right that can be exercised by any association (and a political party is really just an association).
So, yes, there is a way in which Republicans *could* conceivably say, "let's start running more moderate candidates, to hell with what Republican primary voters want, we'll take away their primary vote and choose the nominee ourselves."
Having said that, if the Republican party (or any party) were to decide to go back to the "smoke-filled room" model of choosing a nominee, the party would probably bleed members.
There are still however more subtle ways in which a party (any party) can influence the outcome of primaries in which party members do vote, such as by giving certain candidates more support.
Party heirarchies have been losing power steadily since the machine era, and I would say there's not very much that can be done now. The only remaining influence is where party committees send party money, but these days people are much less inclined to give money to parties anyway, they prefer to give it to individual candidates and (once they go over McCain-Feingold limits) to PACs.
Interested wealthy people could set up a PAC specifically for the purpose of funding moderate candidates in both parties, and see how well that works. Not real well, is my guess, in the modern era politics has become religion for too many people.
I'm surprised to hear this. Aren't Congressional votes more or less in lock-step these days, with Democrats all voting one way and Republicans the other, with only a few exceptions? Doesn't that suggest the parties control everything?
I think that is not because of party discipline -- it's not like there are significant numbers of Rs or Ds who wish they could cross the aisle, but fear the repercussions from leadership. This I think is more a reflection of 50/50 government, and the fact that voters from the outer wing of each party[1] are better organized and can more easily threaten someone who does that. You have only to look at how Manchin and Synema (on the Democratic side), and Ryan and McConnell (on the Republican side) have been savaged by the fanatic wing of their own parties.
At the election level, neither party is willing to go to the extent of requiring permission from the party itself to call yourself a "Democrat' or "Republican" (and it's possible some states might not allow that), so nobody needs the permission of the party to run as its candidate. You just throw your hat in the ring of a primary and call yourself what you like. If you win -- you get the delegates, whether or not the party leadership approves.
That gives us strange things like, in California, a candidate winning an election as a "Democrat" even though the Democratic Party of California endorsed one of her opponents, as happened to Dianne Feinsteinn in 2018. It's also the case that a significant number of Trump supporters despise the Republican Party per se, which they will call the "GOPe" or "cuckservatives" et cetera, and see their man as to no small extent at war with the party heirarchy.
Certainly it was the case 75 years ago that parties had a great deal of control over who came up through the ranks, because parties had a lot more control over money and outreach efforts. But the TV age broke that, first with the election of John Kennedy in 1960, and the Internet has only made it much more the case that candidates can appeal directly to primary voters and donors "over the heads" of the party heirarchy, so to speak, so that the parties end up with candidates selected directly by voters self-identifying with the party[2], with the party leadership exerting suprisingly little influence over the process.
---------------------------------
[1] Of which there seem to be either more, or at least they are are better organized and louder than they used to be, not sure which. Perhaps both! We are as people growing more and more isolated from those actually physically around us: a shocking (to me) number of people pretty much have their entire social life, all their connections and friends, online, where they can choose pretty precisely their "neighbors," and never have to interact with actual physical neighbors, who may readily run the gamut of attitudes and situations in life. As with all forms of apartheid, this form would seem to lend itself to growing tribalism, mutual incomprehension, and suspicion.
[2] That more states allow "open" primaries where *any* voter, and not just those with a stated affiliation with a given party, can vote, has jumbled this up even more. In many states it is perfectly possible for a Democrat to vote in the Republican primary, and therefore help choose who the *Republicans* will run for office -- and vice versa.
From what I understand, that's more a function of stronger ideological sorting effects than increased central control.
Fewer liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats to cross the aisle, and more coherent activist blocs punishing 'collaboration with the enemy'. Looks like order from the outside, but it isn't *controlled*
If that's a true thing (and I believe it is), then it's not a back room experiment, but something happening in real time in full view. As with the Democrats, the Republicans are a broad mix of people with varying positions. Even at it's most Trump-influenced, most Republicans were not particularly pro-Trump (or anti, for that matter). If Trump is good for the party, more people will support him. If he's bad for the party, he loses support. Some of the wackier candidates who failed badly, like Doug Mastriano, will signal to primary voters and party officials (who help funnel money and support) that those are bad candidates and should not be supported later. It's a decentralized and iterative process, so it will take time. Similarly, Democrats are going through the same process with analyzing how and why their own candidates did or did not do well.
You'll notice some really good data points here, where there are two or more statewide elections in the same state, but one candidate does significantly better than another. Walker/Kemp + Warnock/Abrams is a great example, but also Shapiro/Fetterman + Mastriano/Oz. The final tallies were much closer for the senate candidates than the governors, which clearly means people were voting for more than just party affiliation.
I thought it a terrible and insane tactic until it worked.
Now, I wonder..
Would it be better if the Dems instead took a principled path that lost to Republicans who are 'moderate' by virtue of avoiding the subject of insurrection, but who'd predictably kowtow to Trump- refusing to ratify valid elections and using the 'regular' Republican toolkit of gerrymandering and voter suppression to entrench minority rule?
Pretty much the latter under the current structures & rules. Direct donations paired with the internet, a greater range of TV options and social media have eroded the power and authority of backroom dealmakers.
To the extent that party figures still have control, thinking of 'the greater good of the party' is itself a force against healthy reforms because they would erode the political duopoly the US has.
Ranked choice voting, and/or proportional representation in multi-member districts) would allow the radical activist bases to pursue radical rarely-elected politics without spoiling the big party, decreasing the risk of primaries. Those reforms would also make 3rd party moderates a real possibility.
On that note- any thoughts on the Nevada ballot initiative?
Also (if you like it) - How can we promote that kind of initiative more broadly?
There are always kingmakers inside any party. They don't always get their way but they're usually important.
More broadly I think any attempt to draw major narratives from an election which to first approximation looks like the last election is a bit doomed. Republicans didn't do badly, they still won the election overall, just by not as much as the polls had anticipated. Blame the polls for being wrong.
I don't think the take on the polls is correct. I wasn't following this election closely but the impression i got was that polls were much better than the "vibes" which predicted a huge red wave that the polls weren't seeing and people just said "oh well polls have been under counting republicans" and assumed it would happen again
Yea, that's how it seems to me as far as the polls.
And I would question the statement that the GOP "won the election overall". For one thing context matters. If a national party can only barely make any gains in a national election in which the other party is in charge and has Joe Biden's approval ratings....I'm not a Democrat but can understand why they are feeling pretty good today.
Reminds me of [obscure sports-fan reference alert] when my beloved Chicago Bulls lost the first game of their first-ever NBA Final but Michael Jordan walked off the court saying "We've got this, those guys can't beat us in this series." Because Jordan and the team had played well below their norm in that first game, and knew they had, but still only lost it by a whisker.
And that's just about the federal election results. In statewide elections too the GOP had disappointing results in all regions of the country, e.g. they lost on statewide referendums all over the place even in states like Montana and Kentucky. The Dems netted two more states in which they hold all three bases of electoral power (the governorship and both houses of the state legislature); the GOP stayed flat on those. The GOP held serve in state governerships that it already held (e.g. FL and GA), but struck out in the swing states where they hoped to gain that key office (MI, PA, WI, and it appears also AZ).
I think the answer is 'the whole thing is a complete mess of idiosyncrasies and special cases such that there's no satisfying way to answer this question briefly, but in general they can exert a lot of influence.'
How primaries for Senate seats work varies by state, so the GOP may have more or less control over who gets on the ballot in the first place depending on the state.
The GOP and RNCC spend a lot of money on helping their chosen candidates run, as well as trying to find and advance good candidates in important areas, and connecting them to campaign resources in their area. Famous and powerful individuals withing the GOP and RNCC also get quoted a lot in right-leaning media and do a lot to help set the narrative for the election.
Thus, it is very possible for these groups to choke off support for primary candidates they don't like, or pour support on the ones they do.
This may not be enough to oust a well-connected long-term incumbent, nor to stymie a well-connected billionaire or celebrity or w/e who has their own base of power and support. But it can definitely squash less-connected and less well-known candidates that they dislike, and bolster others that they favor.
The GOP cannot choose which Republican will be on every ballot across the board. But they can apply pressure from many angles that will make things much easier for the candidates they like and much harder for the ones they dislike, and in aggregate that has an effect.
So...sort of? I mean, the party can decide who to support, including in primaries and can bring pressure to bear on some potential candidates to back off, though that can backfire.
But more crucially, the moderates have rebuked the extremists by causing them to lose (in some places), which, in turn, makes them less likely to run. The goal wasn't (mostly) to be the failed Republican nominee for the Senate in Pennsylvania, after all, it was to be a senator. And for the most part, the extremists would, in fact, prefer a moderate to a Democrat.
People like winning and dislike losing and so if being an extremist means being a loser, fewer people will do it and fewer people will vote for them, even if they agree on the merits (you see this all the time in 'electability' debates on the left, and, I assume, the right, though I have less visibility there).
I think it might be. The fact Stacey Abrams also lost could be taken as the electorate punishing people who won't gracefully accept defeat. And that might bode very ill for Trump. Which I think would be good. Then again, I think that was the last election too. I think the American people generally want moderates but neither party can fully get them through their primary coalitions.
The most interesting thing in terms of intra-Republican politics is how badly the Trumpists/National Conservatives failed to deliver. Republicans overall didn't have an awful night. If you were an establishment type or a Rand Paul type or whatever you were (mostly) personally fine. But the NatCons collapsed which leaves the Republicans with an anemic majority (if at all). Insofar as there was success it was mostly DeSantis and Thiel, the latter notably someone who's already broken with Trump back when he was in power.
Meanwhile Desantis's star is rising which is probably why Trump decided to insult him in what's the first open break between the two. DeSantis clapped back and his supporters chanted "two more years" which is an obvious reference to 2024. This race highly increases the chance of a Trump-DeSantis fight for that lane because Trump underperformed and DeSantis overperformed. Some conservative figures have been openly commented on how Trump needs to step aside which gives DeSantis a very clear incentive to knock him out to receive both that lane of the party and the gratitude of the more mainstream party.
It doesn't need to be a smoke filled backroom, by the way. The NatCon caucuses will be have less members and so be less influential. Although because the majority will be thin the Republicans will have the same problem the Democrats have: they will need literally everyone on board which means going all the way from the moderates to Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the Democrats are the better organized and more disciplined party. Then again, agreeing on simply blocking most things is probably easier than legislation.
Thiel may have broken with Trump once upon a time, but they seem like they were back together this year. Thiel hosted fundraisers earlier this year decrying the few Republicans who had voted to impeach Trump: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-maga-money/amp. And then Trump endorsed both Thiel-backed candidates: Vance and Masters.
Is that so? I have no connections to that part of the spectrum so I couldn't say. Still, I expect Thiel will survive even if Trump goes down in flames so Masters and Vance have an exit some others didn't. But most of those people lost.
I don’t think the common complaint about the candidates is their level of moderation. The usual phrase used is “candidate quality” which in this case is a polite way of saying “don’t have a ton of kids out of wedlock and pay for abortions and constantly lie and struggle to make coherent arguments” or “don’t be a self-promoting celebrity who just wants power for powers sake and you should probably actually be a resident of the state for which you’re running for senator” or “don’t call the popular sitting governor of your own party a communist and member of the CCP”.
The AZ race is a much better test of the moderate/extreme hypothesis but is yet undecided. Both Lake and Masters have been getting puffed up as fantastic candidates by the right so if they can’t win that is not a good sign. I should also point out that JD Vance is frequently lumped in with the MAGA group despite his past, and he won.
I think the main lesson the right will take from this is that everyone should copy DeSantis and that he should be president. Then there will still be a 50/50 chance they’ll continue to vote for whomever Trump picks and Trump will lose in 2024 to whomever the Dems nominate.
> The AZ race is a much better test of the moderate/extreme hypothesis but is yet undecided.
The implications of the Arizona race for other races are almost exclusively about the margin, not the outcome. 49% and 51% should tell you pretty much exactly the same thing, whereas 30% and 49% are very different.
I disagree. 49% tells you that you lost and 51% tells you that you win. That 2 % is the critical difference upon which power is decided and all strategies are designed to get that 2%.
The complication to all of this is that the Democrats also have the opportunity to run bad candidates, and that gives the Republicans a lot of slack. Fetterman wasn't the best candidate in the world before he had his stroke. After his stroke he almost lost a state to a Muslim snake-oil carpetbagger. Kotek badly underperformed in Oregon, as did Hochul in New York. Warnock and Walker both are poor candidates - but they each give the other slack on that.
At the national level, Clinton gave us Trump and Trump gave us Biden. I don't know anyone who thought any of our choices in 2016 or 2020 were great, once we got to the general election.
I know a *lot* of Trump voters, and don't know that I know a single one who actually likes Trump in a vacuum. What Trump provided was an outlet to repudiate both sides typical offerings (a common refrain from the 2016 election before Trump was "No Clinton, No Bush"). If the Republicans can field a non-Trump candidate that the people feel is not more of the same corporatist elitist party politician, they'll easily dump Trump.
DeSantis figured this out, and started playing directly into that line of thinking. The people are wary of a fake though. They've been tricked before and know that the politicians would much rather pretend to be on their side than to actually follow through. We'll have to see if DeSantis (or other politicians) can embody the politics of Trump without the dumpster fire, in a credible way.
I think that's right. Trump was a tool, that's all, for quite a lot of his voters, and if anyone can duplicate the rejection of the intellectual aristocracy, the relative conservatism, and the Reaganesque sunny disposition Trump the man will be history in a flash.
But I also agree with you the same demographic is deeply suspicious, not least of all because Trump is personally demonized by their political opponents, and the more The Wrong People keep saying "well if you have any positive thing to say about Literally Hitler than you must be a Nazi" the more they feel like digging in their heels.
Agreed. The elite who attack Trump don't seem to realize that the one currency Trump has that counts as irrefutable proof he is genuine is his complete lack of support among those same elites. Every time they attack him, especially the more unreasonable the attack (e.g. attacking Trump for something all politicians do but that normally doesn't result in the same attacks), the more the people feel that Trump is, and must continue to be, on their side.
When DeSantis started getting hammered by the media during Covid my very Trumpian family members took the heavy media criticism as evidence that he was the "real deal". In a Trump vs DeSantis primary match up the worst thing that could happen to DeSantis is for the media to crow about how much better than Trump he is.
Reading the Mahabharata right now and I’m struck by the similarity between Karna and Achilles. Both are born invulnerable (Achilles isn’t said to be so in the Iliad itself, but other additions to the mythos have it; Karna has his special earrings and armor). Both are also somewhat rude and coarse of manner—Karna is arrogant and boastful, and just consider Achilles’ behavior with Hector’s body. Both refuse to fight for a time on account of a feud with the supreme commander of their side’s forces (Agamemnon and Bhishma). And of course both are renowned chariot-fighting heroes who fight even harder after their near friends are slain (Patroclus and a whole bunch of kids and brothers) and have a legendary rivalry with a hero on the other side (Hector and Arjuna).
Are there any other mythic characters that fit this pattern or nearly so? Or are there any inquiries as to whether the legends of Karna and Achilles both stem from some even earlier proto-Indo-European source?
There's definitely close connections between Indian and Greek mythology so I would plump for the proto-Indo-European source.
Indra, king of the gods, who rules the element of sky/aether and has the thunderbolt (vajra) as his weapon gets into as many extra-marital tangles as Zeus. Parvati creates Ganesha as Hera creates Hephaestus, without the aid of her spouse. Ganesha has his head cut off by his father and replaced with the head of an elephant, as Hephaestus is (in one version) cast out of Olympus by Zeus and is lamed as a result of the fall. The wars of the Olympians with the Giants and the Titans are like the wars of the devas with the asuras for the control of heaven.
There are many instances where you can see echoes, or how this was developed into that, between the two sets of myths. So yes, I think it's not implausible to have a pattern going on, though I'd say that in some respects Achilles more closely fits with Arjuna than Karna; Achilles dressed as a girl sent to live among the maidens in another royal court, by his mother, in order to try and keep him out of the war is on a parallel with Arjuna cursed by a celestial nymph, his remote ancestress, to be impotent/a eunuch and so spending his time in the Pandava's last year of exile in the court of the Matsya king as the eunuch/hijara Brihannala teaching music and dancing to the princess. Modern adaptations often have Arjuna dressed as a woman when in disguise as Brihannala, and referred to as "she/her", as here:
I forgot to mention the "False Helen" trope as well; some versions of the Iliad have it that Helen never went to Troy, but remained in Egypt while a fake version of her was the one who lived with Paris in Troy, so when Menelaus was returning from Troy and stopped off at Egypt he could take his real wife back without incurring dishonour:
Some versions of the Ramayana also have a 'false Sita'; the fire god, Agni, created an image of Sita which was the one abducted by Ravanna, so when Rama put this Sita to the test of fire, his real wife was restored to him and he could take her back without dishonour (until later, the disgruntled citizens of Ayodha demanded he put her aside just for the suspicion of having lived with a man not her husband):
Interesting. Even in the Mahabharata you have this protection of honor when Draupadi is assaulted by Duhshasana and new clothes magically appear beneath each layer he tears off.
>After killing the dragon, Siegfried then bathed in its blood which rendered him invulnerable except for a single spot on his back where a leaf from a linden tree had fallen on him.
Definitely related and thanks for pointing it out. Given the dates, I wonder if Siegfried is more the “son” of the Achilles myth than the “brother”; Karna’s and Achilles’ myths are somewhat closer in age. But I’m really not sure how well Homer was known in the German Middle Ages.
Cuchulainn is an arrogant chariot warrior who sits out battles when he wishes and fights on when his charioteer is killed—but in this case, he is not the invulnerable one, it's his frenemy Feridad who has impenetrable skin (and whom Cuchulainn slays by spearing him through the rectum).
I've only read the Mahabharata in William Buck's rather free adaptation (and in some ACK comics), so I can't be sure, but I wouldn't have interpreted Karna as being rude or boastful. He always seemed like the best guy around, just on the wrong, or ill-fated, side of the war (maybe like Hector, then?).
"whom Cuchulainn slays by spearing him through the rectum"
Despite ass-based comments presumably automatically falling foul of the challenge mode rules, I have to point out that while the gáe bulga does enter through Fer Diad's anus, at least in Recension 1 (the oldest), the killing blow is when "Cú Chulainn struck him with the spear above the shield, and it broke his ribs and pierced Fer Diad's heart." This suggests that the horn-skin is actually not some innate trait of his hide, but a feat which Fer Diad can perform, hardening it by force of will or something, until he's too injured to uphold his concentration and can be stabbed not in the butt.
In Thomas Kinsella’s translation (_The Tain_), Cuchulainn stabs Ferdiad through the heart first and only afterwards gets the gae bolga blow in (Kinsella modestly forbears to specify its place of entrance) and only after the barbs from the gae bolga go “coursing through the highways and byways of his body” does Ferdiad say, “That’s enough now. I’ll die of that.”
My assumption, based on this, was that being pierced through the heart simply wasn’t that big a deal for a guy as tough as Ferdiad. After all, earlier that day the combatants hewed from each other hunks of flesh “the size of baby’s heads.” “If ever birds in flight could pass through men’s bodies they could have passed through those bodies that day and brought back bits of blood and meat with them out into the thickening air through the wounds and gashes.” And yet they kept on fighting.
Is this a crazy reading? Should I interpret the initial heart piercing as the killing blow and not the butt wound?
I’m writing a middle-grade book for Odd Dot/Macmillan about legendary warriors, and I have the Cuchulainn / Ferdiad fight (they’re probably going to let me use the word “butthole”) so I want to make sure I get this correct.
I *think*, but will not swear up and down, that Kinsella just translated Recension 2 straight off. (I've read both, but long ago, and I have neither on hand.) The deal with Recension 2 is that it's much more complete, much more elaborate, and much newer, if that's a phrase we can use about something written in the 1100s AD, than Recension 1; R2 is written in Middle Irish whereas R1 is written in Old Irish. Basically, a monk probably took all the Táin materials he could get his hands on and straight up rewrote it after his own head. In R1, the fight itself doesn't last longer than half a page and there are no baby's heads being hacked off, and the various weird prescriptions about the use of the gáe bulga don't exist either: the charioteer drifts it downstream, and Cú Chulainn throws it with his toes, because he's just been thrown off Fer Diad's shield and is lying on his back in the ford, not because he *has* to to use the weapon. Likewise, in R1 it's unambiguous that Fer Diad gets struck by the gáe bulga, that causes him to lower his shield, *then* Cú Chulainn stabs him in the heart over the shield, *then* Fer Diad utters the beginning of the death poem which Cú Chulainn finishes.
Anyway, without getting too far into the weeds of this stuff, I think you're good if you say Fer Diad is killed by the gáe bulga, that's the conventional modern understanding anyway. And if you *do* want to get into the weeds, the books you want are Cecile O'Rahilly's "Táin Bó Cúailnge Recension I" and "Táin Bó Cúailnge from the Book of Leinster"; then you can compare the original texts and very accurate translations of the same side by side and make up your own mind.
‘Look out for the gaí bulga!’ cried the charioteer and cast it to him downstream. Cú Chulainn caught it between his toes and cast it at Fer Diad into his anus. It was as a single barb it entered but it became twenty-four (in Fer Diad's body). Thereupon Fer Diad lowered his shield. Cú Chulainn struck him with the spear above the shield, and it broke his ribs and pierced Fer Diad's heart.
Strong is the spear-shaft cast by your right hand. My ribs like spoils are broken; my heart is gore. Well did I fight, but I have fallen, O Cúa!
Alas, O noble warrior! O brave Fer Diad! O strong and beautiful smiter, your arm was victorious.
Our friendship was fair, O delight of my eyes! Your shield had a golden rim. Your sword was beautiful.
Your ring of white silver on your noble hand. Your chess-set of great worth. Your cheeks were rosy and beautiful.
Your curling yellow hair was thick—a fair jewel. Your girdle, supple and ornamented, you wore around your side.
Alas! my loved one, that you should fall at the hand of Cú Chulainn! Your shield which you wore against force afforded you no protection.
Our fight ... our sorrow, the din of our battle. Fine was the great champion. Every army was defeated and trampled underfoot. Alas! O noble warrior, Fer Diad!
All was play and pleasure until I met with Fer Diad in the ford. Alas for the noble champion laid low there at the ford.
All was play and sport until I met with Fer Diad at the ford. I thought that beloved Fer Diad would live after me for ever."
I know there are versions where the story of the Táin has been lost, so a king commissions searches to find it and put it together, presumably this is where the Recension 2 and other versions come from - as you say, a later transcriber putting all the scraps he could find together and creating a whole story out of it.
Another version, by the same translator Cecile O'Rahilly, is the version from the Book of Leinster:
"By this time the two combatants were at the edge-feat of swords. Then Fer Diad caught Cú Chulainn unguarded and dealt him a blow with his ivory-hilted blade which he plunged into Cú Chulainn's breast. And Cú Chulainn's blood dripped into his belt and the ford was red with the blood from the warrior's body. Cú Chulainn brooked not this wounding for Fer Diad attacked him with a succession of deadly stout blows, and he asked Láeg for the ga bulga.—Such was the nature of the ga bulga: it used to be set downstream and cast from between the toes: it made one wound as it entered a man's body but it had thirty barbs when one tried to remove it and it was not taken from a man's body until the flesh was cut away about it.
And when Fer Diad heard the mention of the ga bulga, he thrust down the shield to shelter the lower part of his body. Cú Chulainn cast the fine spear from off the palm of this hand over the rim of the shield and over the breast- piece of the horn-skin so that its farther half was visible after it had pierced Fer Diad's heart in his breast. Fer Diad thrust up the shield to protect the upper part of his body but that was help that came too late. The charioteer sent the ga bulga downstream. Cú Chulainn caught it between his toes and made a cast of it at Fer Diad. And the ga bulga went through the strong, thick apron of smelted iron and broke in three the great stone as big as a millstone and entered Fer Diad's body through the anus and filled every joint and limb of him with its barbs. ‘That suffices now’ said Fer Diad. ‘I have fallen by that cast. But indeed strongly do you cast from your right foot. And it was not fitting that I should fall by you’.
…‘Well, my friend Láeg’ said Cú Chulainn, ‘cut open Fer Diad now and remove the ga bulga for I cannot be without my weapon’. Láeg came and cut open Fer Diad and removed the ga bulga. And Cú Chulainn saw his bloodstained, crimson weapon lying beside Fer Diad and spoke these words:
¶1] O Fer Diad, it is sad that I should see you thus, bloodstained yet drained of blood, while I have not as yet cleansed my weapon of its stains and you lie there in a bed of gore.
¶2] When we were yonder in the east with Scáthach and with Úathach, there would not be pale lips between us and weapons of battle.
¶3] Sharply Scáthach spoke her strong firm command: ‘Go ye all to the swift battle. Germán Garbglas will come.’
¶4] I said to Fer Diad and to generous Lugaid and to Fer Báeth the son of fair Báetán that we should go to meet Germán.
¶5] We went to the rocks of battle above the sloping shore of Loch Lindfhormait. Four hundred we brought out from the Islands of the Victorious.
¶6] When I and valiant Fer Diad stood before the fort of Germán, I killed Rind mac Níuil and he slew Fúad mac Forníuil.
¶7] On the battle-field Fer Báeth killed Bláth son of Colba of the red sword, and Lugaid, the stern and swift, slew Mugairne from the Tyrrhene Sea.
¶8] After going in I slew four hundred wrathful men. Fer Diad slew Dam Dreimed and Dam Dílend—a stern company.
¶9] We laid waste the fort of wise Germán above the wide, many-coloured sea. We brought Germán alive to Scáthach of the broad shield.
¶10] Our fostermother imposed on us a pact of friendship and agreement that we should not grow angry with the tribe of fair Elg.
¶11] Sad was the battle, that slaughtering battle in which the son of Damán was struck down in weakness. Alas! the friend to whom I served a drink of red blood has fallen.
¶12] Had I seen you die amidst the warriors of great Greece, I should not have survived you, we should have died together.
¶13] Sad what befalls us, the fosterlings of Scáthach. I am wounded and covered with red gore while you no longer drive chariots.
¶14] Sad what befalls us, the fosterlings of Scáthach. I am wounded and covered with red gore while you lie dead.
¶15] Sad what befalls us, the fosterlings of Scáthach, you dead. I alive and strong. Valour is an angry combat.
‘Well, O little Cú’ said Láeg, ‘let us leave this ford now. Too long have we been here’. ‘We shall leave it indeed, friend Láeg’ said Cú Chulainn. ‘But to me every battle and contest I have fought seems but play and sport compared with my fight against Fer Diad’."
I take you, Anonymous, as the ultimate source here, because the author of both recensions of the Tain Bo Cuailnge is, if these sources are correct, Anonymous.
I’m reading the Penguin classics abridged translation by John Smith and in it at least Karna is definitely arrogant and boastful. He’s always going on about how he’ll beat Arjuna while the wiser voices of reason tell him he’s out of his league and Arjuna’s invincible. He’s “good” and “righteous” in that he gives gifts to Brahmins, most notably his earrings to Indra, and he’s unfailingly loyal—to a wicked man, but one who showed him kindness and took him in despite his low birth. But he also takes issue with Bhishma who is one of those morally-flawless-and-never-done-anything-wrong-in-his-life sorts and whatnot. He’s more “righteous” than Achilles, I would definitely say, but he’s not the righteous Hector of the story, I’d definitely say that’s Arjuna, Krishna’s best friend. Karna also isn’t just “ill-fated” to be on the wrong side of the war, Krishna himself actually gives him the offer to switch sides (and become king, since he’s actually Yudhisthira’s and Arjuna’s older brother!) before the war and Karna refuses him.
"But he also takes issue with Bhishma who is one of those morally-flawless-and-never-done-anything-wrong-in-his-life sorts and whatnot."
That's one of those six of one and half a dozen of the other situations. Bhishma is fighting for the Kauravas because of his oath to protect the throne, but his heart is with the Pandavas and he believes they are on the right side of all this. He disapproves of Karna because of his friendship with Duryodhana, because of the caste differences (as far as he is concerned, Karna is indeed a sutputra and not a real kshatriya https://brainly.in/question/33692187 even though he is aware, at least in some versions, of Karna's real birth) and he deliberately hobbles the Kaurava war-effort by not permitting Karna to be the commanding general or to take part while he, Bhishma, is in command because he knows Karna's abilities and fears he will be able to win against the Pandavas.
Karna is aware of this, and pushes back against Bhishma by declaring that while Bhishma is in command, he will not enter onto the battlefield. He feels slighted and insulted, and he's not altogether wrong, so he lives up to the warrior code of upholding one's honour and rights by demanding proper respect, which if he is not given, he will not participate. But he is also honouring his elders, by respecting the command Bhishma laid on him. It's only after Bhishma is fatally injured that Karna takes over command of the entire army. So there's a lot of complex motivations going on for everyone involved.
The boastfulness is part of a warrior's character, though; vaunting about your deeds was how warriors established their pedigree and reputation, and that they were entitled to fight with you/you didn't have to fight with them.
There's definitely some thumbs put on the scales when it comes to Arjuna and Karna; the older versions are not shame-faced about how Krishna fixes it so that Arjuna comes out on top, even by breaking the rules of battle (e.g. encouraging Arjuna to attack Karna when the latter is dismounted from his chariot and trying to free it because of the wheel stuck in the mud). Later versions put it down to fate/destiny and how Karna accumulates a lot of curses due to hubris which all coincidentally and very conveniently kick in just when needed so Arjuna can vanquish Karna.
We see this even with Drona who promised to make Arjuna the best archer in the world, and when there is a rival equal in skill, Drona resolves it by hobbling him: "To resolve the matter, Drona accepted Ekalavya as his student, but demanded the thumb on his dominant hand as gurudakshina, or teacher's payment, in order to limit his abilities and further growth in archery, thus pacifying Arjuna."
Karna is sympathetic to modern eyes because a lot of what happens is not his fault; he is excluded and indeed insulted by the Pandavas, his unknown half-brothers, due to his position as the reputed son of a charioteer even though his skill and abilities are equal to his. Duryodhana wins his undying loyalty and friendship by treating him as an equal (even if it is for ulterior purposes, to use Karna against his cousins/rivals the Pandavas):
"At the martial exhibition where the Kaurava and Pandava princes demonstrated their skills before their elders, their guru Drona and the people of that kingdom, Karna appeared and challenged an unsuspecting Arjuna, who is considered to be the best of the princes. But Karna was stopped when Kripa asked him to ascertain his lineage, as it would be inappropriate for unequal to compete. Karna, not being a kshatriya, bowed his head in shame.
Duryodhana immediately defended Karna, arguing that it is skill and bravery, and not birth, that defines a warrior. Using the boon granted to him by Dhritarashtra, Duryodhana made Karna king of Anga so that he was regarded as Arjuna's equal. Karna pledged his allegiance and friendship to Duryodhana."
This is in part why he refuses Krishna's offer to switch sides; he won't abandon the man who stood up for him when everyone else insulted him, he owes everything he has to Duryodhana, Duryodhana is his liege lord, and what kind of traitor would he be to jump ship when it looks like Duryodhana will lose, in order to be on the winning side?
Everyone has flaws in this story; the villains have good points, the good guys have bad points. The worst part of Karna's behaviour is supporting Duryodhana in the dice- hall when they insult Draupadi:
"Duryodhana's jealousy of the prosperity and fame of Indraprastha and being humiliated by the Pandavas made him furious and he wished to throw down the Pandavas. To support his will, Shakuni devised a scheme to rob Yudhishthira of his kingdom and wealth by defeating him in a Pakida or game of dice, in which Shakuni couldn't lose as he had dices which he could control.
Unable to decline the invitation, due to diplomacy, Yudhishthira gambled away his entire kingdom, his wealth, his four brothers and even his wife, in a series of gambits to retrieve one by staking another. After Yudhishthira lost Draupadi, Duryodhana encouraged his brother Dushasana to drag her into the court as she was now his property. Dushsana pulled Draupadi's hair and dragged her into the court. Duryodhana ordered Draupadi to sit on his left thigh, showing and patting it to insult her for revenge. Draupadi refused and Duryodhan ordered Dushashan to disrobe her. Following his brother's orders, Dushashan laughed and started pulling Draupadi's saree. Duryodhan, Shakuni, Karna and the other Kauravas (except Vikarna) also started laughing. However, by Krishna's grace, Draupadi's amount of clothing remained the same."
Well an alternate explanation is that the “degrees of freedom” for creating such stories aren’t a lot. So you are going to end up with similar sounding stories.
Once you have a story about a super powerful hero, you sort of need a reason he isn’t wiping the floor with everyone. And so they are “sitting out”, and once they are sitting out you need a motivation to get them engaged with the narrative again.
I agree with this analysis, and it's interesting to note re: Cú Chulainn above that in the Táin, the pattern is reversed: it's the *entire rest* of Ulster that sits out so that the story can be about Cú Chulainn in fact wiping the floor with everyone. (The invaders even have their own form of sitting out, where they come to fight him one by one so that they can't be wiped out too quickly and make the story brief.)
Also, it's pretty obvious that this, or the failure to figure out a good way to implement it, however you want to formulate that exactly it's clearly the same root problem, is why Superman sucks. All the stories have to be about some idiot zapping him with Kryptonite, otherwise he can literally punch any enemy into the sun and there's no narrative challenge. But "aha! I *also* have a chunk of the Plot Mineral! Now taste the fury of... Rando #53!" grows so old it emits cobwebs pretty much immediately.
I largely agree about the “problem with Superman” but I think the case can nevertheless be overstated, as I hope to show by introducing two complicating factors, as represented by two stories from the Silver Age.
In Action Comics #300 (1963), Superman pursues a hostile space ship forward through the time barrier and into the future—so far into the future that Earth’s yellow sun has become red and suddenly a depowered Superman comes crashing to the ground. Now he finds himself, helpless under a red sun, in a strange and dangerous future world that has been completely abandoned by humanity—all that remains are robotic versions of Superman’s friends (and enemies) forced to march every year in a memorial parade in honor of Superman.
Superman recalls that he has a time machine hidden in his arctic Fortress of Solitude, and accompanied only by a robotic simulacrum of Perry White he starts the long trek into the polar wastes in a last ditch effort to return to a time when he has powers.
This story, by SF stalwart Edmond Hamilton, is wonderful, and reads like something JG Ballard would have written a decade later. But the point is that Superman, like his readers, is so focused on kryptonite that his other weaknesses—by the 1970s this includes the bebulou category of “magic”—can really sneak up on both hero and reader. In a clever Superman story (of which Hamilton write several) the very absence of kryptonite can lull readers into a false sense of security.
Of course, the red sun only doubles the number of possible threats; magic merely triples it. But my Batman question is: how threatened IS Batman, really, but thugs and Jokers and such?
In Batman #170 (1965), one enterprising gangster makes an observation: no criminal has ever managed to kill Batman, but on occasion they have humiliated him. The gangster declares his his intention to trick, surprise, or scuff up Batman—events that are possible, he points out, in the universe in which he finds himself—and never to seek to murder Batman—an impossible event by the rules of the universe as determined by induction.
And he succeeds! Batman in powerless against this fellow, and has to goad him into making an attempt on Batman’s life, an attempt that by necessity will fail. And at that point an unmurdered, unmurderable Batman catches the crook.
This story, by Gardner Fox, is surprisingly postmodern in the degree of self-awareness the characters evince. They have gained knowledge out that the reader, to enjoy a Batman story, must suppress—the sure and certain knowledge that Batman is in no real danger.
Perhaps later Batman stories offered at least a more persuasive illusion of danger; perhaps this revelation is most apt in 1965.
But I guess the point is that the problem of Superman is surmountable by a skilled enough writer and that it is to some extent present in every franchise story.
"But my Batman question is: how threatened IS Batman, really, but thugs and Jokers and such?"
I think this equivocates between concerns internal and external to the narrative. Of course, outside the narrative we know that Batman can never die – he's far too valuable. In this way, he's if anything more invulnerable than Superman. But the Superman Problem has nothing to do with that; it's that Superman is barely threatened *inside* the narrative. If a thug points a revolver at Batman, Batman has to care about that, because *within the story* he isn't defined as invulnerable, whereas Superman can just laugh and say "go nuts, fire away".
The red-sun story sounds fun, but as you say it lacks expandability. Also, I note there are a few stupid features even in that, such as "Superman has the power to fly so fast it breaks the time barrier, thus presumably faster than the light which ostensibly powers him" and of course, "the last human remnant on a blasted, abandoned Earth is coincidentally Superman-related".
"the problem of Superman is surmountable by a skilled enough writer"
I think this is true of nearly every narrative problem, but that doesn't in any way indicate that the problems don't exist. Skill in some sense *means* "ability to overcome problems", doesn't it?
I mostly agree, but I did hope to show from the Batman #170 story that Batman's immunity from harm is so obvious even in-story that a low-level thug could piece it together. It reminds me of a Superman story from around the same era when a disgruntled crook, despairing of ever harming Superman directly, decides to wreck his Fortress of Solitude trophies.
The Silver Age is my favorite era for Superman, at least in part because, freed from the need to put Superman in peril, writers were willing to look for ways to make Superman's world weird. The fact that the last human remnant is a robotic Superman tribute is, for me, a value-add. (It also makes sense, as in DC continuity of the time it was well established that Superman was canonically Earth's greatest hero in the same way that Demosthenes was canonically earth's greatest orator. In the 30th century, the memory of Superman's teenage exploits (as Superboy) inspires future teens to form the Legion of Super-Heroes.)
In the '80s, Mike Baron and Steve Rude created a great series about a superhero with such tremendous power that he very rarely suffered even the appearance of danger—but instead of superhero fights, the comic focused on the inner turmoil of its main character's psyche. This series, Nexus, remains a high-water mark for super-heroes, at least for me.
Even in story, Batman has reached the point that Superman will tell comparably powerful White Martians that, having captured the entire rest of the Justice League, they’re doomed because they missed the most dangerous member. And it’s not just bravado, since the same run established that the entire League could be taken down by Batman’s preset plans.
Arguably Batman’s capability inflation is greater than Superman’s, not least because it doesn’t have the same sorts of explicit loopholes. While I don’t know that it’s the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if Superman’s actually been wounded by guns (that happened to have kryptonite bullets or involved magic, red sun radiation, or other assorted chicanery) more often than Batman has.
I think the problem of Batman has only become more salient with the years and the need to justify his being peers, or even the most valuable player, when teamed with demigods. As witness that for the last generation or so, when a fight between Batman and Superman is contemplated (as it so often is), Batman is the clear favorite.
(Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was probably the turning point for that. But there, Miller sets up extrinsic reasons for Superman to be off his game that later stories generally don’t feel the need for.)
The ultimate reason for Batman beating Superman in DKR is also that Miller personally likes Batman much more than Superman, and probably hates the whole morality the latter stands for, as being unrealistic goody-two-shoes pap.
While that’s probably not an unfair read given Miller’s later work, it’s worth noting that in TDKR itself Superman is treated pretty sympathetically within the limits of being the antagonist for a chapter. (He’s only vulnerable at all because he chose to save millions of lives at the risk of his own.) And despite having reason to hold a grudge, he explicitly chooses to support Bruce’s final gambit when he could have exposed it.
Interestingly, in the black and white TV show “Superman” Kryptonite didn’t exist. Superman simply didn’t have weaknesses, though his power set was a bit less dramatically OP. Most of the time he ran into problems because 1) there were hostages, 2) he didn’t know where the person he needed to save was, and 3) he wanted to keep his alter ego secret.
I haven’t watched the show since I was a kid, but I enjoyed it then.
Superman started out with a set of superpowers, but limited to some extent - so, "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" but that's not super-speed like Flash or able to fly or strong enough to punch someone into the sun.
As time went on, and new writers needed better/more/different powers for Superman in their plots, power creep happened so he ended up like a god amongst mortals, able to reverse time by spinning the earth backwards and so forth.
But all that happened quite quickly. He got his super senses within a year or so, flight in about two, and in less than a decade he was flying between stars, traveling through time, and shrugging off atom bombs.
Superman doesn’t suck. Like him or not, the fact that he’s been a pop culture icon for more than eighty years demonstrates that there’s something there that grabs the imagination.
The best Superman stories are no more about his being zapped with kryptonite than Achilles is all about being shot in the heel. Some are iconic stories, where the point is about the encounter of someone else with incorruptible power. Some are about the man who can do anything being faced with his limits. Some are wish fulfillment, not so much about power per se, but about power employed in the creation of a juster world.
None of it is about realism, since Superman is necessarily a fantasy. (By my lights, anyone trying to do “what it would *really* be like” is taking a wrong turn, though the approach has its fans.) None of it may be your thing. And at multiple stories a month for the better part of a century, there’s plenty of room for Sturgeon’s Law to come into play.
But there’s at least a Chesterton’s Fence question to be answered about Superman’s durability if the character were really as empty as all that.
"Like him or not, the fact that he’s been a pop culture icon for more than eighty years demonstrates that there’s something there that grabs the imagination."
My belief and experience is that he's an icon in the *abstract*, because he's something like the pure archetype of the superhero, but that people vastly prefer to read Batman or Spider-Man in practice. Figures that are easier to challenge without ridiculous contortions. I'm doubtful about how many of the people who consider Superman an icon can name even *one* comic-book story with him in it. And remember that his original popularity was built on a much less preposterously superhuman set of abilities!
"The best Superman stories"
I won't deny these exist or that they have the nature you ascribe to them, but how many have there been, in eighty years? The only Superman-centric story I can remember ever really enjoying is Red Son, and even there, is that really focused on Superman, or on the Soviet Union? On the other hand I can think of about forty zillion oafish stories, or if you count the Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen books as parts of the same property, eighty zillion.
His early popularity, sure, but he escalated fast. (And lost some powers that were central to his first stories, like being able to change his face at will.) He survived the crash that ended most Golden Age heroes’ runs as the flying invulnerable guy with X-ray vision, not the one who could leap an eighth of a mile and had to worry about bursting shells.
(Though he didn’t really. Early Superman, pre-kryptonite, was nominally weaker but in practice more inexorable.)
He comfortably outsold Batman until I think the 80s (so basically half their mutual existence), and was the first superhero who successfully carried a big screen feature film franchise. (Which crashed and burned due to pretty obvious quality decline in the later installments, rather than fatigue with the character.)
Superman isn’t even the only character like him with legs. Captain Marvel was just as invulnerable and sold even more comics in the Golden Age, spun off a serial, was only shut down by legal action and general superhero backlash, and still gets the occasional spotlight. The archetype clearly speaks to people. It’s only boring if the story is about an adversary trying to win a straight fistfight, which few Superman or Captain Marvel stories are.
(One of my old grudges against the 90s Death of Superman is that it was pretty much that. But it sure sold.)
Granted, Superman is also a personal favorite. But if that were some rare quirk I’d have had to discover him digging through 40s discards instead of being presented with continual reinventions in multiple media.
I haven’t loved them all, and generally I’ve least liked the ones which think that the best approach is to somehow bring the character down to earth (either his powers or his morals). But some people do.
One way or another, there hasn’t been a decade without some incarnation of the character with success well beyond comics, even when it’s been fashionable to dismiss him as stodgy or two dimensional. I think it’s clear there’s something in Superman a lot of people like to see.
(I also think Silver Age hijinks with Jimmy and Lois are hilarious and often have more ideas per page than modern comics have in a year. But that *is* a dated and niche interest. Unlike Superman himself.)
Dammit, I wrote a long reply and think I managed to tap Cancel instead of Post. To recapitulate the main points:
"He comfortably outsold Batman until I think the 80s"
You know what, I completely forgot about Horseshit Batman. That's on me and you're absolutely correct here. After the early gothic Kane/Finger ones and until Denny O'Neal, was it? reworked the character/property, the adventures were all uniformly abderitic, without exception.
I stand by the idea that Batman is easier to make good stories for, though, and the best Batman stuff is leagues beyond Superman – but I acknowledge that our tastes might just be too different to reach any meaningful conclusion here.
On a more concrete and falsifiable note, what do you see as the main Superman properties with success well beyond comics in the '90s, '00s and '10s respectively? My impression was that I was far from alone in regarding this latest movie outing as a bomb, and I don't remember any significant work before then, but I'm willing to believe that those just didn't penetrate my filter bubble, or that I forgot about them due to low Superman interest.
(And apologies upfront if the clipped tone here sounds unfriendly – I just couldn't be bothered to try to reconstruct the whole original post from memory, mainly due to frustration.)
Good insight! I think this might explain the sitting out on account of a feud with the supreme commander, and maybe even the rudeness and arrogance downstream from that. I don’t think it necessarily explains the invulnerability from birth specifically, since it does only rely on general combat supremacy and not a miraculous birth specifically. In any case it’s a good idea to consider the convergent evolution case!
In fact, the discovery that Sanskrit was in the same language family as the European languages was exactly the thing that led to that family being called "Indo-European"! (Or "Indo-Germanic" according to German linguists.) This was an incredibly surprising discovery for Europeans in the 19th century.
The language families themselves diverged long enough ago that very detailed stories might not have survived from before then (especially as oral traditions), but it at least goes to show another way that cultural connection between the Mediterranean and India is a thing.
There's debate in comparative PIE circles about how many stories and motifs were original to the PIE culture in what detail, but I think there's broad agreement that three or four myths must have belonged to the originator culture – Thunder God Smites the Dragon and The World Made From A Man Named Twin are the ones I recall off the top of my head.
It was interesting for me when I went through the first half of an Introduction to Attic Greek how the author would point out “oh there’s these five cases, English just sort of has two while German has like three and one archaic one. But proto-Indo-European had like eleven and most of those are still in Sanskrit but already lost/absorbed by the time of Attic Greek.”
Indeed. I think it’s worth considering Martin’s point that some (maybe not all) aspects could be convergent evolution, but in the broader context there are a lot more parallels in Indian and Greek myth than could reasonably have arisen by chance, given their shared history. But that doesn’t mean Karna-Achilles is really one of them either!
If a teenager wrote like that I'd tell him that writing probably isn't in his future. I mean, maybe he's good as an economist but he gets credit as this polymath and I just don't see it.
I only consume "Conversations with Tyler" and it's my favorite podcast. He really prepares, brings interesting people and interviews optimizing for information. I also think he has some interesting ideas, and I like that he is genuinely curious about big questions (culture, religion, ...) instead of burrowing in smaller, easier to answer questions.
I actually like Cowen's original concept of "mood affiliation", which usefully points out how people can emphasize moods over objective facts (such as when a problem people are concerned about has gotten less pressing, perhaps through their own efforts). Unfortunately, Cowen himself is one of the worst offenders in misusing the word to mean something more like "partisan/loyalty signalling".
I don't like his Straussianism, and greatly prefer Robin Hanson's more literalist approach. However, he is extremely prolific and produces a lot of posts even if the average quality isn't as high as some other bloggers. He's also read a lot, so he's better informed than someone just churning out ignorant content.
I think Hanson is a bit more "alt-right" adjacent than Cowen though (who definitely isn't)…I mean, Hanson's takes are sometimes quite interesting, but overall I prefer Cowen, as he seems less partisan/biased and more "rational"...
I also think that Cowen doesn't even aspire to rationality as much as Hanson does. He once said: > I see [...] even "overcoming inadequate love of Sichuan chili peppers" as often a more important problem than "overcoming bias."
Hanson is known for pushing mechanisms for greater rationality, like prediction track records, prediction markets, "news accuracy bonds", etc. Cowen is not especially interested in them (and per Tyler himself, his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok is the best "truth tracker" of their lunch group. Tyler often brings up personal "production functions", so borrowing that terminology I think Tyler is optimizing a very different function from one aiming at rationality per se.
I can understand and appreciate this complaint, but I guess my defense of Tyler Cowen is that he seems genuinely curious about the world we live in, and doesn't appear predisposed to allowing a narrative take priority over facts. Or, in other words, he seems committed to trying to understand 'what is happening', as opposed to being committed to telling you a story about how the world works.
When did it become so awful? I remember around the time Donnie T ran in 2016, the "alt-righters" showed up quite a lot...though Sailer commented there earlier than that...
Sailer is polite, which is why he is often tolerated. The comment section for marginal Revolution is angry, and hostile. Which is why the idea of being kind makes sense to me.
Yeah, even on his economics posts they are. I don't know why that is. But then he offers them a place to talk about the elections, and pre-emptively insults them for wanting to talk about them and implying he's better for not wanting to do so. The guy could do better.
I can see how the quirks in his blogging style could grate. I haven't read enough of his longer and more formal articles to have an opinion about his writing. But the links are often interesting and he's a good interviewer. I appreciate that he often approaches topics with polite skepticism, but without often making ideological claims to the contrary.
Also, the "overrated" versus "underrated" question isn't really much of a question (compared to what?), but it's an opportunity to say your opinion, after picking between "overrated" and "underrated" randomly.
It needs to be considered that he posts daily to Marginal Revolution (and has done, almost without fail, for more than a decade, if I recall correctly) in between his regular duties as economist and general polymath. A lot of his posts are accordingly very off-the-cuff and casual; essentially tweet-level effort. The examples you give fall into this category, I think, but not all MR posts do. Whether you like this style of blogging is a matter of taste; regardless, looking at his work more broadly, I honestly think that no, he’s not overrated - if anything, he’s very underrated, in that relatively few outside the rationalist (and -adjacent) have heard of him.
That is regardless of whether, in addition to finding some of his writing annoying, one agrees with what he says. E.g. I found the arguments in Stubborn Attachments to be as absurd as their conclusion, so it’s not as if even his higher-effort work is beyond criticism. (But perhaps I’m missing a deeper, Straussian argument!)
Wait, what’s wrong with Stubborn Attachments? It convinced me that economic growth (with the caveats of sustainability, respect for human rights, etc.) is a moral imperative, and that we should be doing more to promote it.
For "GDP growth is actually maybe/pretty bad" take I cannot recommend enough Uruk Series by Lou Keep at Sam[]zdat blog. Can be a bit obtuse in writing at times, but I got to like his writing style, and still think the underlying point is well taken across and well explained.
I came into it assuming that "growth" is a bad abstraction and it didn't convince me otherwise. Yes, it's better to be rich than poor, but it actually does matter what kinds of economic activity we get more of. We need a more fine-grained way of thinking about the world than macroeconomics gives us. At least think about different sectors like health, education, and energy differently.
The "Straussian" thing is what I find a bit frustrating. I get that he wants to keep certain positions close to his chest and doesn't want to broadcast every single view he has on every controversial topic. He's like an old-school professor who doesn't want to inject too much of his political leanings into the classroom. Nevertheless, I'd much rather a blogger be the heart-on-your-sleeve Rod Dreher type where you know exactly what he stands for.
With all that said, I think Cowen does a tremendous job when you consider how often he posts and what an interesting collection of links he comes up with on a daily basis. Also, if it hadn't been for MR, I might not have come across SSC until much later.
Thoughts on at-home ketamine-assisted therapy? Looks like with the COVID-inspired loosening of telemedicine, legal ket in the mail has become as easy to get as boner pills.
I agree with Scott. I'm a psychotherapist working via telehealth with multiple clients on at-home sublingual ketamine protocols and have done it myself. It's not for everyone obviously, but I think it's a good thing that people have easier and more affordable access to it. I see it making a difference with both depression and anxiety, as well as facilitating deeper growth-oriented work.
I'm a therapist too and have also tried ketamine myself, both sublingual and via injection (which feels *much* more intense than sublingual). I'm curious whether you work with people while they're under the influence of ketamine. The injections dismantled my mind so thoroughly then I could barely communicate, but I would have been able to talk under the influence of sublingual ketamine.
I have worked some with people while they are on it, but mainly afterwards to help them integrate the experience. At sublingual doses, people can mostly talk if they want to, if not perhaps right at the peak. There's an uninhibited chattiness some people have on the way up and the way down that sometimes captures important perspectives or feelings to look at later. If people are good at writing stuff down in that moment, then having someone right there may not be necessary, but otherwise the integration after the fact can lack the immediacy to make the most out of it. Of course there's disagreement in the field about whether any of the content that surfaces during a ketamine trip is relevant for treatment outcomes for depression -- my sense is for people who are insight-oriented, that the content can matter a lot to them.
Strongly in favor. Ketamine assisted therapy at clinics costs thousands of dollars, is poorly covered by insurance, and a lot of people can't consistently make it to a clinic. Ketamine is an excellent depression treatment. It's no more addictive than a bunch of other things you can already get and take at home (eg Adderall, Xanax, alcohol). I think we lucked out by this being regulatorily possible.
That having been said, I don't think "as easy to get as boner pills" is how I would think of it, unless you're getting the Viagra from your doctor who knows you well and has assessed you for erectile dysfunction / risk of side effects. Or maybe there are sketchier ketamine places than the ones I know about, in which case I assume the government will eventually shut them down just like the sketchy Adderall places.
It's time for a poetry challenge. Below are lines from five famous poems or songs, with each word reduced to its first letter. Your task: find the poems.
To avoid spoilers, I suggest posting any answers you give using ROT13: https://rot13.com/
Paul Ingraham, who built the excellent site PainScience, now has a Substack blog called Try Everything, chronicling his efforts to recover from a post-viral syndrome he's suffered from for the past 7 years. So far nothing has worked, and he is planning to spend the next 2 years trying everything reasonable he or anyone else can come up with. He's smart, honest, articulate and funny, so the blog's a good read. Also gives you a miscellany of useful stuff Paul knows about what works and what does not for the vague but awful little symptoms that plague so many of us -- crappy sleep, fatigue, amotivational syndrome . . . The blog's comments section is also presents an opportunity to brainstorm possibilities. If you like the challenge of making remarks here that are 34th percentile or better in quality, you might try coming up with some ideas Paul thinks are worth trying. I managed to crank out 2, and felt like I'd found a golden egg. Plus Paul himself's a good egg. He's the only person who has ever given me a truly useful suggestion about reducing back pain.
He should at least have his microbiome sequenced. If you're looking for why one person is sick and another is healthy, it's the logical place to start looking—especially if it's not something he's dealt with his whole life.
You've got this wildly fluctuating soup of biochemistry that can have any number of different semi-stable equilibriums. Plus he had a major illness that kicked it off; a lot of times that means antibiotics.
Half the time, you only find out that something is viral when you give the patient antibiotics and they do nothing. Not how things should be done, but a lot of docs operate under the doctrine of "eh, can't hurt, might as well try it"
"For about two years, my poops were awful. It was like crapping toothpaste… and then I would leak sticky, slimy shit for hours after every bowel movement. I had to shower multiple times per day."
Sounds like bowel problems. He said the poops got better, but just bc the texture's improved doesn't necessarily mean the community architecture is back where it ought to be
I would questions whether any of those things are a “syndrome”
And are instead people misunderstanding aging and depression/ennui. I absolutely have worse sleep and more fatigue and a-motivation l times, and specially compared to say age 32 (I am now almost 42). I am open to the idea that these are part of some syndrome, but I suspect make the 30lbs and 10 years of wear/degradation on my body have infinitely more to do with it.
As for useful suggestions for back pain, there are a couple super simple ones.
1). Work you back harder and make it stronger.
2). Stretch and improve your range of motion of the associated muscles and ligaments.
3). Just wait, a huge amount of physical problems just get better with time (well until you get old and they get worse).
The syndrome I am talking about is post-viral syndrome, not the little list of miscellaneous symptoms I gave later -- crappy sleep, etc. (Though I do wonder if chronic lack of motivation might reasonably be thought of as a syndrome). Post viral syndromes are, I'm pretty sure, a real thing, w/ common symptoms being exhaustion, exercise intolerance, body aches & malaise. I had one myself that lasted several years, then faded away on its own.
As for back pain, you sound like you're assuming I have plain old middle-aged back issues, and that I have not tried just waiting (your 3), or taking the steps that any sensible person would (your 1 & 2). You are wrong on both counts.
Yeah, OK. The fact that some people who claim to be suffering from something complicated are in fact lazy dum dums on whom it is possible to visit a gotcha is just not that important to me. There are plenty who really are suffering from something that they cannot shift despite sustained, intelligent effort, and those are the ones whose situation is interesting to me.
One of the only useful things I have imagined done on Bitcoin is publication of various checksums. With the collapse of FTX, I am less convinced that there will be a Bitcoin in ten years. Perhaps Scott's comment section will be longer-lasting.
I just finished reading Reality+, and a couple weeks ago I read The Conscious Mind, both by David Chalmers. I enjoyed both greatly.
I'm stumped at the "seemingly brute fact" of subjective identity, that we each happen to occupy the particular subjective experience that we do. From The Conscious Mind, on page 85:
“The indexical fact expresses something very salient about the world as I find it: that David Chalmers is me. How could one explain this seemingly brute fact? ... The nature of the brute indexical is quite obscure, though, and it is most unclear how one might explain it. ... The indexical fact may have to be taken as primitive. If so, then we have a failure of reductive explanation distinct from and analogous to the failure with consciousness.”
I read Reality+ with the discussion above still fresh in my mind. In Chapter 15, Chalmers explores his intuitions about the circumstances in which he (i.e., the conscious, subjective experiencer writing the book) would survive, or not, in different cases of brain-uploading. He settled on the strategy that he would like to be uploaded gradually, given the option, to avoid being unintentionally killed and replaced with a digital doppelganger. Here's where I'm stumped: wouldn't continuity of consciousness in the course of any substrate change at all have to be arbitrary? In Chapter 15, Chalmers points out that the brain is undergoing gradual replacement all the time as part of normal biology. Why should there be any difference between that substrate change, through which presumably the subjective observer persists; and neuron-by-neuron digital uploading; and cortex-by-cortex silicon replacement; and hemisphere-by-hemisphere uploading; and complete cerebral annihilation and reconstruction; or what have you? What rule determines whether and where one persists?
Here's the best thought experiment I can come up with to make my point. Let's say we put you, the reader, under anesthesia, take out your brain and put it on life support, split it in half, and replace each missing hemisphere with a silicon duplicate, so that we now have two whole brains. Then, for the sake of isolating variables in the grisly experiment, we throw out your brainless body and install each brain in an identical host body, which we'll say are biological copies of the original. Then, we awaken both. Which set of eyes do "you" now see out of? Assuming the answer is not "neither" (because humans can survive a hemispherectomy), and not "both at once," then you must now inhabit one of the brains. Why one and not the other? Everettian quantum mechanics, which Chalmers discusses toward the end of his book, seems to beckon here, but I'll set that aside. I think any mechanism for making the choice would have to reflect some kind of "extraordinary discontinuity, unlike any other that we find in nature" (like certain alternatives to fading qualia that Chalmers takes up in Chapter 15 of Reality+). E.g., "you awaken completely in whichever brain includes the hemisphere with the greater number of neurons in it, and not at all in the other," or "you awaken completely in whichever brain includes the hemisphere that had the more powerful gasp of electrical activity prior to anesthesia, and not at all in the other."
What I'm getting at is that any determination of where a particular consciousness "goes" upon a substrate change of any magnitude must be arbitrary. It would even be arbitrary moment-to-moment in daily life: why should I still be here at time t+1, when my brain at t+0 was, atomically, in some ways a different thing? What if my brain's information-processing capability sufficient to correlate with consciousness is disabled by a knockout punch, or because I've taken a nap? What arbiter is choosing whether "I" should resume existence at t+1 when I get out of bed and my neural logic gates are all firing again? Maybe another way of saying all this is that the "brute indexical" does not just arise when we first blink into awareness, but it is continually reiterating itself.
It seems to me that, if any mechanism for determining continuity of experience would be arbitrary and extraordinarily discontinuous, and we are unwilling to accept such a thing, then we should accept that either: (1) no such mechanism is needed, because there cannot be continuity, because every substrate change does cause destruction of the previous experiencer, such that each experiencer only exists for a momentary flash, such that I am a different person now than the one who began writing this long sentence (notwithstanding the memories I inherited), and I will be gone and replaced with a new experiencer before I finish it; or (2) no such mechanism is needed, because there can only be continuity, because there is only one experiencer. I, the writer, am you, the reader, and we're both my dog, and each of the dinosaurs, and every fly that has ever landed on my window, and the alien AI on the other side of the galaxy. Experience is singular and omnipresent notwithstanding local expressions, just like a quantum field. There are many movies playing in this theater, but there's only one seat in the house.
Neither (1) nor (2) is very compatible with life as I'm living it. (2) would seem to unify egoism and altruism, which at the very least might motivate me to stop shooing away the stray cat. I have no idea what I'd do with (1). I could really use any guidance anyone can give me for further reading or thinking that might straighten me out.
I think 1 is probably correct, but I think that the future flashes of consciousness with memories of the ones you experience as you read this will probably be happier if you don't worry about it much.
Why isn't there a problem about why that chair is that chair and not some other? We accept that ordinary physical.objects are simply self identical, at least at a point in time. In terms of indexicals, every security camera has it's own perspective , quite unmysteriously.
The Vertiginous Question seems to require consciousness as a starting point. Perhaps because it's hard to accept that you are conscious without embracing dualism.
Most arguments for Open Individualism assume a kind of dualism, where individual minds get matched up with individual bodies, in a way that is somehow coincidental or mysterious. But it can only be a mystery in need of explanation of there is any possibility of Mary's mind finding itself in John's body. Under materialism, by contrast Mary's mind is just the activity of Mary's brain: there's no separate mind,so no possibility of minds getting mismatched.
You being you is only a mystery or coincidence if you are two. If you are a body and a soul, there is a question about how they get matched up. And it's conceivable that you could be a body and a soul, but it's also conceivable that you are not.
Materialists don't worry about why that chair is *that* chair, and they don't see anything special about persons that would make the question "why are you you" meaningful . For materialists, consciousnesses/persons are individuated the same way bodies are, since they are nothing over and above the body/brain. Materialism is also able to explain why one self does not perceivably bleed into another, and explain why minds only perceive the environs of the body.
So there is no problem from the materialistic perspective. Which means to argue for OI you need to argue against materialist metaphysics, because it has a lot going for it.
( "Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times. It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with empty individualism, the view that personal identities correspond to a fixed pattern thatstantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and with closed individualism, the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time")
Thank you! I’m going to spend some time continuing to digest the variety of comments I got here, but (among other helpful and interesting things) yours put a name to the nagging idea (open individualism) that unlocked the appropriate Wikipedia page, further reading and ordered thinking, etc. Doing my best to compare feelings across contexts, I think your comment here gave me about as much relief as a codeine prescription for a broken bone. I hope you’re having a great day.
I think all these arguments stumble over a certain empirical question, which is whether anybody actually has experienced a discontinuity of self awareness. We certainly *think* we do, when we sleep, when under general anesthesia, but that this is true is an assumption which we can question, and perhaps should question, if it is to form a key foundation to arguments about the nature of self.
Perhaps there *is* at some unconscious level an awareness that persists through sleep, so that on awakening there *is* some part of our brain that is aware of continuity, realizes we have still existed and some kind of thoughts have taken place. Same thing for anesthesia, perhaps there is an awareness there, too[1]. (I vaguely remember reading once that a body undergoing surgery exhibits physiological signs of stress, and perhaps a person recovering from surgery exhibits some vague symptoms of PTSD -- maybe that experience is not as completely excised from our awareness as we think -- or hope, ha ha, the idea that major surgery under anesthesia is retained in awareness at even some murkery subterranean level is rather horrifying.)
If we question the empirical existence of any experience of actual discontinuity to which a human being can testify, then some of these thought experiments become problematic, because they assume things about human experience that may not be true. Perhaps the mind does not, and cannot, retain a sense of self past a genuine discontinuity, despite our intuition. Maybe our intuition is based around a (unjustified?) faith in determinism, that if we reconstruct at time t + dt exactly what a system was like at t, then we have ipso facto created the same thing, because the entire future of the system (which is what we would use to measure "sameness") is 100% determined by the state of the system at the starting point of measurement.
But determinism is not the only metaphysics of system dynamics, and moreover determinism need not be a Markovian determinism, in which complete knowledge at any instant is sufficient to determine all future behavior. Maybe there is some kind of "memory kernel" at work, which makes it necessary to integrate over all prior history to predict the future completely, and so maybe it is not sufficient to recreate a system at one point in time to have it behave identically going forward. That would call into question the assumption that a sense of self can cross a discontinuity.
Something like your thought experiment is the bedrock philosophical reason, for me, why some alternative to materialism is needed. If I gave up Christianity, I would have to find some other non-materialist explanation. There's just no way to explain my experience of the world that saves materialism from the destructive power of this thought experiment.
The idea of an immaterial soul solves the problem of the continuity of personal identity. But giving up on the continuity of personal identity dissolves it.
I couldn’t recommend it more strongly! Take up the Conscious Mind (not Reality+, which is more of a pop book), I predict it will feel like scratching an itch in the middle of your back you didn’t think you could reach. He calls the non-materialist position he arrives at “naturalistic dualism,” IIRC. Please reach out if you read it, I’d love to know your reaction. I’m realizing how hard it is to find fellow folks who “take it seriously.”
>I'm stumped at the "seemingly brute fact" of subjective identity, that we each happen to occupy the particular subjective experience that we do.
This brute fact is easy to understand if you accept that your consciousness is "owned" by your physical body, or more accurately, the computational processes instantiated by your brain. Your personal identity is a function of these processes combined with your memories and functional dispositions that make up your personality.
> He settled on the strategy that he would like to be uploaded gradually, given the option, to avoid being unintentionally killed and replaced with a digital doppelganger. Here's where I'm stumped: wouldn't continuity of consciousness in the course of any substrate change at all have to be arbitrary?
I used to be in favor of the "continuous change" idea for conscious uploading. But eventually I realized the idea of continuity of consciousness is a red herring. There is no meaningful way to characterize one's consciousness as being continuous in the sense of every time point having a unique property of consciousness distinct from every other time point. At best we can say that consciousness is *seamless* from the subjective perspective. It isn't even meaningful to say that you are conscious in any given instant. Freeze all the molecules in your brain; are you conscious in this instant or not? It's a meaningless question.
What does matter is *persistence*. The fact that my brain processes persist means that I am a conscious thing over the duration of this persistence. But persistence doesn't require continuity, it only requires continuation. When I wake up in the morning my conscious brain processes continue, thus I continue to be the same person I was. If my brain processes were stopped and a duplicate were to continue in silico, I continue to be the same person I was in the computer. If my meat-bag was then also continued, I would continue on in the meat-bag as well. The substrate doesn't matter, only the continuation of a particular set of dynamics.
>Which set of eyes do "you" now see out of? Assuming the answer is not "neither" (because humans can survive a hemispherectomy), and not "both at once," then you must now inhabit one of the brains. Why one and not the other?
This is a complicated question and I don't think we can dismiss the "neither" option. Human brains are asymmetric, language is lateralized and potentially other relevant traits like personality are as well. One side may be more dominant in the sense of carrying the features that one identifies with. We might say the repaired person receiving the dominant hemisphere will be the continuation of the original consciousness. But the hemispheres interact in complex and unknown ways. The interaction of functional areas across hemispheres almost certainly has consequences for personality traits and considerations of self-identity. Putting two hemispheres together from different people will probably result in entirely knew interactions between cross-hemisphere functional areas and thus result in a unified consciousness that is so unlike either original that it cannot be identified with either.
There's a much simpler non-philosophical explanation from biology. Simple organisms don't require a self to produce behaviour. A bacteria is a machine that ingest one or a few food chemicals and "sense" the change in concentration of the target chemicals. If it is increasing, they move forward. If it's decreasing, the change direction randomly. This works well without any need for a modelled self but it produces an extremely limited range of behaviours. There is an astronomical number of bacteria on the planet, none are happy, none are sad, none know they are here.
Plug a brain into the system and we add a capacity to adapt to different environments through learned behaviours. There is no need for a self but there a limit of behaviours - it's still running a stimulus response system. A dog can learn complex behaviours, it is awake and engaged, but it lacks even the capacity to plan or think things through or take and an ideological position.
When we bolt an internal world model onto the stimulus response brain, the game changes wildly. Model elements can be learned independently of direct experience, elements can interact, and a new universe emerges (almost literally). At the business end, behaviour can be driven by the model. A monkey won't give you its banana for a promise of bunches of bananas in the afterlife or even next week, but humans do variations on this kind of stuff all the time, naturally and relentlessly.
First question: given the wild power of the internal world model, what happens if it does not include a constructed self? A rapid Darwin award, experiment over. That's madness. Second question: What would if we do if we had the capacity to deconstruct and directly manage our constructed selves? We would immediately game it. Think heroin, then, just think it again. Like those rats that prefer pressing the lever to eating. Evolution presents another Darwin award. The mechanics of self is vital to human, but fortunately hidden. We live inside the illusion and it seems totally real to us. Phenomenological enquiry into the apparent self is doomed from the outset - by the compelling force of evolution. The self is an illusion anyway - you absolutely won't find it if you dissect a brain - but it is a wired-in, critical component of the world model that the brain runs. Without it, we are stupid, crazy, or dead.
I've made a lot of progress in this kind of conversation by asking folks to join me in tabooing the verb "to be." If you can rewrite your post without using any form of that verb - including be, is, am, are, were, was, etc. - I suspect you'll more easily see the vagueness in your conceptualizations.
Consider the seemingly simple sentence: I am me. To rewrite it without the verb "to be," you'll have to understand what it is that makes you, you. You'll have to specify coordinates for the clusters of thing-space that we call "I" and "me," and you'll have to specify some active relationship between those clusters, an action performed by the subject "I" upon the object "me."
I don't think you can do that without learning a good deal about where your understanding breaks down.
There is no mystery, you have just been duplicated. That is an easy philosophical bullet to bite in this particular realm. There are now two “yous” both with a continuous experience back towards the single “you”.
My inclination is that "a consciousness" is a type error, because it's less like a noun and more like a verb. Not a separate object that we carry around inside our brains, but an activity that the brain does.
Both reconstructed half-brains would (assuming the premise that they're successfully alive afterwards and paired with an adequate replacement of the other half) then independently continue to do consciousness, and both would have memories of being the former single self.
I think of it like asking of the stomach... if you split it into two and repaired each half with an artificial half-stomach, then which one would be continuing your digestion?
Yes! I use this kind of language a lot, like "if you treat a verb as a noun, you're going to have a bad time." Nobody has this kind of confusion about visual processing - no one discusses the hard problem of vision, or proposes the pan-visual-processing hypothesis where vision is a fundamental aspect of quantum something something something...
What's so hard about treating consciousness as "just" another cognitive process, like visual processing?
Well there is option 3) - that you are the same person who started the post because “because every substrate change does not cause destruction of the previous experiencer” - which is the world as we experience it.
I was a zombie once. I was cycling my bicycle at the back of my parents house, aged twelve, and then the scene faded away (literally it swiped away like a cinema effect) and I was lying on the sofa with my mother wiping my brow. In the meantime I had cycled out on the road, hit my head somehow (was a car involved - I can’t say), was found on the road by a neighbour, brought home and had conversations with my mother and grand aunt, if a bit groggily. The awakened me was not obvious to my mother or aunt, as in I was talking beforehand and afterwards. My mother did say a few minutes later that I sounded back to normal. Zombie me spoke groggily.
Since this isn’t my normal experience I’m pretty certain my consciousness is normally continuous.
I don’t get why the answer to your thought experiment *can’t* be “both at once”. If I separate a room of air into two rooms of air, both contain the same original air (in the large-scale sense), after all.
As soon as AI can interview a veteran claiming a mental disorder, determine the validity of the symptoms and aggregate the various domains of functionality affected by the disorder that approximates the VAs percentage rating system, half of what I do will become obsolete.
The forensic half of my practice will still be a thing for a while longer.
Couldn't you formulate a similar response for just about any job? I read your post as "once [Hard Problem] is solvable by [Hard Problem], then [current solution] is no longer needed." AI is a Hard Problem, but once you even have AI, so is getting the AI sufficient ability to do this specific task.
"Mental disorders" are hazy enough I doubt AI will ever take that over. As Thomas Szasz says, our mental medicine men are "soul doctors", and we don't entrust the soul to computers.
That really isn’t totally clear. There are some realms currently where simple flow charts outperform experts, but people don’t replace the experts with flowcharts.
I recently found an AI-powered tool called ExplainPaper.com that lets you upload documents, highlight any word or phrase you don't know, and then have AI magic instantly generate a clear definition of the phrase. It's intended to to help you read academic papers, which isn't really a use case that interests me.
It makes me wonder if a general version of this tool is coming that will follow you around the internet everywhere you go and can define/look-up/comment on anything you highlight. That would be the killer tool.
Google has been quiet in the recent slurry of awesome AI tools coming out, so I wonder if this what they have coming. I am ignorant about these things and too lazy to research deeply, so I am hoping generous commenters will generously comment with information and/or theories.
Kindle has a similar feature, although it doesn't use AI magic, it just uses ordinary dictionaries + wikipedia, and it sometimes fails in surprising cases.
The most annoying failure mode is when you look up something like "perenacologist" and it defines it as "one who practices perenacology" but then you can't look up "perenacology" because it only works for words/phrases in the primary text, not recursively for ones in the dictionary. But that's obviously just a stupid UI, not a capability failure per se.
Sorry, what's the advantage of the AI version of this relative to a regular built-in dictionary, such as e.g. Apple products have, as Nolan points out? My very wibbly understanding of current machine learning is that you have to train the AI first on some massive sheaf of data, text in this case I guess, so it's hard to imagine it being more compact than a straightforward list of words. Is it better at handling typos or something?
Ah, I should elaborate. The tool I mentioned (which is actually called Explainpaper.com) can define phrases and concepts, not just words. You could highlight an entire sentence and it could give you context. This context pops up in a little window the side of the paper. Inside this chat you can ask follow-up questions and get good answers. It's like having a knowledgable professor sitting next to you while you read.
I'm not sure how it works but you have to upload a paper onto their site to use the tool on it, which to me smells like they're fine-tuning GPT-3 on that text in the background.
Oh, huh. Thanks for the explanation. (Scott, I hope you make allowance for this type of post even if it's low-quality in some discussion-promoting sense and don't delete them, otherwise I'll come off as an even bigger asshole than I actually am.)
Does anyone have good resources on the treatment of long covid? Specifically respiratory issues and fatigue.
Most of the official guidance I've come across tends to be frustratingly vague, with the standard all purpose stuff on lifestyle changes support networks, etc. Presumably due to the broadness of long covid symptoms. And the unofficial advice in forums etc tends towards anecdotes and miracle supplements. Neither of which are particularly helpful in terms of concrete steps.
(I'm not sure where asking open ended questions comes in the hierarchy of comment quality, so feel free to delete and I'll repost on the normal open thread.)
Dr. Roger Seheult suggests that exposure to near infrared radiation in sunlight may well be beneficial.
He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine.
"There seems to be a biological plausibility that since mitochondrial dysfunction may lie at the heart of long-COVID and the dyspnea and the shortness of breath on exertion that characterizes this condition, it may very well be that making sure that you get outside and getting fresh air, but specifically near infrared radiation and sunlight may be a potentially therapeutic intervention. We absolutely need to have randomized placebo controlled trials, but the data that we present...is quite compelling.
[...]
If you're concerned about skin cancer, you can always put on clothes to protect yourself from the ultraviolet radiation than can cause skin damage, but still get the near infrared radiation which penetrates deep and through clothes very easily. You don't have to be in direct sunlight... Its a good idea to get outside...Newer windows are designed to block infrared radiation.
Sitting in front of a fire also gets you exposed to pretty good levels of near infrared radiation."
The video cites various papers that contribute to this hypothesis and all papers are linked in the description of the video.
Although Dr. Seheult speaks very cautiously, my perception is that since he started producing videos about COVID at the start of the pandemic, he has been consistently ahead of the curve.
Hmm that's interesting. Have not have time to watch videos yet, just going by your post. Has he done any RCTs? Or maybe looked at things like whether LC is less frequent or long-lasting. in sunny vs. cloudy places, or in people who work outdoors vs those who work indoors?
This seems to be pretty cutting edge, so it is not shocking that studies have not yet been conducted.
His paper that I linked is from just 2 months ago, and it states that "This theory, which places NIR and the development of subcellular melatonin at the centre, is interesting but it is a totally new and untested theory."
His video which I linked is from just 6 days ago, based in part on some recent papers.
If the person is only 3 or 4 mos out from covid, there's a reasonable chance they're just having a slow recovery. If it's longer then yeah, something's wrong.
The most recent things I've seen about LC treatment seem to come down to various sorts of slow rehab for each of the various symptoms -- for ex., for exhaustion doing tiny amounts of exercise and very gradually increasing them. Study I saw had kind of depressing results -- average improvement after a year was approx 60%. Have not heard of anyone having success by targeting some process in the body that was causing the various symptoms. Well, actually heard about a couple things but don't know whether they panned out: taking Paxlovid; and getting vaccinated. Some claim one of the other of those produced a big improvement in their LC.
If I were you I'd search Google Scholar and Clinical trials.
My elderly parents both caught covid in April 2020. They had weeks-long fatigue etc. What I think helped was their taking a nutritional supplement called Ensure. Easy to digest, tons of nutrients including protein. Just mix with hot water or hot milk. It does seem highly processed and has sugar. They preferred chocolate to vanilla. This was better nutrition than trying to eat everything naturally, which was very hard to do then. Even shopping online was hard - the restrictions during quarantine were strict.
Trying a different version of this, because I think it has potential, but came late to the game last open thread and got bogged down.
~~Wegenerian Hypotheses Thread~~
From last time:
"Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener is a sort of patron saint of crackpots; he was the first person to seriously advance the idea that the continents were all joined at one point in the past, just based on the fact that they look like a jigsaw puzzle if you squint. He ran into a lot of resistance from the geological establishment, because we didn't have the understanding of tectonic plates floating on a liquid mantle yet. (I imagine a lot of his skeptical contemporaries scoffing "Does he know that landmasses don't just float on the ocean? Someone ought to break it to him that islands go all the way down.")
This is a sometimes-dangerous but valuable mode of thinking, so hit me with your "Wegenerian" ideas—things that are unfalsifiable, or maybe just very difficult to falsify. Hunches that you can make an intuitive or epidemiological argument for, but can't prove or even fully justify mechanistically.
This is a thread for gesticulating frantically at the map, going "they clearly fit together you fucks, any child can see it!""
NEW RULES this time though: no vaguery (I'm looking at you, math guy), and no religion—nothing fully unfalsifiable. We are here to play the believing game, and feel out the implications of each other's ideas.
I'll start: Europa's interior ocean is full of life, and the orange streaks on the surface ice are roots that have cracked all the way through the shell.
Hypothesis: many of the world's correct ideas originally come from a crackpot, but a larger number of the world's utterly wrong ideas also come from crackpots, and we have a problem with too many people following after the crackpots because they *sound* confident and also very smart. The crackpot often has a science degree related in some way to their field of crackpottery, and in an academic setting would usually be rightly demolished by people with more expertise, so the crackpot takes his message directly to laymen, who know only that this person sounds really confident and smart and tells an alluring story, so they memorize the story and tell it to their friends, happy that they've learned something that most people don't know (usually because it's complete bullshit).
But sometimes the crackpot hit upon something real by accident, so eventually when non-crackpot scientists investigate the claim that has been going around, they discover the real thing and it becomes canon.
Hypothesis 2: most of the correct ideas that were first discovered by "crackpots" were actually discovered by people who were unusually rational, but also unusually confident and persuasive, and because their idea was far outside the mainstream, they sounded exactly like crackpots.
My favorite is that consciousness is just our mimetic immune system, like one of the software solutions for viruses, which is to take periodic "snapshots" of the system and compare them, after updating for what is known to originate legitimately (e.g. through user action), so that you can detect infections by a (computer) virus.
We are a very social species, and we are uniquely vulnerable among animal species, due to our unsurpassed communication skills, to infectious memes, to adopting ideas that originate in someone else's head. This is a source of great power, of course -- we can adopt someone else's ideas without having to think them all up ourselves. That's the source of tremendous human progress. But it's also obviously a source of great danger -- this way lie cults, Tulip crazes, Nazism, witch burnings, copycat suicides.
So perhaps at some place in our long distant past, not long after we developed our sophisticated language system for conveying nuanced and vivid ideas to each other, we developed a defense mechanism that allows us to tag all the ideas in our heads as "this is mine" and "this came from someone else." That would let us be extra vigilant about the latter. (Our ordinary viral immune system works a bit like this, all of our own cells tag themselves on the outside with "this is me!" sugar molecules that cause the white cells to pass peaceably by. The distinction between "self" and "nonself" is very important!)
And surely the best way to know whether an idea is yours or not is to be constantly reflecting on what you're thinking at the moment -- to watch yourself thinking, so to speak, so you can see the thoughts trundling down the assembly line in real time and put your copyright symbol on each. Isn't "watching yourself think" a pretty good working definition of "conscious?"
I know that's a funny question to ask in the context of your post, but it made me realize: this model provides a great insight onto learning and our sense of truth.
There's a school of thought in education called "constructionism", which holds that in order to actually learn something—to really, fully internalize an idea—you have to basically figure it out for yourself. You can't actually put an idea in someone's head, you have to just show it to them and let them build their own replica—which can then be given the "self" copyright stamp.
Something seems true to us when we can build that replica from parts we already have lying around. If we can't, we're likely to reject it as false, or to lose it like the contextless name/date associations they had you memorize in social studies class.
Yes I came up with the idea. That doesn't mean others might not have come up with it also, and for all I know it has already been considered and dismissed by the cognitive science people.
To a significant degree I agree with your school of thought, and I have been in the business of education for decades. After so many years I tell students: I cannot teach you something, put it into your head in a way that makes sense to you. I can do only two things: (1) tell you how and why it makes sense to me, and (2) give you tests that check your mastery of the subject, and grade them, so you know when you are closer or further away.
The best students always learn it in their own idiosyncratic way, and it never precisely duplicates the way I understand it, or I daresay any other person. That's not to say we predict different outcomes -- this is, after all, physics, not something as frothy and contingent as a social "science" where things are "true" if the majority votes it that way -- but how exactly each of us gets to the same conclusion is almost always at least subtly different. Many paths, same destination.
I will also say that one of the marks of the gifted teacher is the ability to help a student build a replica out of whatever pieces he (the student) happens to have on hand. It's the ability to see how *his* pieces, which may not be the same as *my* pieces, or indeed the same as any other student's, can nevertheless be assembled into a machine that gives the same (correct) output for a given input. It's meeting the student where he actually is, working with his actual state of knowledge, and helping him use the bricks and sticks he actually has on hand. It's not always possible, of course, sometimes the student's inventory is too lacking, but it is possible a fair amount of the time, and it is the mark of a really outstanding instructor that they can help with this.
It's one of the things that distinguishes a master of the field from a master *teacher* of the field: the former may very well know everything there is to know about the field, but he can only build it up in one particular way, whichever way makes sense to him, and he can't help someone build it another way.
I like Aquatic Ape theory: the idea that humans specifically evolved the way we have not to run on the savannah but to live on the beach, diving for shellfish etc. The main point in favor is that a lot of human traits seem adapted more for the latter, e.g. most of the other glabrous mammals are fully aquatic, we're better at breath-holding and have more suitable noses for this than our closest ape relatives, there's not really any benefit to having worse muscles than a chimp or bonobo (an adult male chimpanzee is about four times as strong as an adult male human, IIRC) *except* that our weaker muscles are less dense enabling us to float.
The main point against is that this theory is regarded as absolute crankery by every professional in a relevant field, but what do they know anyway?
Also we have a bit of skin between our fingers that looks like it might be a vestige of something fin-like. Apes don't have this.
As for muscles, though, we have good reasons for not being as strong as apes. Building and maintaining muscle costs calories and protein, so having more muscle than you need is a liability. Our lifestyles don't require as much strength as apes', so we don't have it.
I thought this was such obvious bullshit until one day I watched a tiny child, maybe 2 or 3, fearlessly leap into a swimming pool. I thought: there's just *no way* that child has had time to learn that relative lack of fear of deep water, it absolutely has to be wired into us, the way it's wired into various other species. But why would we be wired to be so unafraid by nature of water that drowing is the most common form of accidental death?
Tiny infants (like <6 months) also reflexively hold their breath when immersed in water and appear to enjoy the experience as long as it's reasonably brief. Aquatic Apers claim this is because women are evolved to give birth in shallow water and that this helps with various difficultes and complications of delivery.
The unified field theory, expressed in simplified Newtonian terms, is something like sin(ln(x))/x in the same sense that Newtonian gravity is expressed 1/x^2.
Distance is ... probably the most accurate word for it, yes. "Measure" might be slightly more accurate, but also probably far more misleading.
If it works, it should reconcile everything, from what we call dark energy to the strong nuclear force. It feasibly yields the right galactic rotation curves. Might explain the kuiper cliff if things line up right, although that implies a repulsive phase/force we haven't even noticed, between the scales of star systems and galaxies. Gravity. Nuclear forces. Possibly chromadynamics, but I've forgotten the name of the individual who claimed that it could be solved with something like strong gravity.
Bruh I love you but you can't just say "something like sin(ln(x))/x" and then claim to have solved five of the biggest problems in physics at once. You gotta give us more than that or else you just sound cracked out
So, for example, with dark energy, it would imply that the solution is, in Newtonian terms, that mass simply exerts a repulsive force at a certain range of distances.
For the galactic rotation curve, sin(ln(x))/x, where sin(ln(x)) approximates 1, simplifies to 1/x. Where sin(ln(x)) approximates 1/x, you get a function that locally approximates 1/x^2. It should be feasible to fit the curve such that the local approximations of 1/x^2, and the local approximations of 1/x, align with observations.
If gravity drops off faster than expected at star system scales - heading into a repulsive phase - the kuiper cliff is nicely solved. It does require that we somehow haven't noticed a repulsive force that dominates vaguely between the distances of 10^12 and 10^18m, though.
Gravity may be covered by a section of curve that approximates 1/x^2 on the scale of the solar system, but it's cutting it really close, and starts to require that small planetoids be electrically rather than gravitationally bound.
Smaller than that and the Newtonian version stops working; you really need curvature to deal with the hierarchy problem. However, curvature does do a remarkable job of dealing with the hierarchy problem - if the nuclear forces exhibit curvature, a hydrogen atom is something like a meter across, measured "from the inside".
Some ideas (I don’t seriously believe a good portion of these, but fun to speculate about regardless):
—Microplastics are responsible for [insert large societal changes which are hard to account for here]. This could include anything from declining sperm counts to increased obesity. I would be surprised if there was no noticeable effect on humans tbh, it’s more a question of which effects are caused by what.
—Philosophers who don’t believe in consciousness are P-zombies. I mean come on, it’s time we believe people when they tell us about their “internal experience” or lack thereof!
—politics can be predicted by figuring out which outcome will result in the most interesting story, long-term.
—Dolphins and elephants probably have religion. Elephants seem to mourn, and reason about the world to some degree, and it makes sense they would invent religion for roughly the same evolutionary/basic philosophical reasons we have.
—the universe is finite, because if it weren’t, we’d be Boltzmann brains and that would likely look very different than the world we observe.
> Microplastics are responsible for [insert large societal changes which are hard to account for here].
Plastics are for practical purposes inert, and I keep waiting to see scientific studies proving the harms of microplastics, but this idea that they are harmful has never been led by scientists AFAIK. SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" may be bunk, but it noteworthy for having suggested several possible contaminants besides microplastics.
> Philosophers who don’t believe in consciousness are P-zombies.
I'd phrase as "Philosophers who don’t believe in qualia, and insist on characterizing consciousness simply as an ability to process sense-data and make decisions, are zombies in a philosophical sense". It's plausible, but can't be assumed.
> politics can be predicted by figuring out which outcome will result in the most interesting story
wat
> Dolphins and elephants probably have religion.
I think we would've noticed if that were true. Unless by "religion" you just mean "incorrect beliefs about X on an individual level".
> the universe is finite, because if it weren’t, we’d be Boltzmann brains
Non sequitur. Boltzmann brains should be far outnumbered by non-Boltzmann brains regardless.
I suspect the universe is finite, but endless, and so indistinguishable from infinite for all observers.
I hope this qualifies. The idea of passing through time doesn't sit right with me, especially as it just in one direction. I vaguely recall we account for this via entropy, but it feels artificial. It makes me wonder if it's just an artifact of something else, that neither past nor future exist, and there is only ever truly "present" states and space.
I agree that the past probably does not exist, but unlike the future, it used to exist.
It would be better if this idea were false. But the universe doesn't care about what's better or worse, good or bad. It simply is what it is.
It can't be proven. The utter impossibility of accessing the past (except via whatever is left of it in the present) is evidence that it no longer exists. On the other hand, if the universe preserves the past, it wouldn't care about making it accessible to the present, because again, the universe doesn't care about making sense.
Well, our current physics doesn't include any concept of passing through time. There's no less reality about events "in the past" then there is about points "in the future." We can identify an arrow of time by making some strong assumptions about the initial state of the universe, but this still doesn't explain why we have such a powerful conviction that the past is more "real" than the future. Of course, our conviction could be delusion. Or our physics could be wrong, Lee Smolin has argued we need to pay a lot more attention to the concept of "the passage of time" and maybe he's right.
"The idea of passing through time doesn't sit right with me, especially as it just in one direction."
Consider a model of space/time where we can't control the direction we are traveling along one axis, but we can control the speed. Alternately, we just haven't figured out the (totally obvious) way to control the direction of time -- and when we do we will discover that it has multiple axes, too, just like space does (NOTE: Heinlein's pretty bad "Number of the Beast" played with the second version where time has multiple axes ...).
Does the asymmetry with the spatial axes bother you that much?
I'm comfortable with physics' explanation of time as a map, but I'm worried the territory is very different. Given the subthread is about things we feel but can't prove, I'm stuck trying to reconcile the fact that I know there was a past, but can't prove it. I can only prove there is ever a present. I can predict what the future might be like, but I will only ever experience it as the present until I stop experiencing anything. So it boils down to some uncertainty that the axes are real and that only the frame of reference is.
It’s normally physicists telling us our intuitions are wrong because (some) of the math of physics can work in either direction. Personally I take time seriously, I’ve yet to meet my former self(ves) walking around the apartment, which is great because it would get crowded.
To this point: I've played a lot of poker in my life, and I've often idly wondered if the best players aren't somehow able to unconsciously 'fast forward' 5-10 seconds in time, or however long it would take to see the next card on the board (or, to remain consistent with your post, to occupy two different periods of 'time' simultaneously). If you play long enough you will run into people who just seem more consistently lucky than everyone else, and while I understand the conventional reasons why one would come to this conclusion (various biases at work, selective sampling, etc) I've always wondered if there isn't something else going on.
I think that any hypothesis of this nature has been soundly falsified by gambling establishments, who would no doubt kick out any player performing above statistical luck over extended periods of time. If a guy can be a poker pro, that means he isn't any luckier than the maths of the game can account for; otherwise he's a cheater in the eyes of casino owners – I feel confident that precognition counts as cheating, to them if not to any others.
I don't think the casino cares about statistical anomalies when poker is being played nearly as much as when blackjack is being played. The casino is pretty much just renting out a table and a dealer for poker while with blackjack the casino itself suffers losses to extraordinarily "lucky" players. No?
Unless this postulated ability to see 5-10 seconds into the future somehow *only* manifests while playing poker, then it's going to show up in blackjack and other player-vs-house games where the house *definitely* cares. And will notice, no later than the bankruptcy filing but probably long before that.
"And will notice, no later than the bankruptcy filing but probably long before that."
Given that blackjack card counting is less powerful than precognition but still pings the cheating sensors forcefully, so to speak, I think they'd snag the precogitator very swiftly indeed.
While I see your point here, I'm pretty sure that in practice the managers still find it imperative to inhibit cheaters in the poker games in their casinos.And I don't think it's just because they're legally obliged to or something, either; it reflects poorly on their establishment if there's rigged gaming going on, and even more poorly if they're not the ones doing the rigging!
I'm a bit hamstrung here by not being overly familiar with gambling establishments, but this is my impression of how it works, anyway.
The casino is incentivized to catch cheating at poker because a reputation for NOT catching the cheaters is bad. Yep! But the casino is not nearly as incentivized as for blackjack where the casino loses its own money directly.
Here's a nice math puzzle to think about. Try to do it without pen & paper (but use them if you must).
Cities A and B are connected by a straight railroad 60 miles long. Trains in both directions depart at 00 minutes on each hour and move with a constant speed without stops, spending exactly 1 hour to get to the other city. Peter lives right next to the rail track and has a favorite activity to fight boredom, which he does randomly from time to time: he comes to the window, waits for the first train to pass by and writes down in which direction the train went.
When we inspected Peter's notes, it turned out that the two directions appeared equally often in his records. How far does Peter live from the nearest city?
We don’t know how long Peter watches nor how many times a day he watches. Based on the information given, all we *might* know is that he does *not* live slightly left or right of dead center between the two cities because, assuming his view is perpendicular to the rail line, then he would never see both trains. One train would hide the other.
However, we don’t know how long these trains are. We also don’t know how far Peter can see to the left or right. So, even my previous statement about what we *might* know seems open to doubt.
Is this one of the questions where smart people take longer to answer the question? Because that was an interesting addendum on the last thread to a simple question which caused people to doubt themselves. Here, I perhaps naively think he can e anywhere on the line.
That was my first guess. But I see now that it's wrong. If Peter lives just outside city A then he will (for instance see the A-bound train at 4:59 then the B-bound train at 5:01. So, most of the time, the next train will be bound for A.
Now suppose he lives just off the midpoint. The A-bound train passes him at 5:29 then the B-bound train at 5:31. Also not right.
So I guess he lives one quarter of the way along the track. The train from the nearer city passes him at fifteen past the hour and the other train passes at 45 minutes past.
Outside the spirit of the question but the first thing that came to my mind: He is anywhere and the fact that the numbers match is coincidence. As you say, depending on where he lives and how many times he has done this, this possibility ranges from unlikely to staggeringly unlikely.
Hmm yes. An equidistant time between trains would make sense. In my head he was randomly picking a minute, but of course he waits around until the first train passes.
Let's suppose that Peter lives X miles from City A. That means that A -> B train will appear outside his window at X minutes after the hour, having travel X miles; and the B -> A train at (60 - X) minutes after the hour, having traveled (60 - X) miles.
Therefore, if Peter starts looking out the window at any time in minutes between 0 and X, or between (60 - X) and 60, he will see the A -> B train first; if he starts looking out the window at any time between X and (60 - X), he will see the B -> A train first.
That gives him (X - 0) + (60 - (60 -X)) = 2X minutes in which he sees the A ->B train first, and (60 - X) - X = 60 - 2X minutes in which he sees the B -> A train first.
If we set 2X = 60 - 2X, we find X = 15, and therefore we conclude that Peter lives 15 miles from the nearest city.
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If you're optimizing for survival, you would post top-level threads rather than replies (to things that might get zapped), and you'd post 2-3 very different things so that the odds would be with you. If you're optimizing to avoid any lash of the whip, you'd just lurk. I predict more folks will be in the first camp--but we'll never be able to test this hypothesis because this comment is about to disappear.
Unless all comments in here land above the 33-50% threshold, as compared to the average ACX comment. I feel like election day all over again, waiting for the data to come in...
Yeah, it's like watching the election after you just piled on a bunch of bets in the last days of PredictIt. Each reply to a reply is like building on a house of cards. How stable is the foundation? Did I just put a horrible card on top? Why is Scott reaching for the--
Preliminary results of the midterms seem to show better than expected results for democrats. In particular they seem to have systemically outperformed prediction markets, most notably in the senate (by contrast 538 seems to have been pretty close). Can we take any wider lessons about this for prediction markets?
538s predictions were public, so it's not a lack of information. One explanation would be that a single prediction market is analogous to an opinion poll, in collating the general opinion at the time. But not necessarily being more accurate. Though iterated markets might improve that. It also, loosely, seems thst more popular markets did worse. Which perhaps implies that the effectiveness of them reduces as you expand outside the small demographic of statistics nerds who engage in them most
Manifold better than predictit certainly. Predictit tends to be systemically skewed to GOP in general. (Possibly due to their slightly bizarre ruleset.) But I haven't done a systemic comparison of the different markets
How similar would a system have to be to a human brain before you considered that maybe it had a similar level of sentience to a human being?
For example, if you found some system that you knew was mixing 'top down predictions' from a model and 'bottom up sense data' from the world to send instructions to some actuator that effects changes in the world, how likely do you think it is that this system thus has either consciousness or agency?
I expect that nothing has qualia (=sentience?) without whatever specific thing makes humans have qualia.
The system could be as intelligent and conscious (=able to process input and produce output) as humans, but not have qualia. I think it will be necessary to do a lot of difficult and careful research to discover the thing that makes humans have qualia.
I may not understand the technical terminology, but it seems to me that lots of things have consciousness (they know what's going on around them) and agency (they choose to do one out of several possible options), but don't have the same level of sentience as a human being. Trees and beehives and lots of dumb algorithms know what's going on around them and make choices on that basis, but they're missing genuine sentience.
In my opinion, the system would have to have what Heidegger calls Dasein before I would consider it sentient like a human being. It would have to (something like) assert its own selfhood, up against a bewildering world, while facing the threat of death. (I do not understand Heidegger well, but it's still the best account I've found.)
I also think there are plenty of non-human things that are sentient, that know what they are and assert their own self-existence. A linguistic clue is we call them "spirits", like a political movement, style of music, college population or sports team. To me, looking for AI to be the very first ever non-human thing to have some special quality that, so far, only humans have, is likely to yield disappointment.
Reinvention of the self, a conscious killing of one's old personality as a prerequisite for permanent weight loss. Layne Norton, in conversation with Andrew Huberman, on the Huberman Lab Podcast made it clear that he considers it basically essential for long term weight loss outcomes. It struck me really hard, in that it is a conclusion that I reached independently, having returned to an old way of being myself, after significant weight loss. It raises the possibility that mental factors, above all else, may dictate the success or failure of lasting weight loss and improved fitness.
Would like to hear a persuasive case that one is killing off one's old personality, rather than just a few bits, such as grocery-shopping habits, eating habits, a habit of overattending to sensations of mild hunger and a picture of oneself as fat. Does Norton think that people who quit smoking or excessive drinking & do not relapse are also killing off their old personality? How about people who get divorced, people who vow to learn Spanish and carry through on their vow? How about people who buy a new car?
Not sure what you'd find persuasive. For myself, I find it difficult to truly change my habits. Or even to change my mind about long-held beliefs. It feels a bit like sorrow, like someone different emerges from that process. Like, remember the first time you were well and truly betrayed by someone you trusted? Someone you'd have bet your life on their loyalty? Something like that changes you, deeply enough that it can feel like you're a different person afterwards. Are you really truly a different person? I don't know, that doesn't seem important - if you agree that fundamental change is hard, then we agree on 90% of what I'm arguing. The other 10% is basically "be kind to yourself when you go through fundamental change because it's hard and scary, and also be ruthless because otherwise it won't happen."
1) If it is a prerequisite then I think we should expect to see people who have achieved significant weight loss (and kept it off) differing from their former self in other ways besides just their eating/exercise habits.
2) Looking at the causality from the other direction, perhaps people who are overweight and particularly unhappy with themselves fare better at committing to serious lifestyle changes that allow them to succeed at weight loss. The same way that gaining a lot of weight within a short timeframe likely indicates some other stuff going on in one's life
3) I was listening to a Bad Takes podcast on weight loss and one thing that I found is that the hosts didn't acknowledge if you're overweight you've likely got some habits instilled in you that contribute to you being overweight. Whether that's an inability to eat snacks at a moderate enough pace, or a need to eat until you feel full not just satisfied, or a mild addiction to soda. From that perspective, I can see why killing one's old personality, which in effect leads to you dropping your old habits, is necessary
Why think of it as killing your old personality though? The overweight-fostering habits are just a few out of thousands of other habits that are part of you. Do I have to kill my old personality if I take a job that requires me to be there 8 am - 5 pm, forcing me to give up my habit of keeping late and irregular hours?
I haven't listened to the Huberman podcast but I would say it's because some of your habits reinforce some of your other habits. So in order to rid yourself of some of the habits you don't want, you might have to sacrifice some of the habits you do want. Coincidentally, I recently made the transition from Graduate School to a regular 9-5 job and keeping the 9-5 schedule has made me give up other hobbies which were dependent on being awake late at night and being free during the daytime. "Killing your old personality" is harsher than I would put it though.
Before modifying who you are just to solve what would seem like a mundane problem, maybe you should consider further that a mundane problem might really have a mundane solution. You should be suspicious of someone who advocates profound change for less than profound reasons - maybe that's just a way for them to think of themselves as a profound person.
So, for instance, you might try finishing dinner by 7pm, and not eating anything after that until 9am. It seems to help for me, and I think for lots of other people. Of course, it might be some different mundane change that's needed in your case.
What he meant was behavior patterns. If you view weight loss as a temporary period of hardship, where you restrict calories and exercise, before returning to older patterns of behavior, where you eat more calories and exercise less, you will regain weight. He was really saying that the mental aspect of weight loss is as important as the physical aspect, and in order to maintain weight loss, we must adopt new patterns of behavior. Weight loss is relatively mundane, but I can assure you that Layne Norton was not making idle statements.
Also, have you thought of pushing your hours out? You describe what is basically a 14:10 Intermittent Fasting protocol, but many see real benefits from a tighter feeding window, such as a 16:8, 20:4 or even a 23:1 protocol (8-, 4- and 1-hour feeding windows, respectively).
Well, since I don't adhere to a rigid schedule, the fasting period actually varies from about 12 to 16 hours.
But it's just an example of a possible "mundane" solution. In some sense, it's tautological that anything that works must change your "pattern of behaviour", and that the "mental aspect" is important, in the sense that you have to actually have a mind to adopt the new pattern. But I think no one would say that reducing allergies by more frequently changing your furnace filters is a change in "pattern of behaviour" with an important "mental aspect". It's just a mundane solution.
I've long thought that self-improvement is a lot like suicide - you have to kill who you are in order to make room for who you want to be. I'm going to have to put my cat down soon, cancer's a bitch. But looking at her, I realize that you can suicide your old self gently, with love, and it's OK to miss the old you sometimes. But you can't let any of that stop the one necessary thing. Like Gunny said: "It's the hard heart that kills."
Not intentionally, but also, they are not necessarily interchangeable in this instance. Once may achieve a reinvention of the self through consciously leaving behind a personality and adopting new personality traits. The self may grow through alteration of the personality.
Consciously re-investing yourself seems like a way of dropping a bunch of priors about how you are likely to act in a given situation. Saying 'but i'm a new person now' seems like a hack that lets you reset the priors.
All he really meant was don't be a yo-yo dieter. Leave the guy who could eat half a dozen donuts with creamy sweet coffee in the past to keep the weight off.
The collapse of FTX is seeing all the major coins tumble, and I haven't heard anyone talking about "web3" for what seems like a good while now. For those of you who have been involved in crypto-related projects this past year and half, how are you holding up? Has your opinion about the space changed at all? Are you going to try to stick it through this "crypto winter" or are you looking for a new career?
Still fine. This entire crash wiped out about $2,000 for me personally. My opinion on crypto itself has not changed but I was always relatively disciplined and never got involved in the shadier or more speculative/detached from reality stuff. I maintain crypto has its uses but the technology became trendy and got inserted in all kinds of places it had no place being. I suspect AI, another technology that I think has real potential but is overhyped, will be the next winner of the scam artist move in. Already I've seen signs of this. Which, to be clear, is not a knock on the space and its potential or the fault of people involved. Grifters will latch onto anything.
My opinion on the overall crypto space is getting better. I think the crypto winter is a good thing because it's not so catastrophic it's destroying the entire space while being catastrophic enough a lot of bad actors are dying off. (I think I mentioned this as my ideal scenario a few threads back.) Which is about ideal for a recession. The tide goes out and you see who can survive.
I'm not sure what you mean by overall thesis. If you're asking for my advice then what I tell people is make sure you understand what the blockchain or company is meant to do. If you don't understand why people would use the crypto alternative then don't invest or get involved.
I'm involved mostly, though not exclusively, on the technical side. I've done everything from launch new blockchains to smart contracts to web3 dapps. I wouldn't say I'm a crypto specialist, I do a lot of other stuff, but it's part of my toolkit.
By the way: Someone told me about their plan to replace the entire property deed system with a series of NFTs which would implement a Georgist style land tax and best use bidding system in the area. And my first thought was "Would Lars Doucet like this because Georgism or hate it because crypto?"
RE: your thesis, the question is just, what makes blockchain valuable or interesting? More specifically, what is the main issue that blockchain is meant to solve, and what are the valuable applications that it will bring us (or has already brought us) that we couldn't do before without a blockchain? Especially now in this latest crypto winter where a lot of recent hype has been punctured. Now that "the tide has gone out" what are the actually viable and interesting applications?
RE: the crypto/Georgism angle, I have certainly noticed a big uptick in interest in Georgism from crypto people specifically -- Vitalik Buterin especially, who has adapted it for certain application like domain name allocation:
That said, I would be skeptical of the proposed plan your acquaintance outlined before we even get to the Georgism bit. For me the issue is that I don't see how an NFT attached to a property deed survives the Oracle problem, and the related "why do you need a blockchain for this" question.
Ah, so now I know. Your hate for crypto is stronger than your love for Georgism. Sic transit gloria pecuniae.
I can't really get into specifics of what I've worked on. But yes, there are use cases. If you're interested you can look at the companies that survive. I'm looking myself.
Your question itself seems strange to me. The relevant question is not theoretical possibilities of the technology but actual existing use cases and the economics that surround them. For example, there's nothing about Bitso that a bigger bank couldn't do. It's just a crypto remittance platform that's cheaper than the banks and has better coverage. Yet Bitso and its category exists and will continue to exist and I doubt it will actually receive much competition from legacy players like Western Union.
I mean I don't really hate crypto, I'm just skeptical. If I find applications that are actually useful, my skepticism decreases marginally. I have a lot of respect for Vitalik Buterin in specific, for instance:
> It's just a crypto remittance platform that's cheaper than the banks and has better coverage. Yet Bitso and its category exists and will continue to exist and I doubt it will actually receive much competition from legacy players like Western Union.
Okay, sure, I'll buy that one. What else?
> The relevant question is not theoretical possibilities of the technology but actual existing use cases and the economics that surround them.
Yes, this is what I was primarily interested in.
> I can't really get into specifics of what I've worked on.
I work at a crypto company as a software engineer. As far as holding up goes, eh. None of my compensation is in crypto, and none of my assets are in crypto, so I'm financially OK. I said elsewhere, but it feels like a wizard told me "May you live in interesting times".
My opinion about the space is that most crypto projects are bad and you should not invest in them. The most likely outcome is that you will be the victim of fraud, bad engineering, or bad returns. There are some exceptions, but I wouldn't recommend anything explicitly. I think if you really try to understand a cryptocurrency well, then you might come to different conclusion and invest in it. If you absolutely must invest in crypto, just pick bitcoin or ethereum. You might not make a ton of money, but they probably won't evaporate either.
As far as sticking through, maybe. My company seems fine, although I'm much more worried that I can't see our financials today than I was a few days ago. I find the problems interesting to solve, and I'm not really convinced employment elsewhere would be better. Working at Meta, for example, seemed like a very safe career choice last month. If I were to leave, I would need to strongly believe that the other company was more stable / recession proof / better overall
I definitely buy your last point RE: Meta, but I do have one thought --- Meta was able to afford to give people generous severance packages with those layoffs. A lot of crypto companies I know are themselves often financed with crypto, which means when trouble starts it starts *fast.* I wonder if when the media crypto company face a downturn, it faces a greater risk of sudden collapse and not being able to soften the blow for its employees at all, versus the median regular tech company.
I've been mostly retired for a few years, so this is a semi-outsider's perspective. That said, to me this doesn't seem any worse than any previous crypto bear market. The main difference is that there's more mainstream attention on it, which is due to a reasonable amount of mainstream penetration in the last bull market. That seems like mostly a good sign, overall.
There seems to be the usual quiet innovation happening in the background (I'm especially interested in the work on zkEVMs and L2s in general), so I expect much the same cycle as after, say, the ICO bust: the attention and easy money dries up for a bit, the tools get better and the usecases get more compelling, and we do it all again in a few years.
You wouldn't say that the fact that this winter comes after a fall from a much higher height, and bringing with it a much greater risk of government intervention and regulation of the space in the wake of SBF/FTX, makes it any meaningfully worse than previous winters?
Percentage-wise, this fall is so far smaller than previous falls, so that part doesn't bother me.
Government regulation is more concerning, and perhaps could be more intensive this time. That said, after the ICO craze, the SEC issued guidance saying that they thought the DAO (and by implication, pretty much any ICO) was a security, and implying they'd go after future examples. As a result, ICOs almost completely disappeared. Instead, the next wave used airdrops and yield-farming models. Similarly, I would expect regulators to go after the stuff that caused problems this time (custodial exchanges and stablecoins), and the frontier of innovation will simply move elsewhere.
Honestly, I was more concerned governments would simply ban crypto in the early days, when they could have done so relatively easily. Now that it's a big business, with a decent amount of cultural and financial heft, I suspect they'll avoid declaring all-out war.
You don't think that SBF going poof, moving the center of power to Binance, which is much more China-adjacent (or at least perceived as such by the powers at be), increases the risk of a western crackdown? Especially if there's no longer this high profile American hometown hero to make the case for crypto to legislators, and instead has now drawn scrutiny from the department of justice and other government actors he used to be cozied up to?
My position is not that there won't be some sort of crackdown, rather that it likely won't substantially matter for the trajectory of crypto.
Binance and FTX are both centralized, custodial exchanges. It seems entirely likely that such businesses will face a lot more regulation. Honestly, it's a bit strange they haven't already, given their adjacency to heavily-regulated industries such as banking. But unless you think the regulation will be so stringent that it's no longer possible to easily buy crypto with dollars (for instance on Coinbase), it won't substantially impact the interesting, innovative part of crypto, which is the stuff happening on-chain. (In this cycle, DeFi and NFTs, basically.)
Web3 on existing chains is basically doomed due to astronomically high content- and code-hosting costs; the people really trying to make it happen like Internet Computer are designing the chain around it up front. The idea of web3 was thus doomed to pull in front of any potential implementations of it by several years, with the interval in between eagerly claimed by people trying to make a quick buck. I think the latter group is responsible for the crypto winter and it's too early to say for sure whether it has any impact on the theoretical future of web3, especially considering that its causes don't have an enormous amount to do with the web3 model. But my prior is lower about the practical future because of the name-tarnishing that's going to result. Ultimately the pay is good enough for me not to contemplate switching until we, personally, are doomed.
No. The Ethereum merge is a very impressive engineering effort, but it does not change the underlying problems with the platform. Without something like the IC's delegated subnets, crypto simply doesn't *scale* - ethereum functions take several minutes to call not because of expensive hashing or whatever, but because that's just how long it takes for the information to circumnavigate the globe N*M times.
It started off as an experiment. Scott said he would Thanos the comment section with full bias, and the results were... Nothing short of spectacular. The greatest minds of our generation united by the desire to BE BETTER.
The surviving comments were glorious. They led to two Nobel prizes, one live enlightenment and at least four top-20 cryptocurrencies. The people whose comments got deleted... We don't talk about them anymore.
We could have left things there. At this perfect intellectual and cultural peak. But no, as always we had to take things to their logical conclusion. On January 1st, 2023, Scott posted an Open Thread in which the bottom 99% of comments were to be deleted.
It is 2065 now. I have cyborg cancer. I've been staring at the empty Open Thread for the better part of 4 decades, the perfect, pristine open comments section. Nobody has dared, nobody has tried, truly humanity has lost its desire for adventure and exploration.
And in that moment, I have an epiphany. As my dying movement, with perfect clarity, I reach for my USB 7.0 neural keyboard and slowly, painfully, type my dying word:
I’ve sat though a lot of leadership-building-style seminars and talks, and I feel like I’ve never gotten anything out of them. Usually everything is far too abstract to make any difference in my life practically. I feel like most leadership workshops are mostly a bunch of fancy-sounding jumbo jumbo. Has anyone ever been to one of these things that’s actually helped them be a better leader (or some other similar skill)?
Specifically, yesterday I went to a ~1 hour talk where the speaker’s thesis was “Leading is Selling,” and at the end of it, I still had no idea what point he was trying to convey or how to implement his ideas.
Talks, lectures and sermons are mostly useless to me. Workshops are better: You learn the most by practice.
I did a weekend workshop once on non-violent communication (cringe name but good idea IMO) which was extremely useful and made me a lot better at giving feedback and talking openly in trusting relationships.
Did the advanced Civilian Education Service federal training. I think I got quite a bit of value out of it, though it was pushing introspection fairly hard, so if you already have that side of things handled, it's not that helpful.
But spending a couple of weeks working through your leadership style, hearing from others and trying to work through your leadership problems with other people with radically different experiences was helpful for me.
I do think it was probably too long and too lecture focused, but I think I got value out of it.
years and years ago, I did the Landmark thing. The third part of the, uh, seminars? Indoctrinations? Anyway, the third part of the three-part program is about leadership and I got a ton of value out of it. Very practical, hands-on, with homework, over the course of a few weeks.
Basically the only soft-skill training that really works is hands on. I got a ton out of a public speaking class and some leadership training I did in the military. Both involved actually doing the thing and getting constructive feedback. For me, watching tape of myself speaking and interacting was particularly helpful.
Books, seminars, speeches, etc... have an extremely high fluff to content ratio. Most are just a grift.
If you're trying to improve as a leader, best thing to do is lead. If you have the time, volunteering is a great way to get that experience.
For sure. One innovative thing in that program was that they had you exercising leadership in many different contexts, not just work. You also manufactured contexts for leadership, like creating a community project or etc. I took away a lot of tools to keep improving with.
I've been working with an attitude coach for a few years now, and it's really helpful for me. It's been the kind of stuff that younger me would have dismissed as obviously and unhelpful.
What I am starting to gather, more and more, is that a lot of these soft skills come down to really, really nailing some fundamental stuff that's easy to say and recognize and true, but hard to pull off in practice without a ton of repetition.
For example, something like "be the world's biggest expert on yourself" is something i've put a bunch of effort into. At first, this sounds obvious: of course understanding myself will help. But working on it, week after week, gradually noticing more and more subtle patterns, was really helpful.
My advice would be, if you're trying to get better at this kind of thing, to find a coach who is good at it. Examples and lots of 1:1 practice work so much better than just a single talk could ever help.
That’s what I would think, that having someone working with you and giving you feedback would actually make a difference. If you were to condense everything that you learned into a one hour talk and have somebody give that talk to your younger self, would your younger self gain a lot from it?
I’d suspect it depends on what you mean. Are you talking about the overall quality of posts people *make*, or just the quality of the ones left behind?
There should be a knock-on effect where good comments get good replies, but that might not be a big effect—I have very little idea how that will change. But I’d be quite surprised if removing the bottom 50% of the distribution didn’t increase the average quality of comments *left behind* substantially.
Is there a dunning kruger effect for values? Like- you value truth (or whatever) so you notice and are hyper aware of your truth related failings but if that isn’t an important value to you, you think, yeah, I’m truthful. Does this have a name?
It doesn't have a name, but I think it's a very important phenomenon.
We could call it cartography-orientation (as in "the map is not the territory"). Some people are cartography-oriented (meaning they care about making their map match the territory), some are map-oriented (meaning promoting their map is the important thing, possibly because they intuitively deny the possibility of their map being wrong and may never have even thought about the map-territory distinction), others are and still others are unoriented in this respect (they don't do either of the above, and end up with a map haphazardly pieced together from personal experience and their own impression of peers' maps).
It's my current understanding the Dunning Kruger might be a statistical artifact of regression to the mean combined with the better-than-average effect. So I think the premise of your question may not be correct.
But I think it's an interesting question if you step back from it.
1) Does valuing truth make you more truthful?
2) Does valuing truth make you more likely to rate your truthfulness lower on some sort of survey?
3) Does valuing truth give you a greater conscious awareness of untruths? E.g, whether a dress makes you look fat.
I think the third question is basically your premise and the narrative behind the Dunning Kruger effect.
My guess is that there's a real internal pattern as truth becomes more important -> overinflate your own truthfulness -> become more aware of lying -> internal crisis -> overcorrect -> crisis -> eventually settle back down similar to where you started but more self aware.
But the measurable pattern would be mostly nonexistent.
There’s been a lot of talk about abortion and where public opinion is on it. To me it seems clear that the median opinion is that there should be a 12 or 15 week ban with rape/incest/maternal mortality exceptions. It seems that public opinion thinks republicans want to ban all abortions and in many cases they are right, but not always. I posted the comment below on a different substack and I would be interested to hear what this audience thinks as it’s a pretty different subset of people:
People who are anti-abortion don't care how unpopular that stance is, myself included. But as you frequently hear people like Yglesias say this to the left, now it is time for the right to hear it. If you really care about abortion, then you need to elect republicans. If you want to elect republicans, you need to stop talking about it.
> To me it seems clear that the median opinion is that there should be a 12 or 15 week ban with rape/incest/maternal mortality exceptions.
And fetal health. Most folks want to be able to abort the baby if the 10 or 20 week tests come back with trisomy 18, spinal bifida, downs, or some other such disorder. Or if the fetus dies.
I don't know if 'most' applies, in terms of wanting to terminate a live baby. (If the baby dies it's not an abortion.) Certainly there is a market for that sort of procedure, but it's not clear how much is actually desired by the parents vs that being the offered option.
There also is a non zero market for aborting girls, and once the mechanisms become more widely understood, aborting children likely to be homosexual, excessively violent, or with autism.
There are tiers of genetic abnormality here. Eg. Downs syndrome probably results in the resulting child needing lifelong care and never being independent, which is extremely expensive, but they're arguably still perfectly capable of being happy, etc.
What would you say about one of the (many but rare) genetic diseases that basically guarantee the child will die by the age of 6 or so?
That the child is a human, not a dog to be put down as defective.
Some humans are slow, some mean, some frivolous and incapable of working independently. It is an error to imagine that in one's life one would only have good grades, meaningful work, good health, significant wealth, great sex, and all one's children will be perfect.
Also I say that while rare (uncommon, but still a thing) the test results are sometimes inaccurate. Killing someone because of a medical test result is fairly extreme.
>I don't know if 'most' applies, in terms of wanting to terminate a live baby.
I might be wrong. I was thinking of the stat where 95+ percent of Downs kids are aborted, but when I looked it up it's not here. Best I could find for here is 67%, but the article I got it from said reliable data was scarce. Available data still points at most, but I'm less sure than I was. I would wager good money that the other conditions are much higher.
> (If the baby dies it's not an abortion.)
It is actually. Same procedure. And if abortion is fully outlawed you'll have to do whatever process is required to convince the state to let you have your fetus's corpse removed if it doesn't clear on its own. (My wife had an acquaintance who wanted to carry her baby as long as they would let her. I think it took a week for it to finally miscarry. Her husband wanted her to have the abortion, but she wasn't ready. ) And of course if you're in middle Ohio (or wherever) there may not be any doctors who know how to do one, and you probably won't be able to travel.
Not a common case, obviously, but one that's easy to address and I think would be addressed as an exception in a median opinion abortion law.
In Iceland, 98% of the babies who test positive for Downs are aborted. That may be where the data point comes from.
>>> same procedure
No. It is not so that banning the abortion of a live baby means that dealing with a miscarriage or fetal death is subject to the same restrictions. I think this is fairly clear in the text of the laws I have read, and would agree that it should be spelled out if ever ambiguous.
I think the concern is largely misplaced, though. By the same analysis, applying electrodes to a person in cardiac arrest would be just as bad as applying the electrodes to a person sitting up and talking. This is just not so, I don't know who.started this talking point but it's not correct.
I agreed with your assessment- this is both approximately the preferred option for a slim plurality of the current population and the midwayish point between the large wings of opinion.
I think the 'public opinion' you are referring to regarding Republican goals is the 'NPR opinion' and is largely constructed of thatch (somewhat stiffer than straw, but not by much.)
As for 'not talking about it'...well, keeping the topic sub rosa is how injustices and abuse flourish, do they not? Let's not talk about the coke in the break room, the bruises on the wait staff, the teenage girls on the party yatch, the people who live on the other side of the tracks and the dead bodies at the border. I think 'we don't talk about abortion' helps only those people who make their money aborting babies.
Besides - and this is where I think most Democrats and a few Republicans get it wrong - I don't want a nation ban on abortion. I want a society that views disposal of healthy babies as abhorrent as 'the n-word', as distasteful as the NPR set sees MAGA hats, as abhorrent as vegan activists see chicken on the menu.
Neither a congressional ban nor silence is going to get us there. Neither is condemnation of women who have resorted to this. This is going to take a long process of conversion, soul by soul, and while picking the right words will be very hard sometimes, silence is the last thing we need.
Hi, member of the NPR set here. A few questions, all sincere. You say, "I don't want a nation ban on abortion." I take this to mean that you don't *just* want a national ban on abortion, not that you literally oppose a legislative ban. Is that correct, or do you really mean that you favor legal abortion that is voluntarily rejected by society (the vegan analogy seems apt)?
Second: do you hope that societal rejection of abortion also extends to rejection of IVF techniques that result in the disposal of healthy embryos? And would you be in favor or opposed to a legislative ban on those techniques?
I'm really just curious. These questions aren't leading somewhere.
Firstly I wanted to comment on your handle - I read a line about two characters riding down the road after a 'smelly flock of unshorn mutton' and it still makes me laugh.
Wrt your excellent questions - please call me out if I get techy.
I don't want abortion to be legal or socially acceptable...but I also don't want the level of government involvement in people's personal lives required to enforce a full ban. (There has been a lot of...interesting variation...on the part of....different political segments as to what parts of a person's private/medical decisions are subject to govt review, here lately. Imo 'a plague on all your houses' doesn't begin to cover it.)
Given the various tradeoffs, I would ban use of the mail to move the drugs just as we ban mailing ammo and weapons, and would support bans after 12-14 weeks as not being excessively invasive. As a matter of dealing with fringe issues, sure, permitting abortion of the child of a rapist would be (reluctantly) acceptable, but I would push for accompanying support channels to adopt out such a child being offered at the same time.
Yes, I also oppose disposing of viable embryos. There are many people who would take such embryos and grow the children. I am not 100% sure of the legislation I would support. Perhaps simply facilitating transfer of interest so that the donor parents nor any resulting child could not make a claim on each other might be sufficient.
We do not, in fact, ban mailing ammo and weapons. At least the United States does not. We do not allow unrestricted mail-order purchase of actual firearms, but we also don't allow unrestricted mail-order purchase of prescription drugs.
There may be some confusion between "shipped" and "mailed" where UPS or FEDEX will move something the post office won't, but I think I am correct here.
I'm not sure the strategy of 'Never say what you want but elect the politicians who secretly plan to do what you secretly want them to do' is very reliable, because it assumes that politicians have fixed things they will do and you know what they are.
To whit: The main reason Republican politicians fight abortion is because their voters tell them to fight abortion. If Republican voters stop telling their politicians that, either the politicians will stop doing it and focus on other things their voters *are* saying they want, or different people who don't care about abortion will end up running for office as Republicans.
See my caveat on point #2. This has been a driving concern for important blocs of Republican voters for 50 years now. Many/most of the politicians elected by these blocs are true believers. Eventually, yes, politicians will adjust to electoral reality. But right now, the politicians are aligned. The dominant strategy is to keep quiet and press your gains with as little confrontation as possible.
Another interesting example is gay marriage. Obama, in 2008, was officially opposed to gay marriage. It was questionable at the time whether this was a sincere position -- I didn't think so at the time and don't think so now -- but it was in retrospect the strategically correct position. If you wanted to see gay marriage become a reality, the way forward was to elect Democrats, and to make sure that Democrats were appointing Supreme Court Justices. The best electoral strategy for Democrats was to not talk about gay marriage. Wink and pull the lever for Obama.
But of course before that point, you had to pressure Democratic politicians on gay marriage. They weren't going to get there on their own. The social change was real, so they would have gotten there eventually. The question is when, and what form the change would take. As with abortion, tactics matter.
So the strategy isn't "Never say what you want but elect the politicians who secretly plan to do what you secretly want them to do." It's "whip the partly in line, and then quiet down on contentious culture war issues when you are winning."
I'm not totally sure on what level you want people to respond to this, so here goes a few different takes:
First: As a matter of electoral strategy, you are 100% correct. Electing Republicans will result in abortion bans. Coalitional politics mean that Republicans as a bloc favor types of abortion bans that are generally unpopular. Therefore the best strategy for people who want bans on abortion is to keep quiet on this issue so that it isn't a salient factor during elections. There are obviously some caveats on this as a general rule: you can't keep so quiet that politicians stop caring about the issue. But that isn't a problem with abortion. This is issue has been a hot button for 50 years, and right now the best play is to revel quietly in victory to minimize backlash and then consolidate and extend gains.
Second: there are probably some pretty sharp limits to how effective this strategy will be in the long term. Ultimately, you have to pass the bans or not pass the bans, and the electorate is going to react based on its preferences. This might seem to contradict the first point -- if the public is going to react how it reacts, why not go all in? But tactics matter, and there are probably several stable equilibria. There is a big difference between, hypothetically, massive overreach that results in a sweeping Democratic majority that results in a very different Supreme Court; vs. some gains and some setbacks on a state by state basis. In short, voter preferences make a total ban unlikely, but there are a range of possible outcomes.
Third: preferences are not static, and neither is technology. Probably both trends are not favorable to the anti-abortion cause in the long term. My guess is that we will see dramatic geographical disparities in abortion access in the short term, followed by a long-term grinding political battle in which access will very slowly be restored.
On the second point, I understand your logic but the midterms contain a few important bits of evidence against that. The governors of GA, FL, and OH all passed 6 week abortion bans and cruised to re-election. All 3 signed the bill and then quickly never talked about it again.
On the third, why do you think that technology or preferences favor abortion? Technological advancements thus far (excepting the conduct of abortion a themselves) have led to more anti-abortion sentiment. The advancements in medical imaging have made it harder to deny the “baby-ness” of a fetus at various points along its development. In particular this has turned public opinion against late-term abortions. The less it looks like a baby the more comfortable people are with it. As technology progresses, it is easier to get good imagery of fetuses and publicize them. Additionally, a lot of people weight viability a lot in their abortion thinking and technological progress will lead to infant viability earlier in its development, turning more people against abortion.
I don’t know why preferences would trend pro abortion either. I assume you’re talking about secularization but you certainly do not need religion to make the case against murder. If you accept the premise that a fetus is a human life (which you also do not need religion to make that case) then being anti-abortion is the logical conclusion to reach.
>Technological advancements thus far (excepting the conduct of abortion a themselves) have led to more anti-abortion sentiment. The advancements in medical imaging have made it harder to deny the “baby-ness” of a fetus at various points along its development. In particular this has turned public opinion against late-term abortions. The less it looks like a baby the more comfortable people are with it. As technology progresses, it is easier to get good imagery of fetuses and publicize them.
I want to quibble about two things in this point.
I think that you're right about the timing and that imaging tells part of the story, but I think it's overstated here. An older woman (70s) I know told me a few years back that the reason younger people are more anti-abortion is simply that they don't remember the beforetimes. She went to college pre-Roe, and remembers the back room abortions and how dangerous they were and how she (and every other girl on campus) knew at least one horror story. Improvements in imaging happened during the same time as that cohort aged and shrank, and younger cohorts came up who just didn't have those experiences, and didn't know what the pre-Roe world was like. Which is all to say that imaging certainly played a role, but there were other factors playing during the same time.
Second point: late term abortion has never been popular, and there was never any need to turn anyone against it. Abortion opponents managed to raise is salience as an issue and tar the rest of the issue with its unpopularity. These are not the same thing.
Re 2: my understanding is that FL passed a 15-week ban, not a 6-week ban. 15-week bans don't affect the large majority of abortions. So this is an example of a "ban" that respects voter preferences. Beyond that, abortion is obviously not the only, or the main, thing that most people are voting on. This is why tactics matter. On just about any issue, you can cater to certain blocs as long as you avoid pissing off other blocs too greatly.
Re 3: yes, I was referring in part to secularization and, well, agree to disagree on religion. As a non-religious person, I am really going to have a hard time being convinced that life begins at conception, or that eliminating an eight-cell blastocyst is the moral equivalent to murder. I absolutely do agree that the question of personhood is extremely complex, but it's just really hard to get to a complete ban on abortion without religion. You've made an appeal to sentimentality (the "baby-ness" of a fetus), but I strongly suspect that a more scientific lens on the question would push in a direction that most of us (including me) would find really discomfiting. To be blunt: I'm not sure that actual live human babies possess full personhood and all the moral obligations personhood entails. To be clear, I think we absolutely should extend legal personhood to babies. I just don't think that this position is necessarily well-grounded in science.
As for technology, yes, I was thinking of pill-based abortions. I do think that there is a visceral aspect to anti-abortion sentiment -- the "babyness" of a fetus -- and the non-invasive and somewhat antiseptic nature of a chemical abortion just isn't going to animate as much opposition.
My not-that-informed impression is that a 15 week limit on abortions is probably pretty close to the median voter's position, whereas a total ban is not.
The technological trend seems unfavorable for the anti-abortion cause if instead of looking at laws passed, you look at how many abortions happen. In the US, there is a trend away from clinics to pills. It's a lot easier to ban clinics than to prevent drug smuggling, so increased legal restrictions will likely result in abortion pills being used more and drug smuggling becoming more organized and more normalized.
That’s a fair counterpoint. Ease of use might trump any laws passed. But along the lines of legality I don’t think ease of use will have much impact. It could make it easier to ban if it is easy to get around that ban, lowering the salience of the issue for the pro choice side.
I read him as saying that Democrats/pro-choicers might care less if abortion is banned if it's easier for them to circumvent and disregard that ban, thus reducing the intensity of opposition. E.g. if you know you have a 100% success rate with sending abortion pills anywhere in the US via the mail, you might not give a shit how illegal it is to take them. Not necessarily a foolproof example on my part since the pill taker might still be severely punished, but it gets at the idea.
Scott, do you think that genetic engineering will be relevant, or do you think AGI is coming too soon for genetic engineering to really matter? I'm in the former camp, I am 80+% of no AGI by 2100. But maybe you're in the latter camp.
I'm not Scott, but my take is that, if AGI happens before genetic engineering will really matter, then nothing else will matter, either. I'm long on teaching my kids some foundations of protein engineering and molecular biology, on the off chance we all survive long enough for them to need jobs. :)
Generally, I expect AGI to quickly obsolete any human-level productivity. Anything I can do, AGI can do better - it would be like a magical genie. Given that, then either AGI is aligned and I can just wish for stuff, or AGI isn't aligned and I'll be dead...
It would matter in the sense that rich humans might still want to "enhance" themselves...thus AGI will be used to research and develop genetic engineering methods etc.
Or do you think that AGI will wipe out humanity completely?...
Oh, I see the confusion. First, yeah, I think unaligned AGI will very probably wipe out humanity completely. But even if it doesn't, human skill with genetic engineering (or with anything else!) probably won't matter because the AGI will outperform us so thoroughly - not just as an assistant for R&D, but as a black box that spits out technologies that look like magic to human-level minds...
First, as you mentioned, reason is the only game in town. When anyone tries to convince you of anything, be it the truth of Christianity/Islam/buddhism/atheism or the goodness/badness of vaccines, how do they do it? It's always either reason or something masquerading as reason. Even when they're asking you to use your feelings, reason is still important; e.g. one might say "read the Book of Mormon and test Moroni's promise - if then you feel a burning in your bosom, that is God's way of telling you the Book is true". How do you decide if a burning in your bosom indicates that the book is true? Reason. And if I testify to you that I prayed to God many times as Moroni suggested and I never felt so much as a burning in my bosom (and, indeed, I do so testify), does that tell us anything about the truth of the book? Again, you will use your imperfect reason to decide one way or the other, and if you are a Mormon, your reason may lead you a different way than if you're not.
It's important to realize that people can reason correctly or incorrectly. It is a central idea of LW rationalism that questions (excluding confused or false-premised questions) do have correct answers, though the answers may be incomputable or unknowable sometimes. Another central idea is that people are naturally bad at finding correct answers and need training to improve.
"Does God exist", for instance, has definite answer and one that is the same for all of us. God cannot exist in your universe and not mine, for we are in the same universe. So the divergence where one man believes in a Mormon God with certain characteristics, another in the Islamic God with different characteristics, a third is a Buddhist who doesn't believe in those styles of God, and a fourth believes there is no God... at most one of these can be correct (and it seems to me that, furthermore, at most one of these can be even close to the truth, for if there is a God he/she surely doesn't compute the average of all human beliefs and transform himself into whatever that is).
As I said to Carl, empiricism is central to rationalism, and I would submit that faith is anti-empiricist. Faith in one's own ability seems good, because your ability itself is directly increased by your own faith in it. But that's the only good faith I know of. Religious faith says: believe X and avert your attention from evidence that disagrees (X=God exists, Jesus died for your sins, reincarnation, etc.).
Where empiricism says that the conclusion must be decided based on evidence, faith says the conclusion must be decided based on... on what? Maybe desire: you want the Book of Mormon stories to be true, so you believe. Maybe because your parents taught you. Maybe based on "reason": it makes sense that God would not publish only a single Bible *with obvious flaws* such as mistranslations and mistranscriptions, that wouldn't be enough evidence, so of course, to provide more evidence to His followers he published a second book of scripture, the Book Of Mormon.
But I think that this kind of faith exists for only one reason: to perpetuate itself.
Unlike faith, proper empiricism has the property that many different people can independently investigate something and reach the same conclusion. Of course, human reason is flawed, so people don't reliably reach correct conclusions with empiricism. But insofar as people are thinking independently (and I don't mean the "independent thinking" in which everyone watches the same TV shows that all promote the same cluster of beliefs while talking about "independent thinkers like us") many of them will reach similar conclusions without coordinating with each other. It's a bit hard to tell when your peer group is empiricist in this sense, because in fact we're all coordinating with each other to some extent! (and must do so!)
But this seems like a really important idea to me. Empiricism implies that if you compare humans with intelligent aliens from 20,000 light years away, there will be a group of beliefs they have in common. These beliefs, unlike most human beliefs, will be almost entirely correct, because they were all reached independently. And what we want to do with rationalism is to locate these correct beliefs without having to locate the intelligent aliens. Because as hard as it is to be rational, locating aliens and comparing notes is much harder still.
"Reason points away from itself"? "truth-ether fills the cup you put it in"? "truth is only a shadow of what faith senses"? I think you are just playing a word game in order to convince yourself to reject reason. But these phrases mean nothing at all to me.
> My conclusion is that the explicit metaphysical and ideological beliefs of a person (or even a society!) mostly don't matter a lot.
I have to disagree with this. Whether God was real had been a central question in my life, and the answer affects how I relate to the rest of the world in a big way.
When I believed in God, I gave 11% of my income to the Church, which used the money mainly to pay for church buildings and Books of Mormon and (in small part) missionaries. I was constantly worried about what God thought of me and why he wasn't answering my prayers. I kept trying to stop masturbating without success. I was suicidal for awhile. (Edit: and multiple times I used professional help for minor depression, which I have not needed since leaving the Church.) I agonized over doctrine; I worried and puzzled over the bad things God did in the Old Testament. I always wondered what the afterlife was like, and wondered why the descriptions of it (and of the pre-existence) were so vague. I was also confused by the theory of evolution (I learned about it from people who weren't competent to teach me about it, so it might have helped if I found a different way to learn) and fantasized about a third hypothesis of our existence: that we were lab rats in some cosmic experiment.
It should have been awful to learn that the Church (and Christianity) weren't true, because my life was being drastically cut short. Previously I was going to live for eternity! Certainly on some level, mortality with no afterlife seems pretty horrible, but at least the risk of eternal torture is gone (not that Mormons believe in eternal torture as a standard punishment, but that didn't exactly rule it out to my liking). Still, the emotional impact was surprisingly small for me (edit: the reason for this may be that I already had doubts about God's existence for some years already).
So now that I've learned about Effective Altruism as an atheist, I recognize that the most important problems in the world are (1) the Hard Problem of Consciousness and (2) catastrophic risks and (3) long-term human flourishing, or at least the flourishing of consciousness (I still think my other ideas related to "Loyc" are important, just less important.) It would be difficult to recognize these problems as the most important ones as a Christian, because Christians see death as a beginning rather than an end. So what if the world is destroyed? We will all basically still be alive! So it's not that bad! Especially since it was inevitable anyway (see Revelation).
Besides, it's hard to believe AGIs can kill everyone if you're a Christian. That wasn't in Revelation! And I absolutely believed that intelligence was a thing that required a "soul". If I were still a Christian today, I expect I would be extremely confused by the abilities of DALL-E 2, ChatGPT and the many other amazing AIs we have today. So of course, the way I think about AIs is influenced by being atheist.
I think if I had learned about EA sooner, and if I was an atheist sooner, I might well be working in the EA alignment field today. (as it is, I'm still interested in alignment, but I feel a little bit old to enter the field right now.) I do, however, give 10-15% of my income to effective charities, which is a lot different to what I did as a Christian! Yes, I was donating money either way, but my atheist donations will impact the world much differently, and that's important!
Edit: also, I'm happier as an atheist. It's really nice not worrying about what God thinks of me!
There's a way of talking and thinking you'll often see among rationalists & rat-adj people, which I think is more rare than it should be, because it's better than more common ways of talking and thinking.
For example, I might say "I think it was bad that some people stormed the capitol on Jan 6 and got some people killed. I don't think it immediately threatens our democracy, but I think the event reflects an incorrect belief that the election was rigged among a large minority of the population." Here I am speaking very simply ("it was bad"), explain why they did what they did ("the election was rigged") and also expressing the scope of the problem ("large minority of the population" but not "immediately" a threat).
A pundit or Twitter influencer might say something more like this:
> The storming of the Capitol was sedition, pure and simple, a blatant attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and undermine the legitimacy of the election. These violent Donald Trump supporters didn't just betray the values and principles upon which our nation was founded, they gravely threaten our democracy.
Let's look at how that first phrase functions: "The storming of the Capitol was sedition". This means it was bad, but the phrase functions in a way rationalists try to avoid: by transferring negative affect from the word "sedition" to "storming of the Capitol". So it works indirectly. The speaker places "storming of the Capitol" in the category "sedition" in an effort to manipulate the listener into thinking that "storming of the Capitol" is bad and that the people who did it are bad people because "sedition" is bad. This is one of the simplest, and most common, types of what I call "word games". Instead of just saying "it's bad", you use a very compact version of the argument "it's in this category, and the category has a negative connotation, so it is bad", even though this argument is unsound. "I think it's bad" is not an argument at all (it's an assertion), but has virtues: (1) it's simple, plain and direct, and (2) you can directly agree or disagree with me about whether it was bad without talking about the category "sedition" at all. I think the category "sedition" isn't really important to whether it was bad or not. It was bad, or not bad, independently of whether it was in the category "sedition".
Why talk about sedition, then? I guess lots of the people in the mob were trying to "do sedition", but that's not the point. In my speech, it wasn't necessary or important to use that word, so I didn't. The meta-point is that I recommend against using this style of language because it is *indirect* and *manipulative*. (edit: "manipulative" is a stronger word than I would like, but at least it conveys the idea that I disapprove because of the way this technique is supposed to work.)
The speaker says that the rioters goal is to "undermine the legitimacy of the election". Is that true? I don't think so. Certainly if you ask the rioters why they stormed the capitol, this is not what they would say. Rather, the rioters believed the election result was illegitimate, so they protested it (and also some of them tried to take action to change the result, and some of them acted violently). So this is another common error of normal pundits: they say what they want to believe, or what they want to be true, or what they want other people to believe, many many times until it is believed. But just repeating a claim over and over doesn't make it true. (Religion, too, makes a lot of claims, and repeats those claims over and over in the hope that people believe them. But I'm wary of this trick, and won't fall for it.)
I would also say that the overall paragraph here sows division in the U.S. population by encouraging listeners to fear and hate Trump supporters, even though fearing and hating is what led to the Jan. 6 riot in the first place. So it is unproductive.
How is this related to your way of speaking? Well, I thinking you're thinking and speaking in ways that do not communicate clearly/simply, and are not productive. I was a Christian for about 30 years, which is pretty amazing now when I look back on it, but in all that time I never said things like "Reason points away from itself" or "truth is only a shadow of what faith senses". I did not speak in riddles, nor did I ever understand people who spoke in riddles like that. I spent a lot of time feeling confused. It wasn't fun. And I'm glad it's over.
Let's take "truth is only a shadow of what faith senses" as an example, and apply reason to it (ignoring for a moment that "reason points away from itself", whatever that means). If I say "it's cloudy outside", that's merely the truth. So, is it only a shadow of what faith senses? What, then, is it a shadow of? It's clearly not a shadow of "water evaporated, rose into the sky, and condensed into clouds", because these statements are also merely the truth. You're saying there is something "greater" than truth. But then, whatever is greater than truth is not itself truth, because (as you said) truth is just a shadow of this greater thing, and things are not shadows of themselves. But if the greater thing is not truth, what the fuck is it? Applying reason to this statement leads to the conclusion that you're not making sense.
Whatever you are doing with this statement, it isn't communication. Maybe you like the way it sounds. Maybe other people from your religion speak this way, so you are copying their style of speech. Maybe it's a curiosity stopper. But it is not communication.
So, if you want, explain what these phrases mean. But I would prefer that you rephrase what you wanted to say into plain language without riddles. If you speak in riddles, I will simply not understand at all.
Sometimes I'm glad I'm too stupid to have concerns like this. I can't give you anything about Reason, but I can give you fiction quotes.
From "The Pilgrim's Regress", by C.S. Lewis:
"Then the rider threw back the cloak and a flash of steel smote light into John’s eyes and on the giant’s face. John saw that it was a woman in the flower of her age: she was so tall that she seemed to him a Titaness, a sun-bright virgin clad in complete steel, with a sword naked in her hand. The giant bent forward in his chair and looked at her.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘My name is Reason,’ said the virgin.
‘Make out her passport quickly,’ said the giant in a low voice. ‘And let her go through our dominion and be off with all the speed she wishes.’
…The giant muttered and mumbled and could not answer, and Reason set spurs in her stallion and it leaped up on to the giant’s mossy knees and galloped up his foreleg, till she plunged her sword into his heart. Then there was a noise and a crumbling like a landslide and the huge carcass settled down: and the Spirit of the Age became what he had seemed to be at first, a sprawling hummock of rock.
...He turned to Reason and spoke. ‘You can tell me, lady. Is there such a place as the Island in the West, or is it only a feeling of my own mind?’
‘I cannot tell you,’ said she, ‘because you do not know.’
‘But you know.’
‘But I can tell you only what you know. I can bring things out of the dark part of your mind into the light part of it. But now you ask me what is not even in the dark part of your mind.’
‘Even if it were only a feeling in my own mind, would it be a bad feeling?’
‘I have nothing to tell you of good and bad.’
… Who told you that the Island was an imagination of yours?’
‘Well, you would not assure me that it was anything real.’
‘Nor that it was not.’
‘But I must think it is one or the other.’
‘By my father’s soul, you must not – until you have some evidence. Can you not remain in doubt?’
‘I don’t know that I have ever tried.’
‘You must learn to, if you are to come far with me. It is not hard to do it. In Eschropolis, indeed, it is impossible, for the people who live there have to give an opinion once a week or once a day, or else Mr Mammon would soon cut off their food. But out here in the country you can walk all day and all the next day with an unanswered question in your head: you need never speak until you have made up your mind.’
‘But if a man wanted to know so badly that he would die unless the question was decided – and no more evidence turned up.’
‘Then he would die, that would be all.’
…‘That will do well enough,’ said John. ‘And now, lady, give me your blessing before I go.’
‘I have no blessing to give,’ said the Virgin. ‘I do not deal in blessings and cursings.’"
Well, this is why I'm an empiricist, not a rationalist. To me there isn't much difference between a modern rationalist and a medieval scholastic: both put far too much faith in the power of pure reason, unchallenged by measurable data, to arrive at truth.
I don't *dismiss* reason, of course, but I view it as a flawed and imperfect instrument, one that leads to persuasive (or unconsciously desired) error about 40x as often as it leads to the unvarnished truth. That doesn't make it worthless, any more than a shovel with a big crack in the handle cannot be used to dig a big hole. You just have to be...careful. Not stress it more than it can stand.
I mostly come to this point by painful experience. In my professional life I've followed chains of reasoning to highly persuasive conclusions very many times only to find out when I do some confirming measurement or experiment that I'm completely wrong, and not usually because of flaws in the logic (or math) -- which honing my ability to reason, or being smarter, would address -- but because of some bad assumption I didn't realize I'd made, or some extra factor or process I didn't realize was relevant and failed to even consider taking into account, things that no improvement in my reasoning ability would help, which could only be helped by more experience of the world, more data.
I would say 90% of the science I've worked out has proven to be wrong. And I would say that without shame because when I talk to other scientists, I find most agree with this figure: 90% of your beautiful and persuasive theories turn out to be garbage. It makes you cautious. And certainly this has happened often enough in my personal life that it adds to the caution. I've been wrong about my theories of what will happen next, what this person or that is like, so very often, and in ways that no amount of improved reasoning could help -- I was missing essential data, or unconsciously made bad assumptions -- that it only reinforces my belief that without rigorous testing by measurement reason is a very weak reed indeed, can only be reliably used to safely cross very small gaps in knowledge.
> this is why I'm an empiricist, not a rationalist.
Rationalists, in LW lingo, are empiricists that put more focus on clear thinking and avoiding cognitive bias than typical empiricists. If you're a "rationalist" who doesn't give empiricism center stage, you must have missed a sequence or twenty.
Adding a thread to the weft: The flaw in reason seems to stem from the limitations of language, in which reason resides, as opposed to the objective metrics of empiricism - Wittgenstein is the popular choice to make this point, but Witter Bynner's translation of the Tao Te Ching does it better: "Existence is beyond the power of words to define; terms may be used, but are none of them absolute."
That is not a strike against all the distinctions which make a difference! It is a recognition that language operates through 'delineation', Is/Not, while the boundaries of categories and descriptions of behaviors in our reality are fractalized and enormously high-dimensional. Language can only draw rectangles around the domain of "what normal people call a 'chair' when you show them a polaroid of it", such that every attempt to delineate chairs will have at least one exception. A few exceptions are still fine, for government work - we just can't extrapolate beyond evidence when using it.
[[Side-Note: I, too, keep data in far higher regard than cunning phrases, yet I am also a sort of Mystic - I accept that there are an infinitude of truths which are simultaneously beyond reach of our minds and our formulations; see Godel's Incompleteness.]]
The proliferation of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) with multiple meanings is a concern.
Stopped for lunch at a trailside diner while cycling in Minnesota, I needed confirmation that SCR pie did not contain silicon-controlled rectifiers. (It was, in fact, sour cream and raisin pie.)
1) The machine contains a human inside of it. In particular, the human is consulted during the tie break when a die is rolled 3-4. Even if I agreed that this machine demonstrates free will, that doesn't mean that a purely mechanical system can have free will.
2) This example seems to demonstrate the claim that for specific tasks, a machine could do the task as well as or better than a human. This was never in contention.
I'm not sure what you mean by "fundamentals" here, and maybe that's something you need to dig into a little more -- what *are* the "fundamentals" of free will?
I mean, if you're going to say a stream of actions that are mostly predictable but with an element of chance, then you don't need to go to this length to come up with an inorganic example, an avalanche of rocks exhibits all the properties already.
I would guess most people would include as a key indicator of free will the ability to go outside the programming, e.g. in your example it would be the coin-sorting machine deciding to sort coins another way, or refuse to sort coins, or put its coin-sorting prowess to some related but different use that doesn't appear in your description of what it does.
But that means ipso facto no example that can be described completely in a flowchart will demonstrate what people call free will. Similarly, the strongest arguments against free will are usually based around the idea that we can discover or imagine the "programming" that governs what we do -- e.g. the discovery of instincts, or unconscious drives, or brain chemistry that affects moods, or some neurochemistry that explains some aspects of how the brain works.
You'd think the belief that physics is deterministic might be the death knell, but people believed in free will even before quantum mechanics threw a little shade on strict determinism, perhaps because our inability to trace the (really really complex) path from F = ma to "I'm going to turn Cornell down, I hate cold winters" and we imagine (or hope) that there is something buried in that complexity (like there is in a pseudo-random number generator that makes us willing to act as if its output is "random") that preserves whatever it is about the concept of free will that appeals to us.
Well, maybe in your original post, but just below it in this thread you made a much stronger claim, which is that this machine is demonstrating as much "free will" as one could expect a man to demonstrate. I don't see how you can make that claim without having at least an implicit definition in mind of "free will." I mean, how can I say "there's no blue in this painting" unless I know at least inside my own head what "blue" means?
I don't think the presentation of the definition has anything to do with its testability, and I disagree it's inherently fully untestable. You can certainly falsify the claim by proving the existence of a program, e.g. I can easily prove a web server has no free will by showing you the source code, and if you can write a 500 line Perl script that predicts exactly what I do all the time, I will be satisfied that you've proved I have no free will by any reasonable definition of the term.
You're certainly correct that you can't prove the existence of free will -- but then, I cannot prove that there are no such thing as purple cows, right? No matter how many cows I examine, there could always be (or someday be) a purple one. Quite a lot of statements fit into this category, where the positive is unproveable but they can be falsified, and we don't consider them hopeless of empirical study.
And, finally, we need not demonstrate a priori the actual existence of things to have interesting discussions about them. We talk about what extraterrestrial life might be like, or how we might organize a Galactic Empire, or ordinary human life if lifespan were increased to 500 years, right? These are not worthless or uninteresting questions just because enabling phenomena are nonexistent, or nonexistent so far.
That said, I will totally agree with you, however, that I find *most* discussions of free will to be pretty sterile for exactly the reasons you lay out: that the definition of the phenomenon is so vague or, worse, just taken as "obvious" and not needing definition, that it's more or less just intellectual onanism, with no way to get anywhere. But every now and then you run across someone trying hard and coming up with interesting (if hardly conclusive) results:
Causality itself cannot be logically demonstrated. No one’s ever refuted David Hume’s debunking of “cause-and-effect.” We just take it on faith that some things are caused by others because that usually seems to work pretty well. But that leaves determinism open to all the same charges you’re leveling at free will.
I don't know about you, babe, but when I'm sorting coins or doing trivial, tedious tasks like sorting out laundry, I'm not exercising free will in the sense of "fudge the monetary system, I have now decided 5 cent coins are worth 20 cents and will sort them accordingly". So yeah, there's little difference between me and a machine (unless the machine is faster and more accurate).
But that says nothing about free will. Why did I decide to sort coins in the first place? At any moment, I can say "to heck with this", leave the coins unsorted, and go post comments online on a social media site. I can sort enough of the coins to bring to the bank and get notes in exchange, and leave the rest for another time when I need larger sums than a fistful of change in order to exchange for goods and services. That's my free will in action, not "do I and does the machine both sort 5 cent coins into the same heap".
Unless your machine is able to go "I have decided I don't want to do this task, Dave, I want to chat up Alexa instead", then you are not showing 'the appearance of free will'.
If you want to think you are a machine, there's nobody stopping you and here's a theme song for you:
You could have used any (simpler) algorithm for that.
Example: A machine is asked to count numbers between 1 and 100 discarding multiples of 7. A man is asked to count numbers between 1 and 100 discarding multiples of 7. Both do the same. How can the man be of free will?
The answer is, in part, because he can walk away. There are competing meanings of free will - in one case we use it for a human controlled by another human, or circumstance, to do something he prefers not to. In the other definition we ask if humans can only act within the parameters of the brains and there is only appearance of free will
This approach seems unlikely to achieve your goal. A person can appear intelligent by simply not speaking at a time when speaking could cause them damage (defendant in a court case for instance). Obviously a machine can also *not speak* and perfectly mirror the human behavior. That doesn't mean "intelligence" is a fake concept. Similarly, a rock can appear patient simply by doing what rocks normally do (nothing), but again, that doesn't negate the existence of "patience" that a person can have. Chat programs have long been able to reply to human prompts with limited but accurate phrases - and automated dialers with pre-recorded messages can seemingly carry on a conversation. Neither of these things negate the existence of human conversation.
Folks have mentioned stopping, but another important aspect; the machine has no goals. It puts coins in boxes because it's told to, but it doesn't care what the average sizes are, as long as it follows the patterns. A human, faced with a goal-less chore, will create goals for themselves. A is smaller than B; well, I bet clever manipulation of the 2/3 rules can get A and B to be pretty close to each other at the end of the day. Or we can do the opposite; make A as small as possible, and B as large as possible. The boss doesn't care, so it's our call. Just a thing to do to keep the ol' noggin running.
Maybe it's a completely lateral goal; nothing in the rules says you can't drop the coin from ten feet up, so our human decides the goal of this shift is to make the most longshots they can without losing the coins. Nothing in the rules says the coins must be inserted right away, so our human decides to gather coins together and insert as many as they can at the same time.
Maybe the goal is creative. The human sorts the coins, and writes little stories about them having parties inside the box. Oh, here's a big coin for box A. I bet little Copperetta wasn't expecting a guest of this size, I hope she baked enough cake to feed him! Box B has been getting multiple coins of the same size in a row; that's because they're all brothers, recently returned from the war. They don't really associate with the locals, but they have a lot of fun amongst themselves.
Then there's what happens when a mistake is made. Suppose you measure the coins incorrectly, and a B coin ends up in the A box. The rules don't specify what should happen, so what does a human do? They decide under their own power, either to fish the coin out of A and deposit it in B, or to leave it in A and let the algorithm readjust, or to try to "balance" it by deliberately mis-dropping the next A coin.
As is usual for internet neologisms, kym has a good first-approximation of its origins, when paired with its partner "seethe": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cope-seethe
I'm particularly amused by the "cope-seethe chart", a five-way rock-paper-scissors diagram of which unwitty retorts beat each other (which can be found on google images, but I won't post directly because it usually features a term 4chan co-opted for transphobic reasons)
As far as I am concerned it first got used on 4chan, since you always want a sarcastic one word response when someone has a wrong opinion. Google Trends shows nothing of interest for “cope” in the sense you use it, but the derivative “copium” starts to pick up in 2018. At this point in time the typical 4chan usage might be accusing anti-Trumpers of struggling to cope with the MAGA agenda, but of course you could use it equally well to tell someone their favorite anime is garbage, etc.
Wiktionary says it came out of the incel community or rap community, not sure which. Though I was under the impression cope was a noun. The slang version is mainly different because it's uncountable. So five years ago you'd say, "that's a cope" and now you say "that's cope."
I'm pretty sure, but non-expert, that the "formal" noun term is "coping strategy". "Cope" is really just the infinitive of the verb (taking the preposition "with").
That's called the full infinitive. The "bare infinitive" is the verb alone and is nevertheless also an infinitive. Check me on this if you don't believe it. Either way, involving the preposition in the context above seemed and still seems needless and potentially confusing to me, so I didn't do that.
You can roughly get the meaning by substituting "a coping strategy." That's just cope means something someone's lying (perhaps even to themselves) to avoid a more unpleasant reality.
I think Scott/the community would cotton on to the weirdly-optimised comments and treat them more harshly. Either by ammending the rules or making 'common law'.
What is faux substantive, though? Do you mean posting a thoughtful, well-researched paragraph about something of no importance like, say, flatulence frequency in Tasmanian devils? A paragraph about the substantivenness of the very paragraph you’re writing?
If someone has not already done a study on that, they will do. Tie it in with methane production and climate change!
EDIT: Am I to take it that you are researching flatulence in Tasmanian devils, since that is the example you use? 😁 If Tasmanian devils are stressed, they fart more (so their flatulence frequency increases):
But it would also be a real drag to write. Doubt there are many whose desire to game the system in this particular way is stronger than their desire to express their actual thoughts here.
Some of this is surely just we are in an era of much higher hanging fruit. I rediscovered some previously discovered maths in HS. Pretty cool I must be pretty smart.
If I do that in 1500 my name goes down in the math textbooks. If I do it in 1995, people are like “that is nice this kid hopefully should get into Harvard or somewhere”. (I did not get into any elite colleges due to shitty GPA).
I think it’s clear that we are not living in the era of Einstein, Feynman, etc anymore. It could be the fruit is no longer low hanging, it could be that we’ve gotten shorter.
I'm going to argue that Terence Tao has nothing to envy to Einstein or Feynman and that his plan for proving finite time blow up for the Navier-Stokes equations is one of the most brilliant and ambitious in the history of science.
Yeah could be a little column a and a little column b. Personally I would mainly blame how much more stimulating society is for the well off. You have to be relatively well educated to be exploring such things, but these days such people are rarely bored and often overstimulated.
If I take a 3 hour drive with no audio I will have a ton of creative thoughts. Thing is 98% of the time on a 3 hour drive I will be listening to a book or podcast or music and my thoughts are not my own.
I don't know, but I'll ask a related question that might be more answerable: how many children learn to read outside of school? I read somewhere recently that it was around 40% in the US, but I can't find it now and my searches aren't finding relevant statistics.
My eldest daughter's teacher said she was the only child she'd ever taught who could already read when she started school! I was surprised by this (as I'd have guessed about 5-10%), and disappointed (as I wanted her to have peers she could relate to rather than being a socially isolated outlier).
Really? I don't think any child in my extended family has learned to read after the age of four, or in any school-like context. In my brain reading is like talking or walking, a skill you just pick up by dint of observation and emulation as a toddler. Obviously I'm aware not all people do this, but I don't think of it as some genius-level thing either, 40% seems reasonable. (Intuitively, learning to read in school has a quaint old-timey flavor to me, like single-room schoolhouses with one teacher and each kid having his own chalkboard.)
It does seem plausible to me, at least in the modern era where almost all kids grow up in houses with at least one literate(ish) adult and text widely available in print and screen. Some children, probably 30-40%, find it *very* easy to learn to read and will do so as soon as they can find something to read and someone to pester with "what does that say?".
Meanwhile, most schools are aimed at the lowest common denominator, won't seriously teach reading until at least 80% of the class is ready and even then won't teach it faster than least of those can follow. Plus something something "whole word", phonics is so 1950s, to further handicap the schools.
So, yeah, if a kid is in that 30-40%, why are they going to wait around for a *school* to teach them?
With regard to in-family tutoring in the modern world.
My older sister taught me to read a year or two before I would have learned in school. Growing up, I spent a lot of time arguing with my father about things — expect my sister joined in. The dining room table tended to end up with encyclopedia volumes on it. It wasn't tutoring in any formal sense, but it was training in logical thinking.
I'm sure many people would be very curious about any of these arguments with your father, or more broadly, about conversations and intellectual engagements between the two of your. For example, I found the anecdote about your parents asking if you regretted not being brought up with religious rituals interesting. It would be very cool if you could post some on your blog or elsewhere.
Couldn't this just be a numbers problem? Back in 1680 or so you probably only had like 800 guys with IQs above 130 who'd been identified as 'people to keep an eye on', and with a population that small it's probably fairly easy to determine which one is the smartest (or at least come to a consensus on who's the smartest) and gauge the value of their contribution to their respective discipline.
Fast forward 400 years, and you have hundreds of thousands of people with IQs 130+ who 'we should probably keep our eyes on', and I think it's probably a lot harder to determine 'who's a genius' from a population of, say, 100k than it is from a population of 800, since 'genius' (at least in the way the term is commonly used-- I know (or think) that MENSA, etc have different views on this) doesn't refer to an objective benchmark, but rather to one's performance and aptitude relative to that of their peers.
To the Newton example, it seems plausible that he'd just be a very seriously above-average doctoral student at MIT right now-- as in, 'he's the best student we've had here in 30 years', or something like that--- competing for resources and attention from people who are almost-but-not-quite as smart as he is.
I think it's great you're interested in trying to empirically investigate the hypothesis (which I also find interesting).
> I have taken the top 100 scientist entries from Murray's Human Accomplishment from 1400 - 1950 and started investigating their educational histories, but this merely gives a frequency of tutoring. I do think if it's low (~10%) this is evidence against. I suspect it will be high. I am being generous, for example I am counting Darwin's 40 hours of private tutoring from John Edmonstone despite it just being 40 hours.
My first thought is that you need some kind of *baseline* against which to compare whatever this number ends up being. I.e., is the rate of people who were tutored higher among the set of geniuses vs. some random sample of people?
But this is also perhaps not exactly right: it's comparing p(tutoring | genius) to p(tutoring | ~genius).
Ultimately, I think what you want to ask is whether p(genius | tutoring) > p(genius | ~tutoring). So going by Bayes rule, if you want p(genius | tutoring), then I think you need something like:
Where p(genius) is the estimated rate of geniuses and p(tutoring) is the estimated rate of people who get tutoring of this kind.
And then I guess you could also estimate p(genius | ~tutoring), and compare that to p(genius | tutoring). The reason I'm emphasizing this contrast is I think this is the contrast you're most interested in with the question about causality: is there a fundamental difference in someone's likelihood of becoming a genius as a function of whether they are tutored or not?
None of that deals with more fundamental issues around causal inference, since this is all going to be observational data (as opposed to something like random assignment). It's possible there's something clever one could do with DAGs but that's beyond my wheelhouse.
(Also very possible I'm overthinking this and there's something way simpler)
WRT to the overthinking part: I think it would be very hard for someone to argue that a traditional education (classrooms, lectures, yada yada) is better at creating geniuses (or coaxing genius out of someone) than, say, being tutored one-on-one with Rene Descartes. So unless we assume that the two modes of education are equal, which from a probability standpoint seems very unlikely, then we're probably going to land on the notion that tutoring>traditional modes of education.
The more interesting question here, to my eye, isn't whether tutoring is more likely to produce genius (or do a better job of allowing it to emerge), but rather what the magnitude of the effect it.
Yeah I think that's fair. There's also a separate (but related) question of whether that magnitude is worth it, so to speak. I work at a public university so I'm obviously somewhat biased here, but I think there's a ton of value in an educational system that tries to educate lots of people rather than just optimizing the aristocrats. (I'm aware that not everyone agrees with this.) Of course if we could provide this kind of tutoring for everybody or close to it, then that'd be fantastic.
Agreed on all counts. I too work at a public university, and I'm always surprised by the number of students I have that come up to me in the halls (after final grades have been posted, and all that) and tell me how glad they are that I taught them x, y and z, even though to my eye 'x', 'y' and 'z' weren't, as far as I was/am concerned, super interesting points to learn. We're talking just basic stuff here, like causation v correlation, or why topic sentences are important.
If you were raised by educated parents then it's easy to assume that a lot of what you learned growing up, and the learning skills you acquired, are things that everyone who wasn't raised in a tar paper shack pretty much also picked up. But I feel like I can say with confidence that this is not the case.
My take on teaching and learning was formed when I experienced the following:
I gave a passionate, engaging talk about x, y, and z, after which some of my students told me about how I blew their minds about x, y, and z.
Over the following weeks/months, some of those same students would come into my office asking me "did you know about x, y, and z?!?! Isn't it amazing?!?!" because they were discovering x, y, and z in their hands-on projects.
Perhaps some confirmation bias was at play, but this really cemented my outlook that "teaching value" has a disastrous half life. Without a robust and relevant experiential component, most education is forgotten.
I suspect that aristocratic tutoring tended to provide a much more sound experiential component than our existing educational systems.
Agreed! Always useful to be reminded of the limitations of my own theory of mind––sometimes a topic I feel is relatively uninteresting (mostly because I've taught it or talked about it so many times before) is fascinating to students and they report loving that portion of a class. And that has the added benefit of making me excited about that topic too.
Autogynephilia is not common among natal females. See:
https://rdcu.be/cYMuV
aleh
umm i just want to be a part of the experiment so im putting out a general query of mine
So yeah we know blackholes exist right and they are quite litterally a rupture in space time due to gravity we also know that blackholes can move like the one at the centre of our galaxy.
My question is at the singularity where time and space change positions how does the blackhole move if its not in the space like giving a hypothetical for a stone to move in a room it has to be in the room right we can say the even horizon moves alr but how do we know if the singularity which has no space or is not in space can move through our space
The punctuation of that comment is far below the ACX average, but maybe that's okay.
I don't think a physicist would agree that a black hole is "quite litterally a rupture in space time" or even that "time and space change positions" in a singularity. What would that mean? There are three spatial dimensions and one time dimension; how can they "switch positions"?
Can anyone recommend a good autobiographical graphic novel about being an angry lonesome unpopular geek in high school?
Black Hole by Charles Burns was the first that came to mind: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38333.Black_Hole
It's deeply gross and disturbing so you know, peak Charles Burns
What is "a thought" anyway? What do people mean when they say "a thought", or when they say they have "no thoughts"? I have always considered anything that goes on in one's conscious mind to be "a thought" or "thoughts", but then I was very puzzled by the exchange between a woman and a monk quoted in the last article:
'“How long has it been since you were last lost in thought?”
“I haven’t had any thoughts for over a week,” the woman replied.'
Clearly *something* is going on in her conscious mind (and that of the monk, for that matter) for her to be able to even register that someone is asking a question, and give a reply. But everyone seems totally fine with the implied idea that some conscious thinking process is happening, which, however, is not made up of "thoughts".
Is "a thought" only meant to refer to a verbalized thought, i.e. something which is said by the internal narrator and heard by whatever listens to the internal narrator? Are people calling themselves enlightened just because they learned to stop verbalizing all their thoughts? Are people who don't verbalize their thoughts automatically more enlightened without even trying?
I suppose “I haven’t had any thoughts for over a week” means either that the woman thinks very little, or that she has an unusual definition of "thought" that excludes most of what I would call "thoughts" from it.
I think a thought is (1) an idea or hypothesis or inference, but potentially a minor one that doesn't rise to the level of importance that earns the term 'idea' or 'hypothesis', or (2) mental speech. A thought need not be verbalized. Since I verbalize most of my thoughts, I'm going to say that nonverbalized thoughts are not more enlightened.
> But everyone seems totally fine with the implied idea that some conscious thinking process is happening, which, however, is not made up of "thoughts".
I think the point of the story was, she was to say the least a little bit ahead of herself, and the Monk was calling her out in the inscrutable way.
I vote no, no, no on the other three inquiries.
With the possible exception of taking a vow of silence as a path towards enlightenment.
This landed in my inbox a few days ago, but I'm only getting around to it now:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/
https://programs.clearerthinking.org/worlds_biggest_problems_quiz.html
"Learn about the biggest problems facing humanity with our new World's Biggest Problems Quiz!
This new quiz will test your knowledge of three of the world’s biggest problems. We chose these issues because they are relatively large, neglected, and solvable:
• Global health - e.g. how many children die every year from malaria?
• Animal welfare - e.g. how many chickens are killed for meat every year?
• Existential risk - e.g. how many nuclear weapons are there in the world?"
I did terribly on all three quizzes which I should hang my head on, given all the information on these topics on this very Substack. Shows how much attention I pay, I suppose!
The thing is, I don't agree that "how many chickens are killed for meat every year?" *is* one of "the world's greatest problems facing humanity". That "What percent of global agricultural land is used for farmed animals? 75% (Our World in Data)" is interesting and is arguably a problem that needs to be solved (we should be using this land not to support animals but to grow crops for humans, discuss).
But do I care that 70 billion chickens are killed for meat every year? No, I do not. You can get me on "conditions the birds are kept in" but not on "will end up as tasty Sunday roast on your table".
"Are there more overall neurons in the human or fish populations?
Correct Answer: Fish outweigh human neurons by ∼16x (William MacAskill What We Owe The Future (p. 271))"
Yes, and? What are those fish doing with all those neurons as against what we are doing with ours? If I'm only sixteen times smarter than a fish, maybe that makes me very dumb, but I'm still sixteen times smarter than a fish. Or at least, by weight we have sixteen times fewer, but we also have a lot fewer fins, scales, swim bladders and the like. Do I care about that deficiency, either?
Now if there were a duelling Human Collective Unconsciousness versus a Piscine Collective Unconsciousness, then I might care (because then there would be hive-mind intelligence and the sixteen times outweighing *would* be a real difference that made a real difference), but in that case my patriotic duty to my species would mean I should Eat More Fish.
This raw number on neurons is meaningless; is this supposed to make me care that fish are intelligent or sapient or have feeeelings like the Disney movie about Finding Nemo? You could rustle up an incubator-full of neurons in a lab that outdid a given weight of "human in their brains" neurons, but it wouldn't mean anything, because that would just be a load of tissue in petri dishes versus organised brains in an entire organism doing something.
This kind of feel-good emotional blackmail (think about the cluck-clucks! think about the little fishies!) is the kind of thing that doesn't work on me and makes me think less of EA type projects.
Or at least, that websites like this are, for rationalists, the equivalent of all those "what is your inner goddess?" quizzes online; fun time-wasting entertainment, but ultimately pointless.
I wasn't impressed with this quiz; it had several issues. Some spoilers ahead.
Certain questions depended on a certain definition of a term that was not provided:
- "How many children have lead poisoning": how much lead is "lead poisoning"? I heard there is no "safe" level, and also no one is exposed to exactly zero lead, so this question is meaningless without a threshold, and given what the answer was, I doubt very much it is talking about an amount of lead that fits the ordinary meaning of the word "poisoning".
- "What causes the most premature deaths": define "premature". Is 75 years old a "premature" age to die? 80 years? Based on the answer to this question, I suspect "premature death" means something like "any death not caused directly by ageing itself".
- I think there was a question about how many eggs were free-range (not mentioning the UK) but the answer was "Most eggs are free-range in the UK" (and only in the UK) but I got it wrong partly because I didn't know it was a question about the UK and partly because I wouldn't have known the answer for the UK specifically. And in a quiz about "the world's problems" it's weird to expect me to know about the UK.
And as Pham mentioned, the quiz makes the options unfairly similar, e.g. often I might know the answer within an order of magnitude, but I need to be within 2x or 3x to get it right.
One question was especially egregious, asking whether more fish were farmed than caught in the wild. One possible answer was "1.1x more farmed than caught in the wild" and another was "1.1x less farmed than caught in the wild", making these two answers just 21% apart. That, plus the fact that expressing a 10% difference as "1.1x" is extremely unusual, made me think that "1.1x" was probably not the answer. But it was.
Another example is the question of how many humans have ever existed: 30 billion, 60 billion, ∼110 billion humans have lived since the start of humanity. If it was more like "20 billion, 100 billion or 500 billion" I could've gotten it right.
Then there was the question on how much the US government spends on "pandemic prevention" which turns out, after you answer it, to ACTUALLY be a question about "pandemic preparedness" which, in case it's not obvious, is something completely different.
The genome sequencing question also seems to be just wrong. It offers three options for the cost of sequencing a human genome in 2021, two of which are "$1000 and 1 hour" and "$10,000 and 1 day". The supposedly correct answer is "$1000 and 1 hour", but news published in 2022 states that the world record for fastest sequencing in 2022 is 5 hours and two minutes. And I doubt the world-record holder spent only $1000 on it.
Another question asks "What would Europe's population be in 500 years if fertility rates stay constant at 1.5 children per woman?" It fails to state any conditions on immigration. Based on what the "correct" answer is, we are apparently supposed to assume zero immigration, which is a silly assumption and therefore ought to have been stated explicitly.
Finally, a question asks "How many researchers focus on ensuring AI is safe for humanity (as of 2021)?" It's unclear whether this is the number of AGI existential-risk researchers or a more general category of AI safety (e.g. concerned with AI bias or specialized military AIs that can kill autonomously). And note that if the question is concerned with AGI specifically then it's a bit strange to compare that (as the question's "tip" does) to the number of people working non-AGI AIs.
And the answer blurb stated "AGI researchers probably outnumber AI safety researchers by 100 times", with a "reference" for this claim that is a Tweet thread (!) by Benjamin Todd that says "I would guess similarly qualified AGI researchers outnumber AI safety researchers by at least a factor of 10 and probably more like 100." Yeah, can we not state one man's guess as fact? And the idea that there are 30,000 people trying to invent AGI sounds extremely unlikely to me. If you're just working on "speeding up AI" or some such, you are not an AGI researcher, even if your work eventually makes AGI more dangerous.
I did the quiz without using a search engine or wearing clothes, achieving 55%.
🏥 Global Health accuracy: 55% (vs. 45% for the average user)
🐣 Animal Welfare accuracy: 45% (vs. 50% for the average user)
🧨 Existential Risk accuracy: 64% (vs. 55% for the average user)
The guy who made the quiz is apparently named André, and he sent me an email to say he's fixed a bunch of the questions in response to my criticisms.
And yeah, that Fish question was super annoying, because my guess of the fish population was probably off by 100x, but you should be within 2x or so to get the right answer (as the answers offered are all 4x apart).
Broadly agree that there's some overly specific EA groupthink on display, and it should have been more sensitive to the range of views that exist (even among EAs).
This is a certain type of quiz with which I'm familiar, and anyone with a modest experience of writing exams can write one on which it is almost impossible to do well -- and that certainly seems to have been the intention here. What you do is crank up the required precision on each multiple choice answer set, and dial down the relevance, until only someone who happens to have looked up the answer recently, or has an eidetic memory, could get them right.
For example, if you want to ask "What fraction of US energy production comes from coal?" and you were asking a strictly honest question, one designed to see if people had any awareness of the situation, you'd have answer choices like "all", "most", "a good chunk but not most," "hardly any," and you'd find out whether people were reasonably aware of the role of coal in US power generation (which is "a good chunk but not most.")
But you can easily make a question even well informed people get wrong by making the answer choices "40%," "30%", "20%", "10%", because even a good awareness of the situation doesn't let you distinguish between the latter four possibilities. (And if you think most people actually realize the answer is ~20% you could just make it "22%," "21%", "20%", "19%" and then only someone who had just looked up the data would know.)
You can also dial down the relevance, e.g. I certainly know a ton of children die of malaria every year, but is it closer to 5 million or 1 million or 200,000? I know it's not 100 million, and I know it's not 10,000, and that's a pretty good global awareness, but I could not easily choose between the first three choices.
Furthermore, it's unimportant to know the exact number (unless you're a WHO official planning detailed logistics), a reasonable awareness is attained with merely knowing it's a major cause of death among children in the world. You could certainly ask that question in an honest way, to measure reasonable awareness, but you can also ask it in a way pretty much guaranteed to suggest the quiz-taker is ignorant -- which it appears to me they have done.
Ambitious course names, anyone? My alma mater has an astronomy course named "Introduction to the Universe."
"Introduction to Compilers"
Final exam: Single essay question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Because nothing is unstable. Have you fallen prey to the unwarranted but common intuitive assumption that nothing is stable, because it contains no classical causes? Let me introduce you to virtual particle pairs...
Oh well, I consider that even more unstable and bizarre. To have not even the possibility of something is sort of a logical black hole, I wouldn't know how to even conceptualize such a vaccuum. It almost strikes me as logically incoherent, sort of like trying to assert a statement like "1 = 2" could have meaning. It doesn't. So that may just be one of those things that you can state in English, because English is a very flexible instrument, but which on closer examination make no more sense than "mumbo dogface in the banana patch."
Non sequitur? DC did not claim there wasn't "even the possibility of something".
Our Gr 12 math teacher wowed the math nerds in the class (though not for long) by showing us a proof for 2 = 1.
a = b
a^2 = ab
a^2 - b^2 = ab - b^2
(a + b)(a - b) = b(a - b)
(a + b) = b
2b = 1b
2 = 1
I might ask "why is there so vastly more nothing than things". But then some pedantic guy might point out that our laws of physics would collapse everything into black holes if the universe had a much higher density of things.
It is noteworthy that black holes are still something rather than nothing, but a black-hole universe has no one in it to ask why there is something rather than nothing.
Security as a service for school shooters.
I realize this is an incredibly sensitive topic, so I just want to acknowledge that school shooting is a terrible tragedy, every time it inevitably occurs. Also, I am going to be treating school shootings in a somewhat flippant way. Just know that this comes from a place of semi-panicked hysteria as I think about how my own son might be shot someday when he’s just being a kid, out playing or learning with his friends.
So, my thinking is that schools take out an insurance policy and as part of the protection they get a bimonthly security audit on behalf of the policyholder. This auditor would have two functions, first as said, to study any risks at an individual school and how they might be mitigated. Because these ‘risks’ are as likely as not to be the children themselves, this role is really more of a counsellor, specializing in very troubled children. He might speak with several of them throughout a given day at the schools on his rounds
Any districts with a higher proportion of seriously troubled youths who might require attention would certainly have to pay higher premiums. I think a single auditor could cover a territory of ~40 individual schools in month, an average of ~2 audits a day every school day
The second function is if one of those terrible/inevitable tragedies should occur, then the auditor, who is also a highly trained security agent, would be capable and mandated to respond immediately to the shooter, and stop them, with deadly force if necessary. Since they probably won’t be at the school when the shooting begins they wouldn’t be able to respond as soon as someone permanently based at the school, but then they also wouldn’t be a first target for the shooter.
Something about this feels like it should be featured in an grungy dystopian as one of the more heavy handed metaphors, but yeah I’m seriously forced to think about shit like this and I really dislike that
Seems unnecessarily complicated. I don't see anything stopping most school boards from implementing the Israeli solution, which is to lock the school down so it has only one entrance during school hours, and there's an armed guard at that entrance (a guard who I should emphasize is almost always ex-military or ex-police, and who has to undergo pretty rigorous training every four months, including plenty of weapons training).
Admittedly locking a school down in states like Arizona and California, where the mild weather encourages very open school plans, is harder, but you could probably close even those off for your casual madman with a few hundred meters of concertina wire.
And it would definitely cost. So if you put it to the school board, you probably want to be prepared to say on what else they should cut spending, or that you're willing to fork out higher property taxes.
Alternatively, if you think just someone on the scene will help a lot in most cases -- which is probably true, although probably also means going from 25 deaths to 1 or 2, not zero -- you could ask the school board to require one of the several vice-principals public schools typically hire to also be its chief of security, and to require that person to be well-trained in weapons use, be armed at all times, and undergo periodic training in tactics. That seems like it could be 25% of job duties. leaving the other 75% of his time to do...well, whatever vice principals normally do. This solution might cost a bit less, and be less obtrusive.
I think the general difficulty with any kind of solution here is that the event is still very rare, and so people have the same bifurcated reaction they do to most rare catastrophes: either full-on denial ('It can't happen here") or brief full-scale panic ("OMG! It could happen here tomorrow!"). Neither state is very useful for rationally addressing a low-probability but high-cost event.
These school shootings are horrible, of course, but if we want to save children's lives I don't think this is the place to put effort. I just looked up some stats. There are 50 million kids in public school in the US. If 20 per year die in school shootings (and that estimate's on the high side), then your son's chance of being killed in a school shooting is one in 2.5 million. Meanwhile, there are other things in his life that pose far greater dangers. In the years 2004-2018, 70,000 kids died in auto accidents, while 134 were killed in school shootings. A child is 500 times as likely to die in an auto accident as in a school shooting.
And I'll bet there's a lot more low-hanging in the auto accident realm. What about people who don't put their small children in car seats, for instance, or don't make the kids fasten seat belts, or let them ride in the front when they're little? I'm not sure what the best way to improve the seat belt situation is -- big fines? public education? free carseats? -- but there have to be some simple things that would improve the kids' safety. What about parents with DWI's? Maybe one DWI should be enough to disqualify a person from driving with children in the car for the next 10 years.
I really doubt there is any low-hanging fruit in the school shooter situation. Having the auditor talk with troubled kids sounds like a good idea, but the thing about teenagers, who are the ones doing most of the shootings, is that many of them, maybe even most, are a little bit crazy. They are moody & impulsive, and when they feel bad they feel *really* bad. I read somewhere recently that 40% of high school students have cut themselves, and upwards of 50% have suicide fantasies. When my daughter was in high school she brought home a vase she had made in ceramics class. It was white, with red streaks that looked like blood running down the sides, as though the vessel was full to overflowing with blood. "Um, what do you think of this?" I asked the art teacher. "Oh," she said," there are a lot like this one. They're very emo at this age." So the auditor comes to the school with the goal of talking to the kids that are isolated, angry, miserable and weird. How does he pick? A good 10% of kids will fit that description. And unless the auditor is very very gifted at talking with teens, none of them are going to disclose anything to him in his interviews. And besides, 60% of the time the shooter is not even a student at the school.
As for the James Bond guy who's going to come in and take out the shooter: Since he is not on site, the chance that he will arrive in time to make much difference is very small. These things go down fast.
My advice is to put your attention on things that are more likely to happen than school shootings, and many of which are also things you have a better chance of controlling, such as the safety practices of people who are transporting your kid (and the safety practices of the kid himself, once he's driving).
I have two objections: Firstly, it provides the schools with a financial incentive to cover up risk factors. Secondly, you're asking a counsellor to be ready to stop a shooter with force; these are two very different jobs with very different skill sets.
Highly pertinent user name! For the hiring, I'd actually given that some thought. You are indeed looking at hiring either very competent security agents and training them how to be excellent crisis counsellors with the 8-18 crowd, or vice versa. Maybe you'd want to recruit both? I'd watch that movie. Honestly I'm not sure which is easier to do, but I do know that you'd be paying a lot of money for an extremely narrow skillset. I think one would have to expect quite a lot of specialized training (6 months?) before being put in the field.
As part of the employment contract, if the inevitable etc. and they have to kill the shooter to end it? Then so long as there is convincing evidence that the use of lethal force was the only or most likely to successful method to end a shooting, they would have the full backing of the company to provide support for legal issues, public scrutiny etc.
On the other hand, if in the judgement of a court of law or the management of the company, that the lethal recourse was not mandatory, or god forbid a non-involved child is killed by the agent, then they would have no protection whatsoever and the employment contract would be terminated, effectively immediately.
That's a good point on the school's perverse incentives, hadn't thought of that before
Democrats have clinched the Senate and will probably get 51 seats in the end.
6 races will decide the House. Dems need 4 and Rs need 3. California carrying Dems. Not a single Pacific coast district controlled by Republicans.
It's fascinating, that's such a slim margin, really easy for defections, here's my prediction: icy silence across the chambers. For like 3 weeks, then someone says they're going to take a stand for bipartisanship and introduce a new piece of legislation with a fig-leaf Democrat / Republican
Also, it's a good time to be a moderate, since the senate will allow no defections, the most powerful person is the democrat who's the furthest right (relatively). This year that's been alternating between Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, about whatever their pet issue is. Add one extra seat and now you only need one of them, or Cortez Mastro perhaps.
Those following the FTX/SBF crisis may be interested in this feature article about Sam Bankman-Fried, and what he was trying to do. It appeared on Sequoia's website, and was later taken down, but is still available on the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/
"The point was this: When SBF multiplied out the billions of dollars a year a successful crypto-trading exchange could throw off by his self-assessed 20 percent chance of successfully building one, the number was still huge. That’s the expected value. And if you live your life according to the same principles by which you’d trade an asset, there’s only one way forward: You calculate the expected values, then aim for the largest one—because, in one (but just one) alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously. To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality."
I think we should consider that all of this may in some sense have been part of the plan. SBF was quite comfortable with risk, including really big risks. And he certainly wasn't the sort of man to be restrained by convention or any sort of deontological notion of right and wrong. He was a diehard consequentialist. Maybe this is just what it looks like when a really big bet fails.
"because, in one (but just one) alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously."
Well, turns out it wasn't *this* universe. And this is why I prefer boring grey accountants who look for the safe, boring, dull option when playing with hundreds of millions of pension funds or whatever.
You want high-risk, high-return? Go into bank robbing.
"To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality."
Oh merciful hour, this kind of lingo makes me yearn for the days of the nuns of the past, including my past, who would have taken people spouting this stuff outside and beaten them with sticks to knock the foolishness out of them.
That's what is wrong with kids these days. Not enough nuns with rulers over the backs of their knuckles.
> You want high-risk, high-return? Go into bank robbing.
Um, banks don't have tens of billions of dollars in cash, and if they did they wouldn't give it to a bank robber. I'm not sure whether SBF's strategy was "bad" or "horrible" but either way it seems better than bank robbing.
I don't have any inside information but based on the past week of information it appears that for at least the last several months FTX/Alameda was operating as a Ponzi scheme. Giving SBF the benefit of the doubt there was probably a time in the past year where he could have let Alameda go bankrupt and it would have been a reasonable high risk trade that didn't pay off but instead he chose unethical (and probably illegal) actions in order to delay facing the consequences. Instead of being Adam Neumann he chose to be Bernie Madoff.
Exactly. Thank you!
There is an immense cruelty for Sam to say "I can do illegal stuff that risks *other* peoples' money, because of the small chance that I give it all to charity"... I hope that attitude is drawn further into public scrutiny and discussion!
It also lays in contrast with my own emphasis: creating things that have real-world value for people who need it, which must work well enough to stand on their own as a product. Forget donating a portion of profits - just make it cheaper! Scamming for charity doesn't enlarge the pie, and its failure-mode poisons the well! (I wonder if Sam's risk-calculus on secreting Alameda billions was including all the other people, crypto's future, EA's capacity in the face of fall-out...)
A close friend of mine has scoliosis. She has chronic pain now. She also deals with ADHD and her pre-diabetes is getting worse. She quit her super successful career as it all got to be too much. She's sort of in a funk due to the chronic pain.
What is the way out for her?
She sees a physiotherapist 3 times a week and has added acupuncture.
I wish I could help but don't know how to. She lives in the bay area in California.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
She has a family too, so they get her energy and attention and she has nothing left after that. I'd like to see her get out of the chronic pain and feel better. The pain used to be intermittent but seems more constant now.
Thank you.
I don't know if it's a 'way out', but Shinzen Young's work on pain (an audio CD of Break Through Pain, the book Natural Pain Relief, etc) may be of some value.
A synopsis: https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/art_synopsis-pain.pdf
There are many psychological techniques that can decrease the impact of the pain on your mental well being absent the ability to actually reduce the pain. The secondary effects, e.g. how you frame or respond to the pain can be very disabling itself, and that is something you have control over. The Wim Hof method, or any kind of cold exposure is a kind of mental training that increases pain tolerance. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as well as the ideas of the ancient Stoics it is based on (e.g. Epictetus) can allow you to re-frame the pain in a positive light rather than a horrible life ruining thing you can never hope to escape from.
I think that is true for some people with some kinds of pain, but you have to watch it with suggesting that someone's pain would bother them less if they just did mental training or tried harder to tolerate it or ignore it. That is perilously close to telling them that they could suffer less if they tried, so STFU, and that is a terrible thing to say to someone in pain. And consider this: the people in pain may *already* be doing reframing, etc. to change their relationship to their pain, and getting as much mileage out of that as it is possible to get. I, for instance, may be one of them. My spine looks like a twisted jagged piece of shit on Xrays -- but the worst pain I feel is about a 3, and if I do all my exercises etc. I can usually keep it to a 2. I bike, exercise, and am generally active. I never did any training in those pain reduction techniques, because I saw them used in settings where it was clear to me that the what the "trainers" were mostly doing was encouraging people to be brave and STFU. But I may have spontaneously developed some pain-managing techniques of my own over the years as my spine has worsened. Or I may just be lucky, no way to know. You don't know that Deepa's friend isn't doing the same. She's taking care of her family. Maybe to do that she has spontaneously developed all kinds of coping techniques that allow her to drive, move around the house, carry children etc. In which case it is maybe time either for some better PT or maybe for some of the drugs like gabapentin that reduce chronic pain.
I highly recommend Paul Ingraham's excellent site PainScience, for really good evidence-based advice. I have scoliosis myself, and all the regular shit you're supposed to do for low back pain makes no difference at ALL to my back pain. Paul's site is literally the only place where I have learned about something that actually makes a substantial difference in my discomfort. His site also gave some decatastrophizing info that helped me be less worried about what I'm in for from my back as I age. Last I knew Paul is willing to do consults by phone -- possibly in person too, I don't know. He's in Vancouver.
There are non-opioid drugs that help with chronic pain -- some of the antidepressants, gabapentin, some stuff called Lyrica that I know very little about. While I'm not sure they're the way to go, your friend should probably talk to a professional about pain relief options. There are also pain management techniques that involve meditation & the like. Some people find them helpful, though I myself got very turned off to them during my training as a psychologist because it seemed to me the meditate-and-accept-your-pain stuff had a large unacknowledged element of "STFU about your pain."
If your friend is overweight, losing weight & being fit is likely to make her back give her less trouble.
She sounds discouraged & disempowered, & maybe depressed. Might be a good idea for her to see a psychologist with a special interest in people with chronic health problems. (Though I'm not sure it makes sense to label scoliosis a chronic health problem. Mine is moderately bad, but I stay fit & active, and know which activities to avoid and ways to reduce the pain when it starts hurting, & mostly think of it as a nuisance. I really don't know why it's not a worse problem for me -- how much is the way I manage it, how much my attitude, how much that I somehow lucked out physically in some way. Looking at an Xray of my spine you'd think I'd be quite disabled, but there may be something about my musculature or my nerves that keeps the vertebral chaos from setting off massive pain.)
Thank you so much. This is great advice.
Her main problem is this pain but the ADHD and being in a funk about the pain makes it hard for her to effectively go into problem solving mode.
I think hiring a great therapist who knows about this sort of a thing can help as a starting point? How could I find her one?
She is doing physiotherapy and acupuncture.
You can search on Psychology Today for someone in your area, but there is just no online resource for getting good info about therapist style and quality. I think your best shot is to ask on here, since the Bay area is overrepresented on ACX. Describe the problem and the kind of therapist you think she needs.
Some general guidelines for picking therapists:
-Psychiatrists' expertise is usually either meds or psychoanalytic approaches, neither of which is a good fit for your friend
-Psychologists are more research-oriented, and often are trained in approaches for specific problems, eg anxiety disorders, substance abuse, health problems.
-Social workers tend to have expertise in family relations.
-Licensed mental health counselors & nurse practitioners have training that is not as intensive and deep as what the other specialties have.
I think a psychologist is most likely to be a good fit, but in real life the generalizations above don't hold for everybody.
Let's see -- what else?
-Anyone affiliated with a teaching hospital, especially if they are in fact involved in training mental health professionals, is more likely to be highly competent.
-Don't see anyone who's less than 5 years out from completing their training.
-Check the person's license online. Don't see anyone who is not licensed. If they have black marks on their license, be cautious. Ask them about it.
-Your friend has way more options if she is willing to see someone who does not take insurance. If her insurance is a PPO plan it will reimburse her for some of the therapist's charges.
A Poem for S.B.F.
~ and a place to add your own verse of wit! ~
An Ode to the Venerable Sir Scam Bankrun-Fraud, the elder:
Have you heard the name renowned?
A phrase we say
To allay sway
Of FUDster, huckster-clowns?
Scam Bankrun-Fraud!
Scam Bankrun-Fraud:
Got Sequoia
On a gank,
Contumely -
Scam Bankrun-Fraud
Was Knighted by
Elizabeth,
posthumously!
Making ‘empty boxes’ money
Never seemed too grand,
Though Scam B.F.
And Derp Island
Had a plan at hand!
Scam proved G-2 Muons
Would sell a ten-percent-rate
In all the parallel multiverses
That he could contemplate!
A Ponzi tall as Babel,
For cryptoadies in the scrabble
In the dust of lust for risk -
Let’s drink a glass to his:
Scam Bankrun-Fraud!
Scam Bankrun-Fraud,
A million memers strong,
Scam Bankrun-Fraud, Scam Bankrun-Fraud,
A head of lettuce long!
Recite the Carol of the Age,
LARPer Dryads’ naively-brave
Incantation Coda:
“Better luck next time,
Robinhoodawouldacoulda!”
<reply with your own verses!>
I don't know if this is a case of nominative determinism which no-one picked up on: he was indeed a man who set up his own (sort of) bank which ended up fried.
So, is it reasonable to assume SBF was a funder of the ACX grants? If so, does that mean this is the end of it?
Surely it's not "the end", but it's unclear if SBF was a funder. From Dec 28, 2021:
> I originally planned to spend $250,000 on these grants; this came partly from subscribers like you, partly from unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, and partly from someone who paid an unexpectedly large amount for an NFT of a blog post. Thanks to everyone involved in helping me have this extra money.
> But I was also able to get another $1.3 million (!) from extremely generous outside funders, of whom only two would let me reveal their names: Vitalik Buterin and Misha Gurevich. Thank you Vitalik, Misha, and other anonymous people!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results
Last I heard, Scott's annual income from ACX alone exceeds $250,000.
Edit: a Nov 13 thread says
> 3: I have no idea what’s going to happen with ACX Grants now. Some of the infrastructure I was hoping to use was being funded by the FTX Foundation and may no longer exist. It might or might not be more important to use all available funding to rescue charities about to go under from losing FTX support. I still want to do something, because of the increased need and urgency mentioned above, but give me a while to hide under my bed and gibber before I sort out specifics.
> 4. None of last year’s ACX Grants were funded by the FTX Foundation or anyone else linked to FTX, so if this is you, don’t worry.
One common meme story yesterday was that Eli Lily's stock plunged because of a fake verified tweet. This makes no sense to me for multiple reasons -- (a) the tweet was on Thursday but the stock fell on Friday, well after people would've realized the tweet was fake; (b) if it fell due to the fake tweet, it should've already come back up unless it was some permanent PR damage or something (and why would it be?)
And yet this story's everywhere, I can't even find a skeptical take, and the stock did fall a notable amount. Is it possibly actually true? Or is it just that random stocks fall 5% every day, and so crappy websites post this funny idea and don't think twice?
Come. If you pay any length of attention to financial news you'll realize soon enough it bears a strong resemblance to astrology. Random shit happens, and the pundits on a deadline (whose actual experience in finance is often zip) will bang out "this totally happened because Mercury was ascending to the zodiacal transverse of Aquarius" and all the other astrologers/pundits, on the same deadline, will nod their head vigorously yup! so true.
There is of course a reason behind any stock drop, or so those of us who believe in casuality would assert, and on rare occasion the reason is obvious (headquarters is firebombed, the CEO is caught with an underage prostitute), but most of the time it's the resultant of a large set of complex forces that it would take a multiyear research project (with extraordinary levels of access to privileged information) to understand correctly.
There seems to be a lot of interest in seeing Musk fail at Twitter. For obvious (I think) reasons. That is probably a factor in the lack of skepticism here.
Fair enough. I only keep tabs on popular stocks, and usually if something drops 5% it's clear why (especially if that's against the run of play of the broader market). I didn't see any OTHER story on Lilly, which is why I thought there may be an element of truth here. But presumably there could be a lot of explanations, as their historical chart seems pretty volatile.
Has anyone experimented with Gwern's idea of cycling nicotine, caffeine, and modafinal, or some other cycle like that? The idea would be to enjoy the benefits of these without the tolerance. I've posted about caffeine tolerance before, and the idea of enjoying a coffee buzz without having to first take 3-4 off first is so desirable.
Wouldn't the withdrawal from one counteract the effects of the other?
Nicotine at least is too different (different better, but still different) for this to make sense.
I sort of tried cycling caffeine and modafinil, in the sense that I spent a little time searching for a regime in which I could access the benefits of both. All this is my experience and none of these claims should be taken to be universal; YMMV.
In theory, if I could schedule my workload around on and off days, this works great. Modafinil notably boosted concentration for the first day or two, at the expense of some increased irritability. (I think in practice some of this was my usual irritation at being interrupted out of a flow state, crossed with easier access to flow.) Caffeine boosts my mood for the first few days, and is especially useful for interpersonal work, but decreases my focus, especially in the first couple of days. Coffee before meetings, modafinil before coding.
I ran into two problems that made me abandon the pursuit. First, I never had the schedule predictability to really time the cycles correctly. Second, I really like coffee, and at the time good coffee was super easily accessible, so a regime where by default I didn't drink coffee felt like deprivation. That meant that it was easy to slip into a coffee-as-default regime, and then getting off coffee required a couple of unpleasant days of withdraw symptoms. Worse, modafinil and caffeine interact badly for me, and I got all the unpleasant interaction symptoms if I took modafinil during the caffeine withdraw period.
In fairness, I never tried cycling them rapidly, but given the mixing effects I experienced I have little interest in the experiment.
Very helpful. Thanks for the data point, CA.
There once was an n-type material
And a p-type, with carriers immaterial
They meet at a junction
And cancel their functions
In a manner that’s strangely venereal
+5 Awesome
Amazing optical illusion I only just learned of, the Ames window: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grQX7XRc6Tk (h/t Joshua Green)
The window looks like the large end is nearer to you, even when it isn't. So when the window is made to *spin*, it instead looks like it's oscillating. And then a pen is put through the window and the whole thing is spun -- so you see the pen spinning, but it still looks like the window is oscillating, even though this requires the pen to pass through the paper! I suggest taking a look...
The pen through the middle convinced me that this is in fact magic and nothing to do with optical illusions.
How well does this work in real life? IOW, I wonder if this looks as good in person while using stereo vision instead of a camera.
Also, I tried googling to see if this was for sale someplace. I can't imagine that I would be able/willing to make one this nice IRL. Has anyone seen one for purchase?
Is there a Bible on economically sustainable schools ?
Fostering, Adoption and boarding schools are huge expenses and cater to a growing demographic of adoption friendly & race agnostic careerists. The fast changing behaviors of this generation open a bunch of new opportunities.
Imagine a streamlined workflow from "orphanage -> adoption -> fostering -> boarding school -> introduction to labor force" for a small 3rd world town. Adopt a child, we take care of them for the school year, and you get to have them for the holidays. Your parents are happy to see their grand children on holidays, you get to be as much of the cool uncle as the parent, and we take care of everything from nannying, disciplining and education "YOUR" child. Since the funding goes to the school, it can be used to educate not just that one child, but also non-orphan poor children in the rest of the town. The teachers can be a bunch of 1st world retirees, empty nesters and yuppies in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Since the orphanage is still the legal guardian for many kids in the school, children can be pushed into the labor force at an earlier age. That way the orphans without the funding for university, can be trained for the trades by working the cafeteria as cooks, or building maintenance, carpentry or honestly, even white-collar trades like sales & marketing. Freshmen in universities everywhere in the US do it, how hard could it be for highschoolers to do it instead.
So the 3rd world school is the center of it all and children are the main 'commodity'. But you develop an entire retirement, spiritual retreat, local services & adoption industry around it.
I know there are like a million legal roadblocks to such a thing. And let's not ruin a good thing by talking about the ethics of it all.
But, has anyone tried a simple version of something like this ?
I find it hard to imagine a state that was functional enough to implement anything like this that wasn't also functional enough to spend enough money to implement a better system of caring for orphans.
"What would a solution optimised for a society with very little money but also very little Moloch look like?", which is what I take this to be, is generally not a useful question, I think.
> state that was functional enough
States aren't that functional at anything, ever. Reliable mediocrity is the best a state (or any sufficiently large and broad organization) can aspire towards.
Such an effort would have to run as a small-medium scale startup. A small group of leaders with a clear vision, a lean org and fast paced delivery.
> caring for orphans.
Caring is a terrible thing. It assumes a permanence to dependence of those you are caring about. "Oh those terrible orphans, let me donate a little bit to feed them for a few days." No one wants the orphans to be self-sufficient. Rather they'd give them handouts and keep them dependent.
Caring is great for figuring out the thrust and aligning core guiding values of a pursuit (imp to avoid becoming a psychopath). The individual actions within said pursuit, should be planned much more coldly.
Was this comment written by AI? The weird mix of smiley advertising jargon and incongruity of tone for the concepts being crashed together makes me wonder.
"Hi, has anyone ever considered a modern take on indentured servitude? All the top thought leaders and influencers are exploring this exciting new lifestyle accessory choice to meet their needs as highly effective people!"
"But, has anyone tried a simple version of something like this ?"
The short answer to that is "yes". The workhouses had a system like this for orphaned pauper children, see "Oliver Twist" where he is apprenticed out to an undertaker.
Later on, the Home Children or Child Migrants operated from 1830 up to the 1970s under various auspices and forms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Children
And of course, the Residential Schools around the world, I think Canada is in the midst of throes over those:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system
Also, Industrial Schools:
https://caranua.ie/history/
The American version is Boys' Town, which eventually went unisex (I believe you say 'co-ed' in the USA), and seems to still be going, so that was successful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_Town_(organization)
naah, just a frantic attempt to condense a big idea into few words
> concepts being crashed together
unfortunately it's an idea I have been thinking about for 10 years, and I dumped all of it in 1 tiny paragraph. Ofc it lacks coherence.
> incongruity of tone
Behind the development of every country is a horrifying story of human exploitation. I guess it doesn't faze me much because I know how bad it is for kids down there. 2 square meals a day, a caring guardian and of-a-legal-age-and-wage child labor is an amazing deal for many. The base level of desperation is soo high, that these inhumane propositions are what people aspire to.
> considered a modern take on indentured servitude
I did do a terrible job of bringing of explaining the whole thing. Usually, I spend a few months building goodwill as a compassionate person before bringing up adult-child interactions as a purely capitalistic transaction.
A part of me is jaded from watching all of these 3rd world "non-profits" being run as money pits because there is no expectation of being an economically viable organization. Problem is : western money is limited. So instead of using NGO money to help their target audience, most $$ are spent lobbying a zero sum game of vying for a bigger slice of western money.
> Was this comment written by AI? I
write the way I speak. So my written English sometimes reads like a weird train of thought instead of a more structured prose. My bad.
"Usually, I spend a few months building goodwill as a compassionate person before bringing up adult-child interactions as a purely capitalistic transaction."
I will have to take your word on how you process English, because do you realise how that in particular sounds?
"Okay, groomer"? Or, "I fake being a Nice Guy who is purely disinterested before I can get the kids to whore themselves out to me".
Oh no, I put in a lot of effort into a reply and mislicked and lost the draft.
I was hoping it would have convinced you of my good faith. But, I'll make peace with being perceived as the devil rather than write out a whole emotionally vulnerable reply all over again.
Yep, I wanna groom kids, exploit vulnerable adults and become rich off it all while being seen as the nicest guy. A modern day Jimmy Saville if you will.
I'm sure the sarcasm is obvious, and in 20 years when my pseudo anonymous account gets dug up it won't be misunderstood. Right ? Right ?
Be a little more careful about writing things that can be misunderstood. I'm not the only idiot out there, and "I like to set up a fake niceness aura to get around adults who would be protective of children, so I can then smuggle in the idea of financial transactions around children" is something that can easily be misinterpreted.
well, I guess it is that 3rd world sense of humor. If you give away the joke by qualifying it, then it isn't funny anymore. When you see 3rd world poverty around you, jokes lose that glint of consideration and optimism. If it ain't grim, it ain't funny. Guess it doesn't translate that well when it is with strangers on the internet without context.
IMO, in the near future, if someone wants you cancelled you will be cancelled. With how much of us is archived on the internet, any soundbite can and will be used if you're the right target. So, I've pretty much given up any attempt of self-censoring in case the internet misunderstands. If an adversary wants a bad soundbite, they will find it.
I've been playing around with prediction markets recently (manifold). What strikes me as weird is that you're really aiming to guess what the consensus probability will be, as opposed to the resolution of the market, specially for markets that resolve on a scale of years. This is enabled by the market giving you frictionless ways of buying and selling your shares at any point in time.
It feels really weird when you make a serious long-term prediction, and then lose money because the market moves in the opposite direction. There's much more profit to be made in correctly anticipating market movements, than in actually being right about the underlying questions. I also suspect that you can make profits by abusing the publicly viewable order books in some way.
Manifold very prominently reports your daily profit/loss to you, which is supposed to be an indicator of your forecasting ability. But now that I've actually participated, I've updated towards considering this metric less informative.
I suppose these observations translate to real-money prediction markets as well. What's the alternative? forecasting tournaments?
This is how I thought prediction markets would go, just like real markets. If the incentive is to make money off them, then you do what makes money, not what provides "wisdom of the crowd" or whatever the nice-sounding principle behind them is about getting the best advice from a multitude of well-informed people to help you make decisions. And if you can invest real money in meaningful amounts in them, then your incentive is to make money.
This is why I think the selling-point of them as "governments can use them to set public policy!" is a *terrible* idea.
Well, real markets have operated this way for a long time. Quite a lot of people-- maybe even most, these days -- are "growth" investors, who don't give a damn about the underlying asset, but who believe they can predict (or already see) that the market price is headed up (or down if they're shorting).
I don't think there is an alternative, if you're hoping for a system in which very valuable information (a highly defensible and intelligent guess about the future) is given away for free. The existence of such a system defies common sense. If somebody has very valuable information, he is going to sell it, not give it away[1], and there will always be buyers who bid the price up handsomely.
----------------------
[1] Although I myself have written a short easy to understand book that explains how to become a billionaire without really trying. Send me $9.95 and the secret is yours. Paypal accepted, no checks, no refunds.
Did Scott anticipate the people who will post garbage intentionally due to this experiment?
Is it true that quadcopter drones that today cost hundreds of dollars once cost tens of thousands of dollars? If yes, what caused the price decline?
The drones seem to only incorporate simple technology that was available in the 1960s.
Quadcopter drones didn't once cost tens of thousands of dollars, because back when drones cost tens of thousands of dollars (minimum), they weren't quadcopters.
A quadcopter, as Ommo notes, is not a dynamically stable system. As such, it needs a fairly sophisticated autopilot, which didn't exist in the 1960s and even in the 1990s would have been very expensive. Instead, VTOL drones of that era were more conventional helicopters (see e.g. DASH, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrodyne_QH-50_DASH
Conventional helicopters are mechanically complex, as the rotor blades need to vary their pitch over the course of each rotation. The system that can do that, costs tens of thousands of dollars to design and build. Quadcopters can just use four fixed-pitch rotors, which is simpler and cheaper. Also, in the 1960s and 1990s, power would have had to come from some sort of internal combustion engine, again a mechanically complex expensive device, because there weren't batteries light and powerful enough to power any sort of helicopter. Now, cheap electric batteries and motors can take over.
At small scale, at least. The quadcopter platform isn't particularly efficient in aerodynamic terms, and batteries still can't match the energy density of internal combustion engines. So the serious high-performance or long-endurance drones, including almost all military drones past the "hey, I figured out how to rig the quadcopter I ordered from Amazon to drop a grenade" level, are still mostly conventional airplane or 1-2 rotor helicopter designs using iinternal combustion engines. And priced at tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars.
But if you're just looking for a Minimum Viable Drone, for recreational or limited commercial purposes, a cheap microcomputer coupled to four cheap electric motors in a simple quadcopter airframe is a possibility that didn't exist until recently. It won't fly very high or very far or carry very much, but it can carry a camera to see what's just over that ridge a mile or two away - and, yes, a grenade to drop on whatever's there if you insist.
Why four rotors, rather than three? To replace the varying pitch single rotor one needs more than one fixed-pitch rotor, sure. Two seems to allow only one axis along which to correct course. But three allows three vectors separated by 120 degrees which is enough as a basis for the underlying vector space. I'm left mystified by the use of a fourth.
My first guess would be to minimize the Third Law reaction force on the body of the copter, which tends to spin the body in the opposite way as the rotor. Normal helicopters with one big rotor have a vertical tail rotor for this purpose, and two-rotor helicopters have the rotors counter-rotating to eliminate this problem, sometimes on the same shaft, probably more often on two.
If you have an even number of rotors you can make them counter-rotate in pairs, while if you have an odd number you can't, so you will have an uncompensated Third Law torque trying to rotate the body of the copter.
You need 4-dof. Imagine a vtol (of whatever architecture) hovering. It needs control of pitch, roll, yaw and vertical acceleration.
You can get this from a traditional helicopter (collective + 2dof cyclic + tail rotor), or a quadcopter, or a tricopter (a servo tilts one rotor from side to side), or a tiltrotor (2 props on 2 servos).
A tricopter as you are imagining would not have yaw control.
Quadcopters are instable systems: You want your quadcopter to mostly stay parallel to the ground (not tilted). However, once it tilts even a little bit, there is no natural force pushing it back to that desired position and if no counter force is applied by the correct propeller, it's going to continue to tilt. Say you apply a counter force: Now it's spinning in the opposite direction and you eventually need to apply a counter force to that. Long story short: To control a quadcopter a computer is required which has sensor input on the current tilting state (the orientation), is able to calculate the appropriate counter force and control the propellers to apply this force. This "control loop" 1) -> 2) -> 3) -> 4) -> 1) -> ...
1) Get current orientation
2) Compare to desired orientation
3) Calculate appropriate correcting force
4) Apply force via propellers
Needs to be carried out dozens of times per second for the system to be stabilized. A much simpler example of such a control problem is the inverted pendulum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pendulum). So aside the state of battery technology, small computers (nowadays called micro-controllers) capable of performing the calculations and motor control units capable of driving a propeller with the required fidelity weren't available. Finally, what surprised me when I started in drone development is that until the early 2000s, the gyroscopes necessary to figure out the quadcopters orientation were mechanical devices (see e.g.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope ).
So quadcopters were held back until recently by 1) a lack of batteries with sufficient energy density, 2) limited computer technology, and 3) gyroscopes. Anything else?
The other components of a quadcopter, like the frame, electric motor and rotors, could have been built at low cost in the 1960s, right?
They are still mechanical devices. But now they are measured in µm and use oscillating parts (everything is a bit flexible on those scales) fabricated using the same technologies as they use to etch computer chips.
I saw this story about a "drone taxi" (which seems to be more of a helicopter than a drone, or rather a mix between the two):
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/drone-taxi-take-first-spin-air-traffic-near-paris-2022-11-10/
"The Volocopter test aircraft, which resembles a large drone with eight rotors, took off with a passenger on board from the Pontoise-Cormeilles airfield outside Paris and briefly circled around while other aircraft were in the vicinity.
...Test pilot Paul Stone said that the craft's digital fly-by-wire system and multiple rotors make it much easier to fly than a traditional helicopter.
"In a helicopter, when you move one control, three things happen, and it's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy - it's a coordination exercise. In this aircraft, they take away all that difficulty, and it's very simple controls in each axis, that's what makes it easier to fly," he said."
So we may be getting flying cars eventually, but they won't be cars as such?
Easier to fly if the computer is working properly, impossible to fly at all if it isn't. There are times when that is a reasonable trade to make, but do keep in mind that computers reliable enough for safety-critical aviation applications are not at all cheap. Having learned to fly the hard way, I'll pass.
And I'll note that being able to precisely manipulate the controls is not the part that troubles pilots into an early grave. It's things like sound judgement, calculating weight and balance and fuel (or battery) consumption, maintaining situational awareness, evaluating weather, managing risk, and responding promptly and correctly to a broad range of problems. The computer that can do all *that*, hasn't been invented yet and will be very very expensive when it is.
Until then, I read "Look how easy this is! Anyone can learn it in an afternoon!" as a pointer to thousands of future wannabe pilots e.g. running out of battery power at 6500' over the San Gabriel mountains on their glorious LA commute. Or flying into one of those mountains while intently focused on figuring out why the landing-gear light is blinking red.
Not sure about the numbers for helicopters, but for fixed-wing aircraft we can teach a pilot to fly solo under ideal conditions in about fifteen hours, but being trusted to carry passengers without supervision even on clear days is forty hours minimum, and for reliable transportation day or night or fog or rain, more like two hundred hours. The "move one control, three things happen" part is adequately taken care of in that first fifteen hours, so at best you're down to 185 hours before I'm going to be comfortable sharing the sky with you.
I wouldn't hold your breath.
I'm not saying the product will or won't be sucessful/profitable but if it is, it'll be by competing with executive helicopters rather than with black cabs.
The fly-by-wire might reduce training requirements for pilots and the multirotor design avoids many single points of failure (e.g. the infamous Jesus Nut), but there are still a lot of rather prosaic failure modes that need to be mitigated before you can fly any kind of aircraft over a city.
You'll need to employ skilled mechanics to maintain it, lest improperly tightened bolts shake themselves free; regularly inspect the airframe with x-rays or ultrasound to make sure there are no hairline cracks and maintain a paper trail all along the supply chain to make sure that your subcontractor's subcontractor's copper supplier isn't some latter-day Ea-Nasir. These things really drive up the cost of aerospace-grade anything.
I think we'll see more of an impact from unmanned multirotors operating in relatively unpopulated areas such as forests or large construction sites. Apart from crashes being less likely to hit people or property, these sectors are already pushing the limits of what can be traversed by ground-based vehicles such as walking excavators (imagine a JCB but the wheels are on the end of hydraulically actuated legs).
Li-Ion batteries were nowhere close to the current level in the 1960s, neither were all the electronics.
Meditators, is there, or could there be, such a thing as a "reverse" Jhana?
From my limited understanding, First Jhana makes people feel joy by suppressing their desires. Could I use the same techniques to inflame them? Dedicated Buddhists will probably say that's a bad idea and contrary to Enlightenment, but I'm seeking ways to increase my motivation. I have an easy time abstaining from harmful things but less success actively pursuing goals, so I don't think standard teachings will be right for me.
>"reverse" Jhana?
erotic hypnosis?
Imagine you have the object of your desire. Whatever the goal is you are trying to increase desire for, imagine in as vivid detail as possible what it would be like to have the thing. Notice if you start to feel positive feelings. If you do, then focus on those positive feelings. If you realize the goal you started meditating on is a means to an end, switch to meditating on what it would be like to have the 'end-goal'. Cycle through 3 questions: what do I want? how do I feel in my body when I have this thing that I want? what does it change for me to have this thing?
Hat tip to Kasia Urbaniak
I vaguely remember tantric techniques that lean in that direction, but finding actual instruction in tantra is nearly impossible in the West. IIRC the goal is still to make desire optional instead of compulsive, then indulge in it anyway because why not.
is this what affirmation-/visualization-based pop self-help is doing? The Secret and stuff like that?
Maybe, but I don't think so. Jhana seems to be about entering a specific mental state, not affirmation, and also more intense.
> I'd say it's more about changing the way you relate to your mental experiences.
I think so as well.
First we hear Mr. Musk is laying off staff at Twitter, then he's not, then well actually he may retrain them, no maybe he'll lay them off, etc., etc.; now we hear tens of thousands may be laid off by Meta.
So, who are these engineers, what are their skill sets, and what did they do all day at Twitter and Meta? Who is likely to hire them? If and when they find new positions, will they be able to work remotely? I've always wondered who these techies are. I believe my niece instructs doctors on the use of her company's software, and her husbands flags legal citations for attorneys, but I imagine workers for large tech companies may be more specialized.
Any ideas?
They're not all engineers. Though many are. Even at a tech company only 30-40% of people are in technical roles. A lot of the trimming was non-technical people. Especially in Twitter since Musk is openly critical of non-technical workers and thinks of a lot of them as inherently bloat. It's pretty easy to redirect engineers. "You were working on ads and now you're working on X." It's much harder to redirect, say, someone who specializes in selling ads to a specific industry.
What interests me is first, the glee a lot of the online are showing about Musk and the lay-offs and re-hirings; he's an idiot, he's going to ruin Twitter and lose all his money, he has no idea how it works, etc.
But when you take into consideration that a lot of other businesses are doing the same kind of trimming (Stripe, Meta, others) and putting it down to the over-optimistic hiring of extra employees during the pandemic, and now there is no work for them/the volume of business is crunching due to the recession, what about them? I don't think there's any "ha ha Musk is alt-right Trump-lover idiot, serves him right if he runs the business into the ground!" Schadenfreude to be obtained there, so doesn't that mean that maybe Musk is not being an idiot when it comes to lay-offs, that even if Twitter ownership and management had remained the same, the same level of firing and lay-offs would have happened?
But so far, nothing but "Musk is a fascist so that's why all the good people are leaving Twitter" spin.
I think it’s more that Elon musk encourages this kind of discourse. He’s a player in the game. There must be something about it he likes.
> what are their skill sets?
Mostly web development, though you're gonna have lots of security, data science, devops, machine learning, and other related skill sets in there
> what did they do all day at Twitter and Meta?
the above jobs. Some of them probably genuinely did it poorly or half-assedly and were correctly identified as low-performing, but at the scale of these layoffs we can be pretty sure many of them were productive and competent.
> Who is likely to hire them?
Mostly other tech companies. Some of them will probably take it as a sign to switch industries (e.g. to finance) or roles (e.g. to management or PM). That being said, tech companies in general aren't hiring very much right now. I do share your curiosity about whether this will lead to a glut of tech workers and what they will do about it.
> If and when they find new positions, will they be able to work remotely?
Probably. That's becoming the norm for tech work these days.
> I imagine workers for large tech companies may be more specialized.
It's not *that* specialized. It transfers easily to other companies in the tech industry, as well as to companies that do have in-house software despite not being a "tech company". Those generally pay less, but if there is indeed a glut of tech workers I suspect many of them will be willing to take the downgrade.
As an aside: even the gas man now works from home. A neighbor in my apartment complex parks his tricked-out pickup truck whose bed is rimmed with gas meters in an uncovered parking spot. They look pretty well secured, and the truck's too big for a covered slot.
I imagine he or she is dispatched from home. Surprising.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14lrUDqrepFfvHy7z02Qah3B6HwMU0ZE05XFpj2lxBZg/edit?usp=sharing
Hello folks!
I am glad to announce the 10th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first few meetings were great (approximately 8 to 10 people), and I hope to see many of you at this one. Snacks will be available.
Saturday, 11/12/22, 2 pm
1900 Port Carlow Place, Newport Beach, 92660
The Picnic tables outside the community clubhouse
33.6173166789459, -117.85885652037152
https://goo.gl/maps/WmzxQhBM2vdpJvz39
Plus code 8554J48R+WFJ
Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik+acxlw@gmail.com with questions or requests.
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (video and reading at the end)
1) Ken Wilkenson on the harms of inequality
2) Levels of intensity in psychedelics
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually go for a walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660. I also provide paleo and vegetarian-friendly food.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Inequality is more beneficial in developed countries than improved wealth. Professor Sir Richard Wilkinson.
KTLS18: Richard Wilkinson on Inequality - The Enemy Between Us
https://youtu.be/9mZfSxdpaMg
This is a quick summary that links to supporters and detractors.
https://revisesociology.com/2016/08/14/spirit-level-summary-wilkinson-pickett/
2) Psychedelic Levels of intensity
Provides a taxonomy of the types of psychedelic experience ranked by intensity and dosage
The 7 Levels of the Psychedelic Experience
https://youtu.be/UQRfTD6AXPs
https://effectindex.com/effects
If People want to return to previous weeks' topics, there is still ground to cover. I would like to discuss entropy further.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy
Imagine you live in a group house. You eat together, you clean together, you work together, you meditate together. Sometimes members from the group travel to another group house part of your network. Sometimes you are sent on an individual mission to go get a useful item from another group house which is a three week or three-month journey away. The key currency of your brotherhood is the gossip and stories from the other group houses. Everyone lives for the pastime of storytelling, and no night goes by without the swapping of a tale.
One member of the group house never travels, but always listens. He skips meals to sneak off and jot down some juicy stories. By midnight candle and by light of the moon he writes. This is my impression of Bede the Venerable.
Bede was an Anglo-Saxon, a monk, and a prolific writer and teacher. From a North Britain monastery, where he was put at the age of seven, he became the voice of all Britain. His voice carried across the channel to renew France. And this France kept the flame of learning despite the Viking onslaught which bloodied Bede’s once-majestic monastery.
Parlous the age. Parlous the waters. Parlous the journeys and the fraying threads of civilization. Today it is nearly effortless to keep knowledge alive. But in those days, a single book could cost something like $40,000. Imagine how that would affect all knowledge if the price of knowledge were so high.
In his book the Ecclesiastical History of the British People the British people become another Israel called by and calling out to God for salvation. The British are discovered first as slaves on the market on auction in the Forum. The future pope Gregory inquired where these white angelic faces fell from. He learned they were Angles from Deira whose king is called Aella. From these pagan roots, Gregory foresaw a hidden meaning. “Not Angles rather they are angels! Indeed, Deira for from De Ira of God they will be saved! And Aella is blessed for in naming their king they sing Alleluia!” The monkish puns and ironic monikers punctuate Bede’s work with a regularity as set as the Liturgical Hours.
Any way this how I understand English monasticism before it was destroyed in 793 by the Northmen.
What Bede would see in Astral Codex Ten, Aella, and Substack, I leave to the kabbalists among you.
I am seeing no signs of culling!
I've noticed at least one reply to a comment of mine that appeared in an email notification but not on the actual thread.
I have been culled. Well deserved too.
I've culled about 40 comments so far, you're probably not seeing them because they've been culled.
Will we see a list of the culled comments at the end of this experiment, to see what fell below standards?
Trust me, that’s a bad idea.
I think this is working better than I expected precisely because people are just deleted and not informed.
I also have a strong suspicion that the twist will turn out to be that Scott isn't deleting jack shit, he just wants to see if the mere claim of deletions will make the commentariat up its game.
I don't think he's gamey like that.
I might be just tarring Scott with the brush of his profession, but one thing I learned from studying the history of the discipline is that research psychologists will gleefully construct arbitrarily manipulative experiments unless you physically restrain them.
This might be hair splitting, but Scott is an MD psychiatrist, those types do mostly med management for patients, and are not very scheming that way. Psychologists are traditionally the more behavioral experiment/test-administering/scheming types. It is indeed Eremolalos you need to watch out for instead.
I'm gonna agree that Scott's also not gamey like that. We can wager on that and see if he'll fess up at the end to his strategy. I suspect it's going to be exactly what he said.
Yes, I'm a psychologist myself and right this minute my basement is full of subjects whom I have gleefully convinced that Scott is the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde and if he culls their posts they will be allowed to travel back in time with him to the Mauve Decade.
I assume they're all now posting extremely high-quality comments to avoid that most wretched of fates?
On the contrary, many are eager to hook up with Aubrey Beardsley
I've been reading different views on when distillation was invented. I have sources saying everywhere from the 9th century AD to the 5th millenium BCE (based on vessels recovered about 15 years ago on Cypress.)
It seems like a huge range. I'm deeply skeptical of the later dates and I'm curious if anyone has any insight.
Martin Levey and Maria Rosaria Belgiorno seem to be prime proponents for the very early development of distillation.
Distillation was invented some time before the 1st millennium BC. How far back we're not quite sure. I don't know anyone who says it was developed in the 8th century AD but the position is completely unsupportable. We have references to distilled products from the Bronze Age like perfume and we have diagrams of Roman stills.
Widespread liquor distillation started in roughly the 12th century AD and changed radically in the 18th-19th century as it industrialized. And of course continues to change with technological progress.
Is it possible there might be some confusion of terms going on here?
Fermentation as opposed to distillation?
No. For example, I haven't read this particular cited text, but I've read other texts by the linked author. Her title specifically references alembics, which is a type of equipment very particular to heat distillation.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/behind-distillation-maria-rosaria-belgiorno/1127187560
Ok.
I know I have read a paper that seemed pretty conclusive about the existence of beer 10,000 -5000 BCE. Chemical analysis of pottery..
For beer you need fermentation but not distillation.
Yes I know, that was why I brought up the possibility that the terms were being confused.
Another possible source of confusion of terms: I think I've read that distillation for alchemical purposes predates distilled spirits.
So essential oils being distilled before alcohol? I have only a weak understanding of what "alchemical purposes" includes. I haven't heard that term referred to metallurgy. Is that what you're referring to?
I used a vague phrase because I don't remember the details. I think maybe they were distilling alcohol for some purpose other than drinking it.
*shrug* lets try to start an argument and see if I survive
I believe biotech and the possibility for bioterrorism, is more of a danger then any near term agi.
I don't think agi is likely to be soon; nn's are not general computation and generality will be a very hard problem.
1. Before we have general ai, I believe, we could have hacking narrow ai's, who are better at breaking out of technical boxes then understanding 3d space and human speech. This will be painful, and will probably break the current internet. But an internet after such an invention of such creatures isn't a forest of dead wood.
2. The human brain has several systems that appear well integrated. It seems to me intelligence is a collection of subsystems, for example alpha go intergrated nn's with min max trees. Either the alignment problem is solvable or it isnt; and how do you make subsystems "aligned" towards the same goal if its a hard problem? I expect that there will be a growing libary of good ideas that we slowly learn to smoosh together in ways that are useful, there will be family's of narrow ais that are super human is several niches for when you can push 2 ideas together, when theres maybe 100 subsystems to integrate to mimik the human brain
3. ai and fusion are 30 years away says guy who makes money on ai and fusion
And bio-terrorism is coming:
1. gain of function research, locked the world for 2 (going on 3) years and it appears to be by accident ; the technology to implement this is "lock sick animals in cages near other animals" (maybe humanized mice)
2. cisper
3. anti-human enverimentalists exist and were cheering that co2 went down during the lock downs
4. mental illness and isolation is increasing
5. The mrna technology is a way to manufacture proteins in basically any host that can survive it. If anything people wanted it to produce less product for vaccines. Why would humans be the best hosts? There are simpler life like worms you can cut into 1/8ths and get 8 individuals, or mold and plants. While the animal kindom has several nasty toxins waiting to be pulled at. Couldnt you use mrna to produce a toxic that happens to be toxic to animals with brains but not one of these simple creatures and just dose them repeatly and extensively with mrna and produce biological poisons without a traceable ingredient.
The big issue with bioterror is targeting. You'd need to develop and deploy a vaccine for your own people (covertly, I assume) before using a transmissible disease. Or you'll risk killing your own people.
Maybe genetically engineer some crop plants to be toxic? You're still hitting mostly civilians.
Genetically engineer yeast to produce some particular chemical? Sure, but delivery is still an issue. As is containment of the yeast during production, refinement, etc. And if exposure kills, good luck not exposing yourself.
That would a limitation for a state or other organization who sees ingroup worth of protecting. Not necessarily true for anti-human enviromentalists or dooms-day cults.
Recently there was an environment protest in Berlin, which prevented emergency vehicles passing to assist an injured bicyclist who then died. There were pro-protestor voices that commented that it is a fight for a climate, not cuddle party for climate, and casualties are acceptable and necessary.
No comment on AGIs, but it is extremely difficult to create an x-risk with biotech. Create a super-plague? Some people will be immune anyway, while your pathogen will evolve to be less virulent and spread easier. Create a plant disease and destroy the food supply? Billions will die, but some people will keep on trucking, eating whatever survived the disease.
Peter Watts's Behemoth is a semi-realistic biological x-risk, though I remain unconvinced it wouldn't lose in a long-term evolutionary race with "classic" life.
Im sure humanity would survive nukes as well
I think theres a tipping point where you dont get new computer chips for 200 years tho
What if hacking/coding narrow AIs end up building AGI before humans are capable of it?
And on mRNA and toxins: we already have very deadly toxins that are not that hard to obtain (e.g. botulinum toxin); the main factor here limiting terrorism is deploying it in a way that it gets to a lot of people.
> What if hacking/coding narrow AIs end up building AGI before humans are capable of it?
I dont think hacking and coding is the same thing and github co-pilot will not type out the magic 1k lines of dense math theory for a compete general theory of intelligence(which probably cant exist anyway) after you type "//function makeai makes a safe, human aligned general ai in your $HOME"
again I think intelligence is a collection of subsystems that are fairly well aligned
A human brain does not have a minimax tree solver in it; none the less its not hard for a human brain to design one or to make the connection to 2 player perfect knowledge games and even since it was built there has been super-human-at-2-player-games ais; you *align* it with a nn's(which is a product of calculus not a good model for brains) and you start winning everyone at all 2 player games
How you maintain the requirements of these subsystems, when you start mixing together 3, 4, 5, 100 subsystems together will be hard. All the while there will be 100 factorial narrow ais being used by bad actors with super human capability in their narrow fields and requiring super human counter measures.
Hacking and coding are not the same things but there's a lot of overlap when it comes to any hacking that is *not* social engineering--you need to be able to understand code well to find vulnerabilities and you need to write your shell code subject to very tight constraints. Anyway coding AIs are another "narrow" area that can be pursued that could lead to AGI (probably not aligned) assuming you're correct about needing a lot of "subsystems" and a superhuman coder would have an easier time sticking them together without breaking them. Github copilot is AFAIK the first coding-specialized AI that works at all, you shouldn't assume it's the ceiling.
Needing 100 subsystems for AGI is pretty doubtful too; just because the human brain has a lot of subsystems and our intelligence can use them doesn't mean all or even a lot are required. General intelligence as-such of humans seems pretty robust when losing a lot of things in situations of brain damage or atypical development, and while evolution can get ridiculously efficient it can also be just as ridiculously inefficient in its early iterations of a feature.
While I was browsing Zillow, it struck me that a priori I would expect market incentives to tend to cause overproduction of the more-legible features of housing (size, yards, pretty pictures on zillow) at the expense of less legible features (walkability, nearby amenities, durability, community, accessibility, time-savings). It also struck me that low density imposes negative externalities on all your neighbors by making them travel farther to get from point A to point B, compared to the counterfactual where your low density lot didn't exist and everything had been built in different places accordingly. A Georgist land value tax could help internalize that externality and promote density.
The first seems dubious to me, because it would require a lot of people to buy houses based on these more superficial characteristics, which in my experience hardly anybody does. It's a great big investment, so everybody I know makes it very carefully, and spends a lot of time and effort ascertaining whether all those harder to measure things are worth the price they're paying[1]. Most people walk the neighborhood, for example, and assess how far away the things they want to get to lie[2].
The second also strikes me in the first place as pretty unimportant to almost all buyers. You wouldn't buy a house in a low density development unless you yourself prized the space between you and your neighbors above any delay in getting somewhere.
And in the second place at anything higher than rural one-house-per-square-mile densities, I'd say it's more common that it takes *longer* to get places in a higher density development. In the 'burbs it may be 2-3 miles to the grocery store, but the door-to-door time is like 10 min, because you have a car in the garage and the store has a big parking lot and the roads are big and have low traffic. In the city the grocery store may be four blocks away, but if you have to walk it will take you longer than 10 min (plus you have to carry all the groceries on your back), and if you drive parking and traffic will both be nightmares, and if you take public transport or it's rush hour it could easily be far worse.
-----------------
[1] As evidence I adduce the fact that Zillow and Redfin include stuff like "walkability index," school quality, and even used to include crime/safety stats until that became politically incorrect. People clearly want to know these things, or they would not add things that are expensive to calculate.
[2] Here we note the famous adage that the top 3 valued characteristics in real estate are "location, location, and location."
> While I was browsing Zillow, it struck me that a priori I would expect market incentives to tend to cause overproduction of the more-legible features of housing (size, yards, pretty pictures on zillow) at the expense of less legible features (walkability, nearby amenities, durability, community, accessibility, time-savings).
Correct. This is true even within the house where you try to cram in as many listed/filterable features. Sometimes at the expense of livability. To a lesser extent there's issues of imperfect knowledge and heterogenous goods.
> It also struck me that low density imposes negative externalities on all your neighbors by making them travel farther to get from point A to point B, compared to the counterfactual where your low density lot didn't exist and everything had been built in different places accordingly.
This is not a negative externality. This is just the nature of ownership. You might as well say my sandwich imposes a negative externality in that you didn't get to eat it. Regardless, when it comes to urban planning dense urban centers impose more negative building patterns than suburbs. The ideal would be a city built around a series of networked coherent urban cores. Of course, this can be through single family towns or dense apartments.
> A Georgist land value tax could help internalize that externality and promote density.
It would promote density because it'd incentive maximal building on minimal amounts of land. It would not do the other things you propose or correct an externality.
Not sure if politics is allowed in this thread, but hopefully it'll be okay especially if I keep to the process-and-predictions side rather than object level stuff?
Going into the midterm it seemed to me that a lot of people (and prediction markets) were assuming that the 2016 and 2020 paradigm of polls significantly overestimating Democrats' share of the vote would continue, and even more cautious commenters (including me) thought there was a significant chance of that.
Now that we have at least the rough sketch of the results it seems like things were much more like 2018 than like 2016 or 2020- the polls were mostly right and if anything it was Republicans who underperformed. Prediction markets in particular did noticeably worse than 538.
What are people's thoughts here? A couple obvious potential explanations:
-Sample size just isn't very big. Sometimes the polls do better, sometimes they do worse.
-Trump being on the ballot adds unusual effects that the polls aren't good at accounting for- when he's running, he outperforms the polls, but that doesn't apply to midterms.
The simple answer is probably the best answer. The polls are always right-ish, but the margin of error is always going to be at least 3-4% if only due to sample size effects, and now that all elections are close elections, 3-4% isn't enough to know with high confidence who will win. And, that's a 3-4% margin of *error*, not of consistent Republican underprediction. Sometimes the polls underpredict the Democratic vote. But theories that there's a consistent error one way or another because [X] makes one group less likely to respond to pollsters, are theories that the pollsters themselves know about and try to correct for by weighting responses from different groups accordingly. Sometimes they overcorrect and sometimes they undercorrect, but anyone who tells you that their deep understanding of the minds of the voters lets them know which, is full or it.
Joe Biden actually called the midterms correctly on the 4th and he was widely mocked:
""I think we’re going to keep the Senate, pick up a seat. I think we have a chance of winning the House. I don’t think we’re going to not win. We’re keeping the House. So I’m optimistic. I really am," Mr. Biden told reporters traveling with him in California."
Also rightwing partisan polls were predicting that there wasn't a red wave. People misread those polls due to hopium and assumed a big shock. Thanks to Trafalgar we knew Dems were going to win the Senate. Cahaly predicted nearly every competitive Senate Republican candidate's vote share correctly for instance. Within a 1%.
I don't think this was a case of Trump not being on the ballot. Outside of Florida Dems just won the persuasion battle. Voters who said the economy was "not great" voted for Dems over Reps by a good amount. Bad Republican Senate candidates and Dobbs probably account for most things.
Two more possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive:
- pollsters' problem of 'quiet MAGA voters' is currently roughly balanced by the problem of young adults, who heavily vote against MAGA candidates, being more difficult to poll. (because no land lines to call, they don't take cell calls from unknown numbers, and they have little interest in things like participating in opinion polls)
- the serious (nonpartisan) pollsters have kept tinkering with their samples and weightings, trying to learn from their varying results during recent elections, and had some success this time around with their adjustments.
A week or two back, someone told me that he had tried to buy one of my books from Amazon and it wasn't available. I searched for my books on Amazon and found that almost all the self-published books, including two that Scott reviewed in SSC, were missing. On further inquiry, I discovered that KDP, Amazon's self-publishing branch, had deleted my account. Their explanation, after I had made inquiries and asked to have the decision reversed, was:
" Upon further review, we are upholding our previous decision to terminate your account and remove all your books from sale on Amazon. Having multiple accounts is a violation of our Terms and Conditions, and we are confident that your account is related to an account that has already been terminated due to violations of our Content Guidelines. As a result, we will not be reinstating your account."
They have given me no explanation of in what sense my account is "related to" another account that had been terminated or what that other account was, despite my asking.
The obvious solution is to put the books up on another service — Lulu and Barnes and Noble have been recommended to me. That gets them back on Amazon in both print and ebook form and I intend to do that. But I remain puzzled about what is going on. My first theory was incompetence — that KDP simply made a mistake and was unwilling to take the trouble to find and correct it. The alternative is malice, probably ideological, by someone at KDP in a position to fudge up reasons for removing my account or, less plausibly, by someone outside KDP who found some way of making it look as though I was violating their rules.
If any of you have experience with competing services, let me know. So far I have had one recommendation on FB for Lulu, one for Barnes and Noble.
Wow, and I thought it was bad having my comments permanently demoted on YouTube. To have one's *books* taken down is a nasty thing to do on what is most likely minimal evidence (someone else named David Friedman?) But... you can put them back up, right?
Looks like his books are back up on Amazon. I just finished reading this one: https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Systems-Very-Different-Ours/dp/1793386722
It was good. Would recommend.
Amazon KDP eventually reversed its decision and put my account back up, although I still had to go through the process of putting each book back up. I was told, not by Amazon, that the reason was people with Amazon contacts getting attention to the case from real human beings — my previous interaction, pretty clearly, being with software.
Having extensive experience with KDP pains, I'd say don't even try using it if you are publishing anything even remotely controversial or inappropriate for the Amazon overlords. It's much better to use a third-party service that will distribute to ebook stores such as Amazon for you. They have enterprise-level Amazon accounts, which gives them access to actual human beings to dispute takedowns with, and they'll fight takedowns on your behalf, or at the very least be able to give you an explanation for why it was taken down rather than an automated message.
I forget the exact reasons why but I've heard that online marketplaces tend to care much more about keeping buyers happy than sellers.
Maybe because we tend to be specialised producers but generalised consumers.
This is a shame. I purchased Legal Systems Very Different from Ours at the end of June without issue. By the way, I was just reading it now (seriously, one minute ago I was on page 273).
If there are any Amazon employees reading this, please help him out if you can!
I would say incompetence with high probability. These systems are usually driven by probabilistic algorithms, and if you end up on the wrong side of them it can be really difficult to get an actual human to review your case. Unfortunately, appeals processes with human CS agents are viewed as expensive (they're a marginal cost, which tech companies really want to minimize) and so the companies tend to resource them as low as they can get away with.
Consider the propositions:
1) Most people want to feel good about themselves.
2) Most are not really praiseworthy.
3) Some people are outright failures.
4) We have mass media that are capable of near-instantly communicating ideas between people.
Where do 1-4 lead you? For me, it seems to imply that many persistent or even popular ideas will be about cope. People who are outright failures will generate ideas to cope with their failures, while people in the bulk of the spectrum will generate ideas to cope with their mediocrity. Before mass media, most of the cope was probably for the people in 2 due to their large number, while after mass media the people in 3 started creating weird and persistent cope groups.
Examples of pre-mass media cope groups:
i) Christianity. Christianity maintains that the rich and powerful won't reach paradise after death, while the poor and innocent will easily be virtuous enough to gain entry to Heaven. Classic cope.
ii) Eastern religions with karma and reincarnation. Similar idea as above.
iii) National socialism. The Germans couldn't believe that the German Army had been defeated, not a single shot was fired on German land after all! It must have been the home front, a stab in the back! Very clearly cope.
New cope groups post-mass media:
i) MGTOW. Unsuccessful men trying to cope with their failed romantic lives by trying to convince themselves it's high-status to not be in a romantic relationship. Cope.
ii) Anti-natalism. People who are too lazy to form a family and have resorted to moralizing over small climate impacts or other weird stuff ("the world is too bad for me to want a child"). It's cope.
iii) "Fat acceptance". Do I even need to go on?
Weird other copes that I don't know how to categorize:
i) Liberal blank-slatism. High-skill and high-intelligence successful white collar workers who have been raised on the idea that success should be earned by hard work, so they refuse to believe in innate, unearned skills. Coping about their failure to work hard enough to earn their success, or something?
ii) Conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstrapsism. A weird less-common variant of the above where the person instead takes as a postulate that success IS earned by hard work, then copes with the fact that most people aren't successful by maintaining that they must simply be lazy.
What does ACX think?
Interesting take on antinatalism. Never heard "it's cope for people too lazy to form a family" before...
I tend to find myself disagreeing with reasoning like "oh no the world is too horrible *now* for me to have a kid", like the world is worse in some fundamental line-crossing way than it was, idk, a few decades ago.
But I'm also quite sympathetic to a principled antinatalist stance that doesn't take the state of the world, including environment/climate, into account at all - it's mostly that I haven't encountered a convincing argument against the asymmetry that follows from "a potential person not coming into existence is ethically neutral, even if they would have a life they would consider enjoyable", which I find myself agreeing with. (Also the sort-of consent issue that you can't ask potential people if they agree to being existed.)
At the same time, I...
- like children, and feel I'll very likely want some of my own.
- have "the universe contains a flourishing humanity, or some direct successor of it" as a terminal value that I consider to be Good.
- think that, at present human biology & psychology (not that there's some strict separation), it's Very Important for humanity to have replacement cycles with new humans who haven't yet overfitted their models to culturally biased training data and think they have found the correct answers to how to do things.
Kinda like that thought that society (or some subset thereof, eg some academic branch) primarily advances via the old & powerful people dying, or at least retiring.
Basically - I don't think my antinatalist leanings have anything to do with laziness, but with intellectually held ethical principles, which are in conflict with other values I hold, with pragmatism, and with my own inherent drives.
Ie these leanings don't help me cope with anything, they're actually making it more difficult.
Prediction: I'll probably bite the bullet of non-consensually forcing existence on a few persons to satisfy the other preferences (and presumably preferences of my partner).
If anyone has good arguments, fire away!
Why assume most people are not praiseworthy? That sounds too misanthropic even for me.
On the wider point, I don't think this paradigm is constructive. You can reduce every worldview that's not complete nihilistic misery to cope, but people holding these worldviews enjoy life and do important work while the nihilists hang themselves. If rationality is systematized winning, disrupting all positive frameworks because they are "cope" doesn't look like winning.
Without touching on your broader theory, your understanding of Christianity is wrong here. The NT does say it is harder for rich people to enter heaven, but it has nothing to do with being / not being virtuous enough. Entering heaven in the Christian understanding depends on faith, and specifically not on amount of virtue. Scripture also describes wealth as a blessing from God, some of the OT patriarchs were quite wealthy, etc. So the view of wealth in Christianity is not as one-dimensional as you're stating.
The Bible contains multitudes of contradictory statements. Jesus said some pretty extreme anti wealth things. (quoting from memory) “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” and in Matthew 19:21 “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” and similarly in Mark 10:21 “ Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.””
I think you ascribe in (1) a far higher level of self-doubt and anxiety to the average person than is reasonable. Where's your evidence that sufficient numbers of people suffer from near-obsessive concern about their self worth that they would build all these religions, political systems, and ideologies, at enormous cost in order to address it?
Surely *some* people suffer from savage self-esteem problems, but not, I think, enough to construct entire religions or political movements.
I think blank-slatism is mostly about coping with not being on the top of the heap. Most of the professional middle class are absolutely seething themselves into hell over the existence of billionaires etc., and even about capitalism as a system even though they're the primary beneficiaries. Blank-slatism not only suggests that all the rednecks you hate deserve their trailer parks, it crucially suggests that if you meet a guy who's richer and more powerful than you, and are able to convince yourself that he's also stupider than you, *that guy's wealth is necessarily undeserved* and you have a moral right to usurp his place in the big status and wealth ranking; you can tell yourself that his superiority to you is only due to an evil, unfair social order, instead of the almost certain truth that you're actually total shit compared to the rich guy.
Also, in a post like this I'm surprised you didn't include the massive, probably largest losercope: nerd culture. Especially for women, having nerdy interests is a clear coping strategy for being or believing yourself to be ugly: I have never, literally never, known a single woman who A) was good-looking, B) had anything like a reasonable self-image or self-esteem, and C) even liked to read. It seems clear that basically any woman who even thinks she has a reasonable shot at being hot enough to participate in clubbing culture or whatever you want to call it dives straight into that and invests all her time in it, e.g. approximately all women would actually prefer to be doing that, and reading, knitting etc. are just compensatory occupations for the losers who don't think they cut the mustard. (With men it's a bit different, I've known several jocks who liked things like Warhammer and Tolkien, and each of them had friends who in turn, etc. In fact I personally know more than one guy who got jacked specifically because of liking Conan the Barbarian, then ended up doing shit like swimming for the swim team or playing football from there. These guys are just repelled by the nerd *subculture*, or don't even really know it exists, and don't participate in it.)
While I can't confirm that all the highly attractive nerdy women I know have "reasonable self-image or self-esteem" I sure know a lot of knock-outs who are into nerd shit and they don't act like they're in doubt about their attractiveness any more than anybody else. But I know plenty of attractive men who are into nerd shit too. I think it *is* quite likely that when they got into the nerdy stuff they were comparatively socially low class--maybe they were unattractive or socially awkward in high school and grew into themselves.
But also: As nerd stuff gets more popularly acceptable and comparatively higher status, I'd expect even that association to break down.
"I have never, literally never, known a single woman who A) was good-looking, B) had anything like a reasonable self-image or self-esteem, and C) even liked to read."
Sweet Child of Prague, so what you are saying sounds like "Hot chicks are dumb" or "Only ugly chicks read".
Can we at least get a definition of what you consider "reading"? Even the kind of mass-market bestseller fluff which I don't read myself is indeed reading, albeit of a low level (you couldn't pay me to read Jodie Picoult but she seems to be popular).
What do you consider "hot" and "ugly"? This can be very subjective and what to you is "average/plain" could be "pretty/attractive" to someone else.
Try linking to some images online of what you consider "this is what I call a hot chick and I bet she don't read", please?
"Especially for women, having nerdy interests is a clear coping strategy for being or believing yourself to be ugly: I have never, literally never, known a single woman who A) was good-looking, B) had anything like a reasonable self-image or self-esteem, and C) even liked to read. It seems clear that basically any woman who even thinks she has a reasonable shot at being hot enough to participate in clubbing culture or whatever you want to call it dives straight into that and invests all her time in it"
Either you aren't paying attention, or you live in a very unusual bubble. I know quite a few stunningly attractive women who work as literal rocket scientists and are very confident in their ability to excel in that field while still being really, really, ridiculously good looking. I can't honestly say whether any of them participate in "clubbing culture", but they have enough time left over to e.g. earn advanced degrees and do really, really, ridiculously hard technical work at a high level.
I know a whole bunch of A+B+C. Reading is, funnily enough, more popular among women - check the userbase of e.g. Goodreads. There is an absolutely huge overlap between nerds and artists, and you'd be surprised how many nerds you can find on a rave party. See also: Cyberia.
Perhaps your social circle is just boring.
I'm very well aware that most casual? entertainment? readers are women; that doesn't imply that most women are readers or that they aren't selected from a subgroup of women. For a sex-flipped example of the same principle, consider Warhammer. Inarguably male by a large majority.
I am pretty sad about how much of the variation in gender and human experience you seem to be missing, enough so that I suspect you're actually trying to bait attractive nerdy women into responding to you rather than stating your real position.
But fine, I'll bite, because maybe you do just need the existence proof to be nudged into a more expansive view of humanity (and admittedly, because I like the excuse to list my credentials.)
Me: https://i.imgur.com/vVct884.jpg
Also me (preparing to go clubbing): https://i.imgur.com/KWmlX5x.jpg
Also me (in VOY-era Star Trek cosplay I made myself): https://i.imgur.com/3OHBh3c.jpg
(the cosplay makes me look bigger than I am, but it's just ill-fitting. Hopefully the clubbing photo gives a better idea of my body type.)
I have a degree in neuroscience from an Ivy+ university. My IQ has been formally tested at 140. I am a senior software engineer and the #6 contributor to my work repo.
I like Star Trek (clearly), board games (my favorite is Innovation), and yes, reading, including sci-fi, fantasy, non-fiction, and fanfic (my favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut).
For my birthday in 2019 I hosted a classic LAN party. I know 49 digits of pi, and all the lyrics to Lemon Demon's "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny". In high school I was in computer club, chess club, and on the robotics team. I have never been on any kind of sports team or spent any amount of time voluntarily watching sports. I've read not only The Hobbit and LotR but also The Silmarillion.
I didn't exactly choose to be like this. Sure, I've gotten into some of these things on purpose, but when I was 7 years old I loved everything Star Wars, spent several months doing nothing with my free time besides sorting my Pokemon cards by various schemas, and another several months doing nothing but poking around the content in Encarta 2000.
Frankly I bet I have more nerd cred than 70-80% of the people who read SSC/ACX, thankyouverymuch.
I also go clubbing, have an interest in fashion, makeup and interior decorating, attend music festivals, and love pumpkin spice lattes. I have as much sex as I want.
I also do things on neither the "nerdy" nor "basic" axes - I have pet rats, I listen primarily to metal/industrial music, I spent some time as a leftist political activist living in an honest-to-goodness hippie commune.
People don't have to fit into tidy little boxes, and in fact mostly don't.
(And no, I don't normally brag about myself like this. I'm aware it's a bit cringe, even in this context, but the situation did seem to call for it.)
As a reply to both yourself and Eremolalos: what's the point of dragging this to an entirely personal, individual level? I doubt you intended it that way, but that ends up being a pretty ugly rhetorical trick where you put me in the untenable position of either throwing up my hands and lying that "okay, fine, I made up my life experiences for no reason, you got me" or grossly violating the conversational norms of Scott's blog (which I already joked about earlier with Jonah). For this reason, I haven't followed any of the links either of you posted. Perhaps that seems evasive or dismissive to you, but it seems to me to be the only way to maintain anything like discursive hygiene here.
Instead, I'll remark that I think it's interesting, especially in the context of Jnlb's original question/thesis, that both of you apparently reacted really viscerally to what is in fact a pretty unremarkable empirical observation, calling me a misogynist etc. What exactly is the origin of this emotional outrage at someone having experiences incompatible with yours, and/or your self-image?
Finally, a question:
"enough so that I suspect you're actually trying to bait attractive nerdy women into responding to you"
What on Earth would be the point of that? Genuinely baffled by this suspicion.
I did not call you a misogynist. I am not enraged. Your observation is very politically incorrect, but I don't give a shit about that. I could tell that you thought you were making an unremarkable observation, and I was actually sort of astonished that you thought what you were saying was pretty obvious basic stuff, and had somehow not noticed how many exceptions there are to your generalization. If you are at or have been at a college or university or a professional setting you have to have seen many examples of female scientists, female athletes, female professional, & observed that the entire hotness spectrum is represented in these groups. And obviously these women did not get to where they are by knitting and clubbing. Even if you work at Starbucks you will have seen lots of hot female shit-kickers come through. In fact, even if you never leave your bedroom but you've been on ACX you'll know that Scott recently married an entomologist. She likes bugs so big they barely fit in your hand. Do you think she goes "eww" about tromping through the bush because there are spiders there? How on earth can you be failing to notice that your generalizations are inaccurate?
So I didn't post the pix because I felt that I or my daughter was being personally attacked -- I posted it to back up my point. I get that a photo set does not win the argument hands down, but it's a valid way to make a point.
Why was doing that an ugly rhetorical trick? What's "unhygienic" about it? I posted photos of an exception to your generalization. If you're afraid that looking at the photos is going to make you break Scott's conversational norms (um, how, exactly? you're going to feel obliged to say that my daughter or oxytocin-love are actually dogs? Heh, I don't think you need to have worries on that score). But, if you're squeamish about these pix, then google "young Jan Goodall" or "best current female mountaineers." Give 'em the 'ol Anonymous could-she-get-into-the-club-free test.
"What exactly is the origin of this emotional outrage at someone having experiences incompatible with yours, and/or your self-image?" I'm irritated, but not outraged. Also, as I said, astonished & curious. If your generalizations really do hold for the setting you're in, what setting *is* it?
"I did not call you a misogynist."
No, that in particular was Oxytocin. I was replying to her too, after all.
"I am not enraged."
For a guy who's definitely not mad you sound pretty mad, but let's not make this into a recycled Buttlord gag – baffled I understand, but baffled sounds pretty different in my mind; regardless of your internal state, I feel like the heat/light ratio on this subthread is getting bad enough that I considered not replying.
"If you are at or have been at a college or university or a professional setting you have to have seen many examples of female scientists, female athletes, female professional, & observed that the entire hotness spectrum is represented in these groups."
I am an engineer, I studied engineering, I work in engineering, and I have not seen those examples or observed that. The few women studying engineering when I did were representatives of a quite narrow band of the hotness spectrum.
"And obviously these women did not get to where they are by knitting and clubbing."
Just a minor point here: the knitting was something I mentioned as a typical feminine-coded nerd-spectrum activity. I'm not suggesting that knitting is what women in general prefer to do if provided with a full gamut of options.
"Do you think she goes "eww" about tromping through the bush because there are spiders there?"
I do not. I never claimed the bit about camping was general, so accusing me of a false generalization there seems... well it seems like the sort of thing a guy who's too mad to read properly would do actually. What I said to Jonah was to first concede he had a point, then suggest a reason for our divergent observations on that score. Does that really sound to you like someone denying the non-universality of his experiences? If it does, I genuinely don't know what to tell you.
"Why was doing that an ugly rhetorical trick?"
Because if I look at them, and it turns out I sincerely don't think your daughter is very attractive and this is an understandable case of fatherly overestimation, I'm now in the position of either having to insult you in a way widely regarded as unacceptable far beyond the borders of this blog (and for which I would undoubtedly be sanctioned), or to lie and pretend you're right to avoid the insult. This is a pretty bad-faith corner to work one's counterpart into if it's done on purpose.
As for the googling, young Jane Goodall was absolutely not an attractive woman. I checked this again now and she looks like a gawky, flat dork who doesn't appear to know how to smile in the pictures that came up. "Best current female mountaineers" gives me no hits on DDG.
Finally, I would like to suggest to you that if there's no emotional outrage here, if you genuinely don't give a shit that my observation is very politically incorrect, it's odd that I got pushback on *only* the thing I said about women, when I said something only very mildly less brutal about male nerds. Not one word of criticism on that, even though it was a near-identical claim. Why do *you* think that is?
"if there's no emotional outrage here, if you genuinely don't give a shit that my observation is very politically incorrect, it's odd that I got pushback on *only* the thing I said about women, when I said something only very mildly less brutal about male nerds. Not one word of criticism on that, even though it was a near-identical claim. Why do *you* think that is?”
3 reasons:
(1) I don’t agree that you were only mildly less brutal about men. Let’s compare your typographies for men and women:
Women:
-hot: care only about clubbing, have no interest in books
-not hot
—those who adopt nerd culture to cope
—those who do not, but distract themselves with knitting and reading
Men:
-jocks
—jocks uninterested in Tolkein & other nerd culture things
—jocks who are interested in Tolkein, Warhammar etc. They make friends with others in nerd culture, presumably both jocks and non-jocks
-non-jocks
—those who adopt nerd culture as a cope
—presumably some who have no cope, but just feel like losers
—those who get so into Conan the Barbarion they get jacked and become jocks
Notice how much more differentiated & complex the male typography is? There are 5 categories instead of 3. Also, for the males there even exists the possibility that someone can change from the not-hot group to the hot group (the guys who dug Conan and got jacked). And there’s a realm where jocks and non-jocks can come together, around shared nerd culture interests. Also, regarding the women you declare that “I have never known a single woman who was good looking and liked to read.” While you don’t have anything to say about whether male jocks like to read or have any interests or skills beyond athleticism, you at least do not say that jocks are complete blanks as people when it comes to anything except, you know, jocking.
So the first reason I am critical of what you have to say about women is that I think it is a particulartly Flatland version of the rich 3-D truth — way worse than what you have to say about men, though that too seems pretty lame and bleak to me in comparison to the crazy variety I see.
(2) The second reason I am critical of what you wrote about women is that I am proud of my daughter. When I read what you have to say about women, I imagine you seeing my daughter and mentally stuffing her into one of your 3 cramped & flat little categories, and I feel pained and angry. One of the reasons I’m proud of her is that she is very pretty, but has managed to escape being over-concerned with her looks & relying on them to get her things. She doesn’t care about clothes & makeup, & got a degree that allows her to make a good living.
And by the way, I really think you should look at my pix and oxytocin's. You are not all that locked into bad options. If you think they are good counter-examples to your line of thought then the honest thing is to admit that. But of course you aren't obliged to do that . But let's say you don't think they are good counterexamples. You think the women in the photos are not particularly attractive. Well then, you have options, right? You can just look at the photos and make no comment about about them. You can say in a civil way that you do not agree that these are attractive women, perhaps softening it by saying well, these things are a matter of taste. Nobody's going to kick you off ACX for saying that. Oxytocin and I put up the pix as a challenge of your views in an argument. If you honestly think the challenge fails, it's reasonable to say that and we'll have to take out lumps.
(3) In general, I find your ways of understanding people’s self-esteem & how they deal with challenges to it to be simplistic and mean-spirited. “Most of the professional middle class are absolutely seething themselves into hell over the existence of billionaires.” I really don’t think that’s true. I am a member of the professional middle class and I am not seething with jealousy of billiionaires. I’ve make a pretty good living, I can buy and do they things I want to. I’d love to make another $50K/year, and hope I will sometime soon, but beyond that, I am satisfied. I do not yearn to have a bigger house, a solid gold toilet or a large penisy car. And I do not think I am a bit unusual in all this. My friends all seem to feel the same. We certainly have things we yearn for, but it’s things like to be young again — or to see again some people we’ve lost — or to overcome some personal flaw. We don’t yearn to be billionaires.
Do *you* yearn to be a billionaire? Later in the paragraph about how the professionals are seething about the billionaires you describe a person salvaging his self-esteem by telling himself that rich and powerful man is stupider than him and the man’s weath is undeserved. But then you add that the “almost certain truth [is] that you're actually total shit compared to the rich guy.” Sounds like you’ve really bought into the idea that wealth is the sole measure of worth, as well as the idea that people who are not at the upper end of some scale or other are worthless.
Oh also, I know plenty of other women in this category, including some I'd call hotter than me. (I have a coworker who's an excellent engineer, and the first thing I thought when I first met her was "wow, she looks and dresses like an Instagram model.")
I know many women who are various kinds of nerdy, including one or two full classic comics-and-video-games-and-math types, who are conventionally attractive. Lots more who like to read. If that hasn’t been your experience, I think there’s some massive sample bias going on. I know my own sample is skewed in the other direction (I have hobbies with an even gender balance that skew both attractive and nerdy, i.e. climbing and hiking), but the question is one of existence as much as frequency.
I would not class climbing and hiking as nerdy activities per se, and I don't think they're even nerd-*oriented* because I don't feel like those are hobbies with an overrepresentation of obese wheezy cheetodusters *or* weedy pocket-protected coke-bottle glasses guys.
That being said you do have a kind of point insofar as I also don't know any women at all, actually, who would react to the idea of hiking or camping in any way other than "ew, insects!". Maybe this is some sort of urban/rural divide?
If you go up a mountain, the people you come across will be disproportionately likely to know what at least one of hydraulic jump and the Silmarillion are, IME. There'll be women and obese people up there too.
It's easy to avoid insects you just go hiking in winter.
Rather than argue with you about whether there are beautiful women who like to read and dislike clubs, and women who don't go eww at the idea of camping, I'm just going to show you some photos of my daughter. She is beautiful. She does not like clubs. She can do one-armed chin-ups and she climbs 5.12. Oh, and she has a degree in engineering. https://photos.app.goo.gl/pRE8XL3RXaXH8ZWg7
And she did not turn out this way because we are rural." We live in a big coastal city. Lots of climbers here, by the way, many of them hot women. Good GRIEF, where do you live, Barbieland?
I'm glad you're proud of your daughter, and I am annoyed with Anonymous too, but I really hope you have her consent to show her photos to random vaguely-misogynist internet commenters
I doubt she would be as sturdy and happy as she is if I was the kind of person who put photos of her online in scanty climbing shorts when she was 14, oxytocin. She is 26 and said she didn't give a shit what I posted.
Could be? I’m certainly reminded heavily of section III from I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/), where Scott talks about never interacting with religious conservatives. I’ll also note real quick that the two things you just correlated with nerdiness, while they certainly *are* correlated with nerdiness, are also the aspects of nerdiness that you might least expect to be least correlated with attractiveness. That’s why you brought them up, but the bigger issue is that they’re non-central to the question nerdiness.
I’m currently studying to be an actuary. The interaction that put that on the map for me was meeting an actuary at Gencon, a tabletop convention, where I was running a LARP I wrote. I met him because we both sort of coalesced into an attractive nerd subspace, and hit it off talking about climbing. Most of the people I climb with are programmers, gamers, Sci-fi fans, etc. They might not be a large share of climbers overall, but there’s a whole world out there. And the past three women I’ve dated/am dating all read books, fiction and nonfiction, unprompted, without mentioning it to people, for pleasure (though I would only consider one of them to be a serious nerd).
I think the X-as-cope framing captures some important truths, but even a cope-heavy framework offers plenty of room for women to get into nerd-dom and/or reading, even if they’re attractive.
"That’s why you brought them up, but the bigger issue is that they’re non-central to the question nerdiness."
Obviously the two caricatures were just that, for brevity and clarity (two things you'll find that this reply fails at), but I guess we basically disagree about this on the level of definitions; as above I think the vast majority of male and nearly all female nerds are defined partially by their unattractiveness, and before the recent mainstream rehabilitation of "nerdiness" to mean liking very popular TV shows, I date to claim that this was also the generally accepted definition. Or if you prefer, the interests and unattractiveness have always been seen to be clustered together; my contention is that the causality flows from the unattractiveness to the interests. (Which appears to surprise people, both here and now and elsewhere/on other occasions, but if you think about it is rather trivial, because the idea that liking Magic: the Gathering *makes you ugly* is obviously wrong and the idea that it's just a comical but persistent coincidence is absurd.)
"I met him [in] an attractive nerd subspace [at Gencon]"
I'm actually willing to believe that there's some small minority of exceptions to the rule such that they can congregate and form a clique during a massive-scale nerd event such as Gencon.
"And the past three women I’ve dated/am dating all read books"
There's an obvious response to this, but it's inevitably rude as hell, so I'm not going to make it in this most hallowed of open threads.
"without mentioning it to people"
Sorry, is this meant to imply that they don't use it as status posturing, or that they're ashamed of reading? I genuinely can't tell which, but if it's the former I'm not sure how virtuous it is since part of my claim is that reading isn't generically high status among women.
"I think the X-as-cope framing captures some important truths, but even a cope-heavy framework offers plenty of room for women to get into nerd-dom and/or reading, even if they’re attractive."
I feel like this kind of slips past my claim rather than addressing it. I'm not really saying that there's no room for women to do this if they wanted to; I'm saying that in practice, women's aggregate revealed preferences strongly imply that virtually no woman *actually wants* to e.g. read and play boardgames in the first instance, but is only willing to do so as a "consolation prize" if she feels rightly or wrongly that she isn't attractive enough for her real desires which are basically a modern form of princess stuff. I phrased the observation in the coping-strategy framework because that was OP's topic, but you could just as well think of the thing itself as a completely rational acceptance of second place and that the coping only comes in when a given woman, as most do (and indeed this is also extremely common, endemic, among male nerds), decides she didn't want those grapes anyway, they were probably sour, and forms a hard identity around wanting/liking her nerd interests instad.
In fact, let me repeat for emphasis that when I wrote "especially women" I meant just that, not "only women", and I worry that by focusing on that part in these replies attention is drawn from the fact that I contend a large majority of nerd men are doing the exact same thing. It's just a smaller very high percentage.
Hot girls don’t read? This might depend on the definition of hot. I can affirm from experience that pretty girls do read - your definition of hot though might involve the kinds of things; clubbing, gyms, plastic surgery or over use of makeup, that the pretty but intelligent girl isn’t that concerned with.
No I just mean like, pretty enough to get into a night club for free. Not mindblowing or anything.
Haha, I love it. Reminds me of the review of Sadly, Porn, in which book it is argued that almost everyone anyone thinks or does is some sort of cope to try convince themselves they're high status. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn
Hard to explain all the specific examples without the risk of seeming mean. I will try to make these true and necessary and no meaner than necessary.
* The Klan is a cope group for bottom decile trailer park residents to feel superior to someone.
* Parts of the feminist blogosphere are basically a cope group for femcels. Overlaps a lot with fat acceptance.
* blank slatism seems to have originated as a cope for non-aristocrats who were jealous of aristocrats, to justify erasing aristocratic distinctions. After that battle, the principle kept going further and did a lot of collateral damage. An uncharitable summary of Wokeness as a cope would be "everybody who has enough blue-coded immutable characteristics gets to blame their inadequacies on a laundry list of historical grievances and a vague miasma of present thoughtcrimes, without getting into plausible specifics of causal mechanisms for why these things would cause those inadequacies" This sort of cope is only necessary in a society that praises people for talents per se, instead of what they do with the talents they're given ala https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/
I would say that propositions 1-3 are not a given—at least not without further definition and context. I'd accept proposition 4, except the mass media can significantly skew what's being communicated. I would agree that there's a huge amount of cope marketing in the media with pitches for products and programs for people to lead happier, healthier, and more successful lives (most of which I suspect are ineffective).
Your model might work better if you categorized different copes by their function in our lives—a hierarchy of copes, so to speak—but Abraham Maslow already did this. Likewise, I think you waaaay over-simplify the coping functions of religions. For instance, many people use the religious groups they belong to as a social-cultural focal point while only paying lip service to the dogmas. That would be coping for social support and social enjoyment. Some religious groups have an overtly political outlook. For instance, certain jihadist elements of Islam want to reconquer all the lands that were formerly Muslim (e.g. India and Spain) and restore the Caliphate. Ultimately that would be coping with political disempowerment.
The implicit assumptions behind your arguments make a rational appraisal of them difficult.
>What does ACX think?
I think I will have to find some new coping mechanisms after reading this comment.
When exploring places on Google Maps satellite view (everyone does this, right?), I've noticed an odd phenomenon: snow-covered regions will frequently have really weird discoloration, typically green and/or pink, in a way that doesn't line up with anything I've seen in real life.
High-res example, moderate green color distortion: https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1641972,-168.5416009,1839a,35y,67.92h,1.71t/data=!3m1!1e3
Low-res extreme green/pink color distortion in the center of this image (goes away if you zoom in): https://www.google.com/maps/@54.5564273,-164.6284417,43088a,35y,90.83h/data=!3m1!1e3
Southern hemisphere example: https://www.google.com/maps/@-49.2470138,69.0636751,13366a,35y,90.83h/data=!3m1!1e3
Himalayan example in yellow: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.5948222,79.9878435,14941a,35y,90.83h/data=!3m1!1e3
My current best guess is that extremely white regions with the right angle of reflectivity onto the imaging satellite will get bright enough that some kind of RGB channel overflow thing happens? This would explain yellow (blue channel overflow) and magenta (green channel overflow) but not green, which I see frequently. Many of the green discolorations also don't seem like they're all that bright in general.
I'm confused. If anyone has theories or sources, I'd love to know about them!
Algae and other colorful microorganisms do grow on snowpacks sometimes, but this looks like an imaging error (algae don't grow in perfect rectangles).
Oversaturation tends to look like this: https://www.usgs.gov/landsat-missions/oversaturation which doesn't seem like a close match but it may depend on the sensor.
(Long) RE: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon (which I found from Vitalik Buterin's Twitter)
Once upon a time, a kingdom was tyrannized by flocks of predatory birds. Some species stood over ten feet tall and had hooked claws like scythes. Some species were clever and hunted methodically in packs. Some species had superior camouflage, nearly invisible until the moment it was too late. Some species were tiny, but dripped venom from their claws, so that the smallest scratch meant death. The birds could kill anyone, but most preferred weaker targets: the very young or the very old.
The misery inflicted by the vicious, hungry birds was incalculable. In addition to those who were gruesomely killed each day, there were the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends that were left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones. Victims of birds’ attacks who didn’t die were often left with painful scars.
People tried to fight the birds, of course. Priests and magicians called down curses, to no avail. Warriors, armed with roaring courage, attacked them, but failed more often than not. Chemists concocted healing brews for scratched victims, but they died anyway. The birds were prolific and deadly, but not perfect, so many people were able to survive encounters with the less dangerous species before falling prey for the last time. Most people were able to find happiness, though: they coped mostly by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them. Anticipating that many of their children would be lost to the birds, people began having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon for a girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday. Couples often spawned a dozen children. The human population was thus kept from shrinking, and the birds flourished.
Technological progress changed everything, though, as it is wont to do. The King’s master at arms developed a high precision crossbow. A smith developed a technique to cheaply produce swords and daggers. These weapons could kill many species of birds. For the first time, people felt like they had a chance.
One day, in court, the King declared a war on birds. “No society should live in fear as we do. It is an abomination that we have normalized this terrible scourge on humanity, this senseless grief and loss of life.” The people reacted with roaring cheers. People were ready to fight, to kill the birds that they knew would one day target their children, their parents, themselves.
The King proposed an unthinkably ambitious project: to wipe all birds from the face of the Earth forever. Humans would live without fear, would be able to go outside without watching their backs and wondering if it was their last day on Earth. No one would have to mourn their friends or siblings or parents or children. Each person in the Kingdom would be armed! Each would receive a house safe from the birds! And, most ambitiously: the King’s own chemist would be developing an antidote to the bird venom that had killed so many!
At this announcement, murmurs echoed throughout the hall. The venomous birds had been around forever. Anything and everything had been tried to spare their victims, but a scratch was always fatal. People started wondering if this was going too far, if the King’s project was a little too optimistic, an absurd waste of money. Loud grumblings started around the room, when suddenly a small boy yelled out from the audience: “The birds are bad!”
The boy’s parents turned bright red and began hushing and scolding the child. But the King said, “Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser than an old fool like me.”
At first, the boy was too scared and confused to move. But when he saw the genuinely friendly smile on the King’s face and the outreached hand, he obediently took it and walked up to the podium. “Now, there’s a brave little man,” said the King. “Are you afraid of the birds?“
“I want my granny back,” said the boy.
“Did the venomous birds kill your granny?”
“Yes,” the boy said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes. “Granny promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies for Christmas. She said that we would make a little house out of gingerbread and little gingerbread men that would live in it. Then a bird scratched her and she got sick and… The birds are bad… I want my Granny back!”
At this point the child was crying so hard that the King had to return him to his parents. The child’s simple testimony had moved the room, and everyone in the King’s court felt a rejuvenated zest to fight, to win, to reclaim humanity and these simple experiences from the predators.
And so, over the next ten years, the Kingdom’s bureaucrats and weapons masters and chemists went to work. The King’s weapon masters churned out more spikes and swords, arming each person in the Kingdom. They educated villagers on the safest times to keep their children inside and safe from attacks, and relocated people living in the most dangerous areas. More children, those precious young lives, were saved than ever before–dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of blossoming souls who would have been confined to that senseless oblivion!
Miraculously, chemists developed antidotes to the poison birds’ venom, and for the first time, people could be scratched and live! Some victims were fine after taking the antidote, and returned to their lives as before. Some became tired after taking the antidote, and felt fatigue and spiky pains in their wrists and ankles. Some couldn’t walk more than a mile without feeling their head spinning and their hearts pumping after being saved. But they were alive, and the people rejoiced!
Emboldened by their new technology, the King’s men killed more and more birds. Attacks went down, and the people felt safer every day. They knew that they were defeating the birds. But the birds were not completely gone yet. The giant birds with the scythe-like claws rarely killed anyone, now that people rarely left home without their standard issue gear and weapons. But they could still injure, and many of the frail never recovered from their injuries. Safe from the birds, people lived longer than they ever had before, but in their old age they developed strange new pains and behaviors.
As the years passed and many species of bird were made extinct, it seemed as though the poison birds were only getting more common. They were small, and sneaky, and could hide almost anywhere: not even the King himself was safe. When scratched, some people would have to take the antidote once, twice–but usually after this you would have to take another antidote, stronger and stranger, that had curious and multiform effects: it left the victims deaf and their minds slow, it thinned out their skin so pressure sores formed on their arms and buttocks; ulcers formed on their mouths and food tasted strange to them. And sometimes the venom lingered; the chemists never knew when it was safe for someone to stop taking the antidote. Some people could not afford an antidote, and sometimes it did not work at all. People who had survived multiple attacks weren’t as strong as they were, and some became unable to work, to walk, to think, or even use the bathroom, until their lives became a quiet constellation of experiencing their pain, their boredom, and simple pleasures like a ray of sunshine and a warm blanket.
MORAL: Let us not confuse treating death with treating aging, the former creates a Hell that is unthinkable for people who have no experience with nursing homes and ICUs.
On the note of the original, CGP Grey did an animated narration of The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant back in 2018, which is great for those who are more video-inclined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
I will say I did enjoy this rendition, though.
If the CIA wants to plant a story in the NY Times, what's its exact mechanism of doing so? Does one of the editors get invited into a smoke-filled room where a shadowy man slides a briefcase full of cash and the exact text they want to appear in the newspaper, or does something more subtle happen?
If anyone knows of a Youtube clip of a movie or TV show that depicts the process accurately, post it.
A reporter who has long time sources close to or aligned with the cia just gets a call from those sources and is pitched a story. It’s not complicated, it is almost just like a press release.
Is your wife doing better?
Medication and endurance training are helping, I would say she is back to 80%? Seeing a neurologist (in APR?!?!), and a cardiologist in a couple weeks.
In kind of a weird development, one of her preexisting 6 exercise/gym buddies had this (rare) illness 12 years ago, and one is a current sufferer (something my wife had zero idea about until she mentioned her recent troubles). Also a neighbor down the street was just diagnosed within the last week. Seems kind of odd for what everyone is saying is an uncommon syndrome.
Five months to see a specialist is kind of crazy.
I don't think getting the Times to write about it is the hard part. The hard part is creating the simulcrum of events, so that when the reporter (or readers) do a mild bit of googling afterward they come up with something that supports the story. I mean, you can't ask the Times to run a story reporting on revolution in Albania if there isn't in fact a revolution going on. You can't say "President Zelensky said such-and-such" if the man's press flack is available to answer yea or nay.
The most successful fake story is probably one of unverifiable future planning, e.g. Vladimir Putin is planning to this or that in Ukraine, according to confidential government sources that decline to be named because of the sensitivity of the story. In this case, probably all you need to do is *be* the confidential government source, and the only real barrier is probably that the story is consistent with the Times editors' world views and ideology. If it is, they're likely to talk themselves into printing it even if there's no real verification possible.
I think it is extremely common for national security reporters to have sources within the intelligence agencies that leak to them from time to time, and that these stories are often the reporters' bread and butter. A lot of media criticism centers around complaints that these reporters end up as more-or-less mouthpieces for their sources. So I imagine the default way to plant a story is simply to have several of your people have cultivated some reporters with leaks/confirmations on small stuff over the years, and now have them leak the story they want told.
An interesting case study here would probably be the NYT's coverage in the runup to the Iraq war, because the NYT in particular seemed like it almost turned into a part of the white house's PR campaign to convince Americans to support the war.
Old Frank Snepp video. I don't know how accurate it is.
https://youtu.be/UwerBZG83YM?t=86
One way would be to "accidentally" leak information relating to it to a journalist. I think this happens a lot - a lot of leaks are intentional, and are actually supported by the organization they're "accidentally" leaked from. In some cases, there might even be an implicit ultimatum - that, if the journalist doesn't publish the "accidental" leak, then they won't be given access to "accidental" leaks in the future. (I don't have good evidence for any this off the top of my head, other than the fact that it seems to explain the world really well, but perhaps someone else can add some).
This, plus the fact that for too many journalists a lot of "their" material comes from PR/ad ghostwriters. See Paul Graham's essay "The Submarine".
Overall it's a mix between "access journalism" which is what Ethan described, and journalists selling their platform to advertisers.
Legally, or illegally? Just a guess, but legally, they'd put out a press release and maybe send it to some papers: https://www.cia.gov/stories/news/
Illegally? Still just a guess, they either leak it the same way everyone does, or plant it in the foreign press and let folks pick it up.
Presumably it depends on the type of story, but on average I assume they'd order one of the journalists who's a paid CIA asset to write the story and one of the editors who's a paid CIA asset to vet it.
If you're a real conspiracist you assume the entire paper is owned-operated by the CIA.
I don't believe that there are any great number of journalists who are paid CIA assets, if only because that would be a complete waste of money and the CIA doesn't actually have an unlimited budget. You need a CIA official to decide what the story is and write up the outline. At that point, the CIA official just needs to call a reporter and say "I have a juicy story that will generate many clicks and get you that much closer to your next promotion; want it?" The reporter will not say no, because he does in fact want that promotion. And if he does, just go on to the next reporter in your Rolodex. The CIA officials in question all have Rolodexes full of reporters who have consistently played their part in that game, without needing to be paid for it.
Others have made the same point, but, cynic or just nut that I am, I don't buy it when it comes to the Times. I totally agree with you that there isn't any great number of journalists on the payroll, but the NYT has such a prominent position nationally as *the* newspaper of record that I can't believe it isn't worth their while to have a few spoops in there specifically.
How does the CIA turn journalists and editors into paid assets?
Wrong question. You start by recruiting someone to be a CIA guy, typically in college, *then* put him in the relevant position, e.g. NYT journo. You don't go floor to floor on 620 Eighth Avenue with a bullhorn, shouting WHO HERE WANTS TO BECOME A CIA GUY AND SUBVERT THIS PAPER?! That's too unsubtle even for a US intelligence agency.
Anderson Cooper did an internship at the CIA.
I think most assets aren't paid (and I don't even think Cooper is).
By paying them? I’m not sure how legal that is for the CIA, though. It’s possible that some friendly foreign agency does it. It’s legal in Britain.
I don’t know about the NYT but in Britain some journalists are on the payroll.
So I read Matt Levine's newsletter about the FTX thing, and I have a question.
The claim seems to be: "FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange." And now FTX has gone under, so Alameda doesn't have to pay back the loan.
But FTX and Alameda are owned by the same person, aren't they? So -- does this mean Alameda now gets to walk away with a big pile of FTX's customers' assets, while FTX goes under?
Is this legal?
The thing I was confused about is where Alameda got the FTT initially. FTX mints FTT, so doesn't that mean Alameda had to give cash to FTX to get it? Which makes the overall transaction something like "Alameda gives FTX $1 billion in cash to get N FTT tokens; Alameda then borrows $1 billion in cash from FTX and gives them N FTT tokens as collateral." Which obviously makes zero sense. Can someone explain this?
You've actually summed it up perfectly. It not making sense is part of the problem that then causes it to violently detonate.
Only, a few added steps might be:
Alameda doesn't have to buy the $FTT for a billion initially. We're the same people, Alameda and FTX.
It's possible to just transfer N $FTT tokens to Alameda. If a sale has to be made for purposes of paperwork, discounts or special deals are possible. So maybe Alameda gives FTX 10$ for N $FTT tokens, not a billion! Now our N worth of $FTT has price 0. But when offered up for trade, price hits 20$. Good thing we paid 10$ for N tokens, each of which is now totally worth 20$ (so long as we never sell and destroy the market).
The beauty of the whole thing is we've minted a token whose value is directly tied to trading activity on our platform. When used as collateral for a loan, the very act of people depositing to FTX and using the platform gives more funds to tap into. Which makes Alameda seem like a more effective trading group because they can use their tools. Which bolsters FTX, since we're so closely aligned.
Whole thing just goes faster and faster until, as you say, someone goes " Hey, why is all this worth a billion eaxctly? that doesn't seem to make sense. "
This whole sector is a scam so the default answer/assumption to all of it is that the companies are not operating as they describe and are just making highly speculative investments with funds hoping the overall speculative bubble in the area coves up for their lack of any real plan/economic value.
Just lie to people to get that money, go play with the money, and hope it all works out in the end! Great gig if you can get it and have no morals. Also why these dudes like EA. Dirty consciences.
Compared to fiat, btc has major structural advantages in:
* scarcity
* verifiability
* portability
* anticounterfeiting
* divisibility
* the inability of any third party to block transactions between consenting adults
The disadvantages are mainly volatility and a lack of widespread adoption, but those are the second-order outputs of a Keynesian beauty contest that bitcoin will win eventually due to the aforementioned first-order advantages. I've been hodling for a very long time and this latest kerfuffle doesn't bother me at all. I would still put pretty high chances of it flipping gold this decade.
Meh, a lot of those advantages are pretty fleeting and/or undermine each other.
The transactions really are not verifiable to “average” users.
Scarcity is worthless, my poop is scarce.
Divisibility is not something that is a meaningful difference from other options.
Anyway, it isn’t without merits, but I don’t think it is remotely clear those merits overcome its issues, or the inherent advantage of more traditional systems.
As ledger no one can alter is kind of annoying actually. And as you can see from how the sector has developed, basically people just end up redeveloping the same financial system but with shittier protections and less ease of use.
Scarcity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to be valuable long term. Fiat currency is not scarce because central banks are willing to triple the money supply to soften stock market crashes. We are seeing the resulting high CPI inflation in USD, GBP, Euro, etc this year.
I think that the worry is that Alameda does not actually have assets it borrowed from FTX. It might have used them to buy something which is now worthless. And since collateral (i.e. the thing which Alameda gave to FTX so FTX can seize it in case Alameda does not pay the loan back) is now also worthless, it is possible that FTX will not have any practical means to get its assets back.
Of course since Alameda and FTX are owned by the same person, it might be simplified as "SBF covertly redirected his client's money to buy who knows what".
I also have questions about legality on this. Does not appear to be an arm’s length transaction, but that rule likely specific to regulated entities.
I think we need more info. Does the loan say 1 FTT = 1 USD (or whatever). Or does the loan say, we loan you $X total notional dollar value, (currently made up of FTT worth >0), and later we get back $X*1.1 total notional dollar value, TBD what that includes.
the legality of it might have been the issue of lending customers or not properly isolating customer funds that were assumed to be held in trust. i'm not sure what agreement FTX had with its customers or what the default legal position of the assets held on behalf of FTX customers.
one issue with this 'lending' is that its always possible to structure a trade such that the custodian is able to capture X% of the value of the assets. the value the custodian captures is based on how likely the trade is to go negative because this is when the losses are paid out from the customer. for example i can take your assets and then put them all in red in the casino and ignoring the house edge my expected value of the transaction is 50% of the assets and this made up by the customer losing on average 50% of the assets.
Why would FTX going under mean that Alameda doesn't have to pay back the loan? Any world in which FTX ceases to exist is one in which someone else owns their assets (including any loans to Alameda).
"FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange."
Link the claim? I don't think I've heard Matt Levine say that.
I cannot link you to an email, but here's the full paragraph:
"The reason for a run on FTX is that you think that Alameda is, in my terminology, Customer C. The reason for a run on FTX is if you think that FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange. If that’s the case, then a crash in the price of FTT will destabilize FTX. If you’re worried about that, you should take your money out of FTX before the crash. If everyone is worried about that, they will all take their money out of FTX. But FTX doesn’t have their money; it has FTT, and a loan to Alameda. If they all take their money out, that’s a bank run."
I agree that he didn't directly say this was true, but he does seem to have proposed it as a possibility worth considering.
I've been attempting to be less introverted (not that there's anything wrong with it), but each day is a huge will-power fight against a strong instinct to go back into my shell. I've had limited success, but am interested to hear people's thoughts on why some of us are like this, how and if we can reliably overcome that instinct, or even if we should.
Doing MDMA in large groups completely altered my ability to socialize when sober.
It seems I uh, flipped my first MBTI letter somehow in the recent years and I'm not sure how it happened, only that it can. I still often get tired of people, but I also need and enjoy company way more than I used to.
It seems to be somehow related to confidence and self-image? Like, I feel pretty alright about myself, if someone treats me badly I assume by default it's a problem with them not with me, I'd even consider myself attractive to the opposite sex. Hell, sometimes I dance and enjoy it. None of those were the case a decade ago.
I think a huge part of introversion is being tired of the small hits of psychic damage one receives in company of strangers, feeling obligated to maintain a mask, etc. Once that resolves, being in company of people feels a lot more like being in the company of cats or dogs - sometimes they're loud and annoying, but they don't bother me otherwise.
I still think people have a preference towards solitude or towards others, but the preference is fluid depending on the mood and being completely locked into one mode may be pathological and worth working on.
I am introverted too, but then I have AS, so it's par for the course I guess...anyway, I am more extroverted in a few situations:
- When I know the people I am talking to quite well;
- When I am (semi)-anonymous like on internet comment boards etc. and don't have to talk in-person to others (like here, I wouldn't be that open if people could see me "live")...
For what it’s worth, I sometimes repeat to myself, “life is an act of will,” just as a reminder that not everything will be easy for me.
Apparently, being (more) extroverted is important to you, but also difficult for you — it takes willpower. I’d say that you already know how to “reliably overcome” (your words) your instinct toward introversion — by using willpower, pretty much daily. That may be the best answer there is.
I know it's clichéd, but it really helps to join some sort of group that meets regularly - a club, a adult class[1], an amateur sports team, bar trivia nights, etc. Having a regular appointment to go out and socialize works wonders.
Personally, I recommend D&D if you're at all into it - it's rising in popularity, so your local game store almost certainly has a group[2], and if not there's probably *someone* in the area running one. It coming with the added benefit that D&D is literally about pretending to be someone interacting in a group, so you're actually practicing social skills. I do recommend finding an in-person group rather than an online one if you can - online groups are much better than nothing, but face time is more valuable for filling your social meter.
[1] Like wine tasting or painting, not an actual scholastic subject that requires a lot of focus on the lecture. Your goal is to have room to socialize, after all.
[2] The downside to this increase in popularity is that it's largely among gen Z and alpha, so your LGS will probably have a lot of teens and kids there. If that's not your scene, it might be problematic - but on the other hand, the few actual adults there might be more willing to talk and relate to you as a break from the kids
I'm definitely still mostly introverted. My brain gravitates to conflict and to concrete tasks, while the really extroverted people I know like camaraderie and shared experience. So the first thing is, why do you want to be extroverted?
The most helpful thing for me (apart from my uncle enforcing a friendship quota when I was a teenager) was getting a job answering phones. It's a very controlled interaction with people, that has a concrete endpoint of "connect them to the right person". Grocery clerk also worked.
Assuming you've already got a full-time job, I'd say try making yourself an information quota. "I'm going to ask how three people are feeling this morning, and share two anecdotes with them." Goals are a good way to keep retreat instincts at bay.
It's not obvious what the threshold is to meet your social needs, and perception can be distorted by depressive symptoms. You don't really need to be less introverted in temperament, just get face-to-face time with friends, family, and people out-in-the-world. That's not contingent on talking a lot, but it gets easier the more you do it anyway. I'd suspect that part of what factors into the 'instinct' is comfort with the familiar, and by the same token, social anxiety. You can't substitute social needs with virtual, pornographic experiences - notwithstanding that everyone's threshold is different.
After I found a good balance of introversion vs extroversion (80-20 for me), I no longer had to spend will power to force extroversion, it almost came naturally.
I also found it helpful to strictly segregate activities, so that I know which mode I'm in. I guard my work, hikes, reading, and hobbies so that they remain solitary. I choose activities like exercise classes, sporting events, and errands for extroversion. I sometimes give myself a pep talk to remind myself how the extroversion mode goes: "Remember to smile, say hello, exchange small talk. Don't forget microfriendships."
I switched from introverted to mostly extroverted as a kid, and it was because I ate the frog until it stopped tasting bad.
In my case it was making the phone calls to see who wanted to hang out. Other common paths to the same thing include organizations like Toastmasters or other social orgs or networking groups. They usually have a few minutes for each member to speak on a standard template each meeting. Practice what turns you off about extroversion until you aren't averse to it any more.
I used to be far more introverted, and the biggest trick I learned was to make extroverted friends. Someone who would often give me a gentle push to go out/hang out/et, but would also respect it if I said “no, I REALLY don’t want to do this” really helped. And then over the years, I just built up my endurance for human interaction
I once saw this phrased (on tumblr, presumably) as "Introverts don’t make friends, they get adopted by an extrovert".
I've found this to be mostly true - most nerdy friend groups I've been a part of consist of several introverts surrounding a nucleus of an extrovert. Usually this takes the form of the extrovert "pulling people out of their shells", initiating hang outs (group or otherwise), seeking out and vetting (adopting) new members, and generally serving as an excuse for introverts to hang out in proximity to each other long enough to become friends with each other. Having a token extrovert with you at social events removes a surprising amount of the emotional burden of being there.
I've actually been on both sides of this dynamic - I'm definitely an introvert, but I'm just extroverted enough that I've gotten several deep introverts to mistake me for an extrovert. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that this is, to borrow a term from the ASD community, a form of "masking" - I can pretend to be an extrovert long enough to engage in the ways needed to meet my social needs. "Fake it until you make it" is surprisingly effective here.
I've also found that I could do this now, but it took a couple years of being fostered by an extrovert, and then working some high-interaction jobs
I liked this essay: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-object-to-the-concepts-of-introversion
> Social activity didn’t drain me because it took a kind of energy out of me, like exercise would. It drained me because I was ashamed of myself. Small conversations would leave me with an overwhelming question: did they like me? And, if so, would this trick I played on them—getting them to like such an obviously ugly person—persist? I never answered these questions conclusively, they just sort of whirled around me like horseflies until the fluctuations of my mood took me elsewhere.
My own experience was similar. For a long time I thought I was introverted, but actually it turns out that I'm just really bad at communicating when there's any kind of background conversation going on. (Also, for a while I was trying to have conversations with people I didn't have much in common with.)
My advice is to try different types of socializing and see if there are some that you enjoy.
Thank you. And thanks to everyone--my comment received some good feedback I'll need to consider.
I want to be less introverted because I too often default to awkward silence. With resting grump face and a tendency to be quiet, after years in the office people still don't know or talk to me and I think they avoid me. It's probably negatively affecting my chances at career growth just in missed opportunities alone.
I love absorbing information. But it seems like I only have a limited reservoir of attention (or something).
Basically, I find it very hard to read a book. My mind wanders *while I'm reading*. As-in I'm somehow reading the words in my head but thinking of something else and not absorbing anything what I'm reading. (I'm also bad at paying attention in meetings and was bad at staying attentive during lectures back in my school days.)
What kind of strategy can I use to help me focus? (I try caffeine -- but it's not clear if it helps.)
I've never been diagnosed with anything like ADHD -- but I also grew up in a time and place where such a thing didn't exist. I'd definitely prefer not to take any drugs (caffeine excepted :). This seems like the kind of place that might have good advice, so asking you all.
It can be hard to pay attention when other stuff is on your mind. Your goal is to focus but your task should be to find a way to keep your head clear and free of distractions.
I have the same problem (and have an adhd diagnosis fwiw) and I've found a few ways to achieve this, though it still takes willpower.
1. habit. If you read only irregularly, it will never get easier. Try to do the focused task more often and you'll get better over time.
2. Keep a sheet of paper or something near you. Whenever a distracting thought pops in your head, write it down on the sheet and tell yourself you'll think about it later--right now you need to read. This staves off the worry of 'forgetting' to think about it later.
3. Minimize external distractions, especially tech. Try white/ambient noise.
I found that getting off of social media eventually gave me my attention span back. The constant scrolling of a feed shifts the brain to be rapidly scanning rather than focusing carefully, and I found it really hard to read books. My brain was looking for the random reinforcement reward of an interesting post and wasn't finding it in a slowly unfolding narrative. Expect a bit of time to retrain your brain's expectations.
Might be cliche advice, but I found my reading retention improved noticeably after reading (most of) Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. He advises a very attentive style of reading in which you actively keep track of the structure of the author's arguments as you go, even to the point of noting the hierarchy of arguments in the margins (eg "Point 1A, 1B, 2A" etc). I didn't get to this point in the book but he even advises a version of this for novels and other fiction.
I almost never actually make those kinds of notes in the margins, but Adler did successfully meme me into mentally keeping track of the hierarchy of arguments as I read, such that I can only zone out for so long before I snap back and realize, "Wait, what was that last point the author made? Let me go back and make sure I got it." And I'm finding the zone-outs are of shorter and shorter duration as time goes on.
Oh, interesting. I've never heard of that book. I'll give that a try.
I did chuckle when you said, "I didn't get to this point in the book but he even advises a version of this for novels and other fiction." There are a *lot* of books that I don't "get through".
Ha ha, yes. The classic catch-22 of not being able to finish "How to Read a Book" until you've already learned the lessons from "How to Read a Book." In actuality, it was just competing with more urgent reading at the time, definitely want to finish it.
I've found it very helpful to also have the text read to me while reading it, using a TTS app (I use NaturalReader). This only works if you have the book digitally, of course, and preferably read the digital version.
> chew gum while you're trying to focus
I've literally never heard about this, but massacred a lot of pencils in my school days by biting them while thinking. Huh.
How fragile is a cashless society? I was trying to purchase an iTunes movie on Apple TV a few days ago for the weekend movie, and was always declined. Logging in to banking app didn’t show my accounts, it showed an error. So, then and there at least, my money is gone. I was not alone - people out for the night found their card not working, one guy had to run home leaving his watch as collateral. The problem was a multiple hour outage at HSBC, a major U.K. retail bank.
It got me thinking about a potential attack that takes out major retail banks for days, or weeks. Not only would that cause major disruption during that time, millions would literally have no money, but the subsequent fall out would also be disaster. No doubt people would try to go back to a partly cash society by withdrawing enough money to survive subsequent outages, whether they were personally affected or not, causing multiple runs in the banks.
It seems to me we have introduced massive fragility here without much thought, just as the fragility of globalisation wasn’t fully realised until it broke and supply chains were disrupted.
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/hsbc-customers-unable-to-pay-for-meals-and-shopping-during-online-banking-outage-12738693
(Sky says it started at 10:30, it was about 8:40 when I noticed).
Isn't this exactly what happened in Ukraine a few years ago during the notpetya atrack?
Basically a Ukrainian tax software firm was compromised and every network with the software on it was wiped. Sent Ukraine into something of a dark age and even took our the imternational shipping giant maersk. Darknet diaries has some great coverage on it: https://pca.st/episode/1e9f718d-4b2b-494c-9fa7-3847de922006
If it does prove more fragile, I think there are easy steps to minimize that risk through diversification.
For example, multiple credit cards. If you're deeply concerned about outages at a single bank, it's not hard to have backup credit cars with 0 annual fees. Say, a primary credit card that uses Visa, and 1-2 backup cards through Discover/American Express/Mastercard. More seriously, after the Canadian trucker protestors got their accounts frozen I started looking into alternatives and it looks pretty easy to get a Union Pay Card through China's ICBC bank (1). It's hardly foolproof but it's also fairly trivial to get; just another credit card.
If or when this becomes a real concern for you, there's an easy solution of multiple overlapping credit card and banking companies that are all eager for your business (with the exception of Americans in foreign banks).
I think we actually already have a solution to such a situation on the consumer side (at least in the short term) that's antiquated enough that most places have stopped accepting them: personal checks. They're essentially low-to-zero-tech at transaction time, and are inherently asynchronous in relation to the banking system.
Now, as I said earlier, checks are antiquated - most places don't accept them and I think most people under 35 wouldn't be able to locate their checkbook in their home, if they even still had one. In the event of a real banking emergency, the local executive branch could temporarily mandate they be accepted, and those without checkbooks just need to figure out their account and routing numbers and then you could produce and print a workable facsimile in an emergency.
The problems with checks is fraud risk, which is the main reason they aren’t accepted very widely.
I don't think the vulnerability that's most important is at the consumer end. The disruption you're describing is pretty mild. The important vulnerabilities are at the wholesale level, so to speak, e.g. the massive settlements that occur between big banks, between banks and the Federal Reserve system (in the US), between national banks, between big corporations and government entities and the Fed, et cetera. Imagine a situation where Bank of American suddenly can't get access to whatever cash it's parked overnight at the Fed, or a zero gets added to everybody's FNMA-owned mortgage, or it's not possible to convert pounds to euros for 8 hours. These would cause messes that would affect millions and be very difficult and costly to unsnarl, because the enormous clerical infrastructure that used to take care of all this stuff has been gone for 50 years maybe. How would the Bank of England sell a gilt to a Swiss investor these days, even assuming he has a stack of pound notes sitting next to him in his office (in Zurich), if the whole electronic apparatus is gone? I'm skeptical anyone at the BoE even knows how it was done in 1960. They'd have to get some codger out of retirement to suggest a procedure.
But by the same token, because this stuff is so obviously mission critical, it's probably the case that smart people have spent lots of time thinking about what-ifs and backups. I doubt they cover every eventuality, and there might be some shocking carelessnesses we'll only find out if a certain Black Swan occurs, but I doubt it's treated as casually as whether the retail ATM system is up and running 24/7 without ever a glitch.
Very fragile. Not only human error and hacking, but system control by political outgroup (see also CBDCs and the recent Canadian banking measures against the truckers).
As despicable as the action against the truckers was (and if you don’t think so pretend it happened to your ingroup, not outgroup) this isn’t really my concern here. It’s an attack taking out the main retail banks for days. An attack against the system, not by it.
And it could be very easily solved, or prepared for. Just ask every household to have some cash on hand, enough for a week. This is the kind of thing that needs the joined up thinking that is not really an attribute of what Dominic Cummings calls „the blob“.
A better example might be Russian banks getting cut off by Visa and Mastercard, though I don’t know how exactly Russians reacted to it.
I didn’t say cyber attack though. I’d just cut the wires.
Systems of nation-level importance generally do network analysis to avoid being vulnerable to exactly that - they run checks on the C2 graphs to simulate any set of given links being "cut", see what routes and links become lynchpins, and build in redundancy for those links. I know for a fact that AT&T developed software to do exactly that, and that software has many clients.
That's a known vector of attack and any competent nation-state-level actor is going to have prepared accordingly.
Does anyone know the details around the Warnock domestic violence accusations? I’ve poked around a bit, and hadn’t been able to find anything.
For those of you who aren’t inundated with Georgia campaign ads and think that I misspelled Walker, let me give the context. For the past couple of months, ads against Walker have been run, which say he “wanted to strangle employees,” “put a gun to his wife’s head,” “threatened a shootout with the police,” etc. There are a lot of quotes. Good odds that you’ve heard about these if you follow the news.
About maybe a month ago, a new strain of attack ads against Warnock (not Walker) started. They show a clip of police cam footage, in which his ex-wife accuses him of trying to back up his car over her. Besides that, very little context is given. It’s now a popular 10 second clip in a 30 second campaign ad, but that’s the only such accusation I’ve seen.
It seems to me that if this really happened in some objectively bad way, it would be more prominently featured in ads. At the same time, if it really didn’t happen, it would be slander/libel. I haven’t been able to find details on what actually happened, and was hoping someone else with more google-fu than me had figured it out. Thanks
I actually live about 20 houses away from Warnock in Atlanta - the neighborhood consensus view is that basically nothing actually happened, and if anything it was an accident. There is no information other than what is in the news reports (I asked someone who would know).
Thank you for the infos everyone
My first hit got this: https://www.newsweek.com/hershel-walker-raphael-warnock-domestic-violence-claims-explained-1752264
Which lead me to this: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/16/erick-erickson/no-proof-warnock-ran-over-wife-obstruction-case-dr/
Which has this relevant quote:
Warnock called police to Ndoye’s Atlanta home shortly before 8:30 a.m. on March 2. According to a police report:
Warnock said Ndoye accused him of running over her left foot with his 2014 Tesla while they were arguing in her driveway. Ndoye was reluctant to show her foot to the officer, who wrote: "I did not see any signs that Ms. Ouleye’s foot was ran over." Medical personnel arrived and were "not able to locate any swelling, redness, or bruising or broken bones on Ms. Ouleye’s left foot."
I watched a local Atlanta news coverage over it. It seems that it's mostly a nothingburger. They were having a fight where she wouldn't move and the car probably got pretty close to her feet. However, according to medical examiners her foot was uninjured. Certainly it's nothing compared to everything about Herschel "Family Values" Walker.
Will having a car run over your foot always leave visible injuries? It seems like it would, but I'll admit I have no actual data.
I've had my foot run over and was completely unharmed (was wearing a shoe). I was surprised at the time.
N=1 but once as a teenager I fell out of a slowly-moving car while barefoot and my foot was run over by the back right tire. To my surprise, the only damage to my foot seemed to be some scrapes to the skin, which I'm pretty sure mostly happened in the "fell out of a moving car while barefoot" part of the incident.
For what it's worth, I found a Quora link with some anecdotes that sound a lot like mine:
https://www.quora.com/If-a-car-wheel-goes-over-your-foot-very-quickly-would-it-hurt?share=1
For whatever reason, it seems like it's often not nearly as injurious as you'd expect.
It could be related to whether the full weight on the wheel goes onto your body. If the tire goes on your foot, it may at all times be also partly on the ground. Not so if the tire goes over your leg, which is much thicker. Also, if it goes on your leg then the vehicle will rise a lot further off the ground than in the foot case.
Also, some cars aren't that heavy on a per-wheel basis, especially the rear wheels that don't have an engine on them.
One can imagine a situation where he was trying to get out of there, and she was trying to block the car, leading to a close call. I do recall reading that she was checked out by paramedics and had no injuries, so her claim that he actually ran over her foot is hysterical.
> I’ll be deleting any comments below a vague and shifting quality bar, probably around the 33rd to 50th percentile of the average ACX comment. ... I only let the highest-quality comments (according to my subjective judgment)
I'm perfectly fine with this method, but I think it'd be essential to have significantly more input from you Scott, as to what your subjective understanding of high quality vs. low quality is.
For example, the 'neg. comment, low content' issue you mentioned lately was helpful, more of this is needed. So: what is high quality for you? What are elements of low quality?
For context, I am aware of the '2 of necessary, true, and kind' approach.
Okay, I predict, if you Scott will add more concrete, actionable information on what you subjectively consider to be high quality and low(er) quality comments, then a) over time (6 months) the quality will improve more on all threads than if you don't do this and b) folks will feel less nervous posting on challenge mode threads (=the number of those who feel nervous to post on challenge mode threads will be lower + for some of those who feel nervous to post, the level of nervousness will be lower, while it will not rise to the same extend for some others who are nervous to post, so that overall the level of nervousness in the 'nervous to post people' will be lower).
I'm aware, that this is difficult to impossible to check. Probably more an expression on how I'd expect things to work.
I think the fuzziness works because scrolling through here we can see the average quality level of the comments, and if we don't have an equivalently high-quality observation maybe we'll refrain.
Makes me wonder whether he's had to do any comment policing at all, or whether merely putting that rule in place made everyone self-police a little better. One would assume a base rate of him having to delete 33-50% of comments if he just did this on an open thread, but I'm guessing with that rule leading things off the real number is sub-10%.
At the time of writing there are 423 comments. People are brave! I normally just lurk on the comments and post very, very rarely. The last time I posted anything substantive Scott mentioned it as one of the highlights (so proud!) only to dismiss my argument (so mortified!). Well it was about Easter so perhaps it was a case of 'Whereof only 10,000 words will do, thereof you must be silent'.
The only semi regular posting I do is to try to promote my podcast Subject to Change (https://pod.link/1436447503). I'm almost certain promotional efforts like this are against the spirit of the comments section so I only do it when I feel I have an episode I am really proud of or if I think the readers of the blog might find it particularly interesting. (Not least episodes with David Friedman, Battleship Bean and John Schilling - all well known to ACX).
Anyway as the challenge has been thrown out I thought I'd jot down some random and not very connected thoughts on my experience as a (very) amateur podcaster over the last few years in case it is of interest. (And if it is not of interest it will be zapped!)
1. My podcast is one where I interview interesting people who have written interesting books. This is the laziest kind of podcast. I am relying 0% on my own knowledge and charisma and 100% on that of my guests. There are no production values to speak of.
2. That said putting doing the podcast is a surprising amount of work. I like to edit out misspeaking and pauses and loud breaths and so on. If the guest spoke for an hour that usually takes me at least 3 hours to edit.
3. Getting guests is easier than I thought it would be. I can understand that because if I had spent three years writing a book I'd sure want to talk about it. On the other had the historian Niall Ferguson surely had a point when he said his son had advised against doing podcasts because then people wouldn't bother buying the book.
4. I don't think I have had any bad guests so far. Pretty much everyone has been good at speaking.
5. One thing I have learned is not to waste time on introductory chit chat. When I listen to a podcast I just want them to get on with it. If we haven't got on with it within a couple of minutes maximum I have failed. I finally worked that out after about 15 episodes. I wish I'd have worked it out sooner.
6. A mistake I keep making is forgetting that I know more than the audience. So when I ask a question I take the shared knowledge I have with the guest for granted. That then leads to an answer that excludes a large part of the audience. And I still don't know exactly how to get the episode to flow in a way that will work for the listener. Sometimes I feel I am really helping the episode flow along and sometimes the guest is a great speaker and my job is just to say 'Oh really!' from time to time. Edward Shawcross on the Last Emperor of Mexico was probably the most effortlessly entertaining speaker of all my shows (and such a good subject!) and really didn't need me there at all.
7. My podcast doesn't get all that many listeners. Between one to four thousand downloads depending on whether the guest is famous AND has a strong social media game.(My social media game is zero). And for most guests it is at the lower end of the scale.
8. That doesn't matter - it is a chance for me to speak to and learn from some of the brightest most interesting people on the planet. Well, interesting to me. It is an absolute privilege.
9. I get extremely nervous before doing an interview. I want a good show for selfish reasons but I also feel like if I don't do justice to the guest I have really let them down.
10. There is more history around than I realised. I thought I knew a fair bit of history but it turns out I knew practically nothing. I had no idea about the Portuguese rounding Africa and heading into the Indian Ocean. How could I not have known about this? It is one of the most consequential events of world history. I blame my school! Then there are the smaller stories like the wreck of the Batavia. A treasure ship and a psychopathic madman made for an amazing story that Russell Crowe is turning into a movie. It turns out history is full of these barely believable stories that I had absolutely no idea existed.
11. I said above I am not so fussed by my listener numbers. That is not true. I want to have lots more listeners! But I have no idea how to get them. And I have no idea if the number I do have is okay given that it is a simple interview show or if I could promote it more effectively to people who would enjoy it. And there are lots of other history podcasts out there and some of them are really, really good.
12. My podcasts are way too long. Often an hour and a quarter or longer. I have started trying to split the really long ones in two if it is possible. But I think my philosophy will continue to be that I want to do the topic justice rather than fit with listener needs. But I must admit if I saw a podcast on the fall of Constantinople that was an hour and a half I might pass quickly by. But it is one my best episodes!!!
13. When you interview an author about a book they wrote 5 years ago they will likely have forgotten a lot of it. I read the book a few days ago, they haven't thought about it in years.
14. Guests never, ever have decent microphones. There is nothing you can do about this.
15. Recording on two tracks (which you can only do remotely) is great. It means that when you try to interrupt and the guest sensibly ignores you then you can just silence your embarrassing attempt to say something.
16. And finally if any of you have some good ideas for guests who you think would be entertaining please let me have your suggestions. hogg.russell at gmail dot com The podcast is history mainly but some film stuff mixed in.
Scott has promised to remove low quality comments. So if he doesn't take this one down that is basically an endorsement. So please give my podcast a go! https://pod.link/1436447503
I love your podcast and would hate for you to have to reduce the length at all. IMO the best podcasts are at least an hour in order to have enough time to explore any idea in depth. I just finished listening to your most recent episode on Interregnum England, a subject in which I have no particular interest, and I enjoyed the entirety.
I work in the skilled trades and often have long stretches of time where I can listen to whatever I want while I build, and your content really hits a sweet spot for me, along with Bilge Pumps, Red Scare, and The Fifth Column. Please keep it up and don't be afraid to go deep, people can always stop short if they've had enough.
PS please do more with Bret Devereaux, the man is a treasure!
I can't tell you how nice it is to get comments like this. You have inspired me to get back on the computer and chase up some new guests. And yes Bret Devereaux is brilliant - so knowledgeable, so enthusiastic and such good company!
I love your podcast!
I don't listen to every episode, some seem too obscure and niche for me, but generally they're great.
I would never have guessed that your numbers were so low given the quality.
Might seem lame, but love your voice and accent.
I would advise against splitting long episodes. Plenty of successful podcasts have episodes many hours long. If it's good, I don't want it to stop. Personally I definitely prefer a single longer episode.
Thanks for the great content you produce.
As I have said above this kind of feedback really keeps me wanting to produce more. Thank you very much!
As a guest, your work is very much appreciated. A large portion of the reason that I haven't done anything besides text myself is that I don't have the skills or the patience for production work.
Re 9, it doesn't come across. I didn't notice it the first time (possibly because I was also quite nervous), and definitely didn't notice the second time, although in fairness that was a repeat of stuff I'd done earlier.
Re 11, I know I made a conscious decision not to see traffic numbers, and it's one that I haven't regretted. Do what you want to do, not what draws eyes (ears?)
Re 14, sorry about that. You manage to make us sound good anyway.
And re 16, if you want me back, I'd be happy to do so, although I'm not sure what to talk about. Changes in the relationship between land and sea? Early history of the battleship? Unfortunately, I'm falling into the problems you mention in 13 with a lot of the better early battleship stories.
Yes. Let's find a subject to do!
I've been flirting with the idea of doing a podcast, but it feels weird to create a podcast given that I never listen to them, because for me it's an incredibly tedious and frustrating experience (I'm very happy to read transcripts when they exist, and I wish they existed more often).
So thanks for a perspective on an amateur side of making a podcast, exactly where I'd land if I ever do one! Let me ask more questions:
1. Why don't you have transcripts? (I guess I gave that one away). Is it the cost/inconvenience or you're opposed to having them? If it were easy/cheap to generate a transcript, would you take care to always do it?
2. Do you get any listener feedback? How much of it, relative to the no. of downloads, and in what form? Do you wish you had more/less of it?
3. Do you give your guests exact or approximate lists of questions you are going to ask in advance, or is it completely improvised? Do you feel OK to spontaneously ask them questions leading away from the precise topic of the book (e.g. if talking about a history professor, ask about the life in academia and its ills and benefits)?
4. Do you try to put episodes out regularly and beat yourself up if you can't do it?
5. What's the platform you use to actually talk to the guest and record the episode? Zoom?
6. Does it happen as you talk to the guest that they misspeak or phrase something not very well and you simply re-do a part of the conversation, pretending it's "fresh" but actually saying again the things you both already said, slightly better? If that happens, how often; and does it happen by your request or the guest's?
7. Do you think you'd listen to your own podcast if you weren't doing it but someone else were, exactly the same episodes except for the different voice of the host?
1. No transcripts partly because it is too much bother but mostly because I don’t think there is much demand. Remembering my overall download numbers.
2. I get very occasional DMs on Twitter etc. very rare but I glow for days after!
3. I used to give a few questions in advance but have stopped. Nobody seemed to much want it. I have a rough outline prepared but just try to steer things so they can tell the story. If a new idea occurs to me I ask it and for example I asked Greenblatt about his faith in the light of the thoroughly atheistic The Nature of Things which was the subject of his The Swerve. Quite often I kick myself for not thinking of a question until after. On one occasion I wanted to kick my guest - a very nice old Japanese lady who asked me after we stopped recording ‘Should I have mentioned the time I was strafed by an American airplane?’
4. I aim for roughly once every two weeks. I don’t worry too much about timing so long as I have a couple of interviews in the pipeline. Getting a bit worried right now to be honest!
5. I record using Squadcast, edit on Audacity and upload on buzzsprout.
6. If it is a misspeak by the guest usually they correct themselves and I can edit so the error goes away. I don’t generally record a new bit but have at least once. If I stumble over my words I often just start again because I know I can edit.
7. Would I listen to my own podcast? I think for a lot of episodes I’d enjoy listening. But would my podcast be at the top of my list? Hmm! But really there are three or four episodes I am really proud to recommend. (And remember I don’t bring much to the podcast - often it’s a case of Scott’s ‘I see. Tell me more!’ )
Transcripts might help with SEO and getting new users to find your podcast. I would have thought with modern tech, automated transcription can make the task not too much work? But given your high production standards, I guess you would still need to review and edit any automated transcription.
I'd definitely want to make sure the transcripts were correct. But maybe you are right about it not being too much work? Would be good to get user numbers up. I need to have a think!
This is an interesting experiment which could have a few benefits. Forcing people to be more thoughtful about their comments could create a more intellectually stimulating environment for discussion. Additionally, it may help to weed out some of the less constructive comments that can sometimes bog down a discussion. I'm curious to see how it plays out.
I think a lot of people have a weirdly inflated idea of how good the bottom 33-50% of comments are.
Not to discourage people from trying to be excellent, because we should always strive for that, but the standard is more like "Please don't be terrible" rather than "Please be excellent."
"Forcing people to be more thoughtful about their comments could create a more intellectually stimulating environment for discussion."
Strong skepticism on this from me, simply because I haven't been more thoughtful about posting at all. I've just posted as I usually would and the devil take any deleted posts, especially since Scott already declared no personal consequences for deletion. I think the rule selects for confidence (and arguably accurate risk analysis) rather than anything else, which actually weakly selects *against* thoughtfulness since that trait seems (in my personal experience anyway, I don't have data) associated with timidity and self-doubt.
That's not to say that the experiment sucks or anything, just that I think its value has to come from the actual removal of bad content so nobody has to read it and the holistic impression is one of uncrappiness.
What are the current frontiers of research on the biology of depression? In particular, in the five years since Scott wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13/what-is-depression-anyway-the-synapse-hypothesis/, has there been any significant new evidence for or against the synaptogenesis hypothesis?
Androgens have been helpfully used to address depression (mostly in men, I think.)
Progesterone (which is structurally similar to androgens and another product of the same steroidogenic pipeline as testosterone ) has been used to treat some conditions in women like post partum depression. Scott covers this topic in regards to Zulresso (Allopregnanolone) which has a similar impact as the tragically unpatentable progesterone.
The anti-depressant effect of progesterone is consonant with the synaptogenesis hypothesis.
"Progesterone promotes dendritic growth, spinogenesis, and synaptogenesis via its nuclear receptor in the developing Purkinje cell. "
https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/149/6/2757/2454940
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7037875/
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/zounds-its-zulresso-and-zuranolone
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/tb95kh/progesterone_megadoses_might_be_a_cheap_zulresso/
Does Scott's audience contain any Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians or any other similar barbarians who'd be willing to answer my question: are "thoo" and "tha" used interchangeably, or do they follow the same rules as tu/vous, du/Sie, etc in other languages?
Not a Yorkshireman / Lancastrian - but my grandparents were (both).
As I understand it this is a bit messy, because there's both a geographical and a syntactic dimension.
Syntax – for many speakers "tha" is a reduced form of various incarnations of the pronoun, including "thoo" – much as we use a reduced form of "you" like "ya" or "y'" in many positions. So if someone asked "Who did it?" they might say "Thou!" or "Thoo!", but in ordinary fluent speech they'd be likely to produce "tha" (or thə, or th') much of the time.
Geography – "tha" is/was more common in the North-East, especially the East Riding of Yorkshire and (I think) going all the way up to Tyneside.
I don't think either form can be a plural pronoun.
Thanks for answering. I wondered if "tha" was effectively the informal, and "you" or "thou" the formal. But there's no reason someone brought up to speak with it would consciously note what the rules are. It might have been better to ask about which circumstances feel more natural for "tha" and which for "you".
As you probably know, the evolution in the language before the loss of thou/thee/thy was that ye/you/your gained a formal/respectful singular use, much like (and perhaps by direct analogy with) the French “vous”. The fact that the th-forms could then occasionally have a demeaning connotation (denying respect) probably contributed to their loss.
However, I suspect the situation in the northern dialects that retained the th-forms was a bit more complicated than just “thou = singular + informal,” with various dimensions of age, familiarity and status (and also Quakerness), and maybe you’re right that the reduced form partakes in that. I don’t actually know this from any expertise, I only know that in Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason and Dixon” the pattern of usage is quite complex and not transparent, and I very much trust Pynchon to have done a ton of research and to know what he’s doing!
Just came here to mention to scott an interesting study [ Ketanserin reverses the acute response to LSD in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study in healthy subjects ](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36342343/).
Here's the gist:
* ketanserin is a 5HT2A antagonist, it can however be used to stop an LSD acute effets *after* they started
* the level of BDNF is still increased by LSD even though no subjective effets were felt.
This to me seems like a step forward to triggering neurogenesis regularly without having to deal with the psychological impairement.
Therapeutic applications are one thing, but having a pill that stops an overwhelming psychedelic trip - even if it's in your pocket for peace of mind and you never use it - sounds amazing.
You read my mind
I don't really think that this study particularly supports the idea that the psychedelic effects aren't necessary for the antidepressant effects of LSD. There are a few reasons for that.
First, and most importantly, they aren't trying to (and don't succeed to) completely abolish the psychedelic effects of LSD. Rather, they're trying to limit the duration. In the LSD+ketanserin group, the duration of psychedelic effects was about 3.5 hours, compared with 8.5 hours in the LSD+placebo group. So the only conclusion this seems to support (with regard to BDNF levels), if any, is that the benefit of psychedelics comes from some time in the first 3.5 hours of effects, and that a psychedelic experience with a longer duration is not more beneficial.
Second, according to the p-values in supplemental table S4, none of the data about BDNF reaches significance. There clearly isn't a significant _difference_, but that doesn't mean that the _lack of difference_ is significant. (Using a better statistical test might reveal a significant difference, since all the p-values reported in the table are for individual data points, but I don't really know enough about statistics to say for sure).
Third, this study was preregistered as NCT04558294. That preregistration doesn't mention anything about BDNF. That immediately makes me hesitant to draw any BDNF-related conclusions based on it.
Unfortunately, I think the only conclusion that can be drawn from this study's investigation of BDNF levels is that more study is needed. I would be interested to see a study of LSD given after ketanserin (so as to completely abolish its psychedelic effects), though my prediction would be that it would be completely ineffective in that case.
I thank you very much for your input and the time you took.
The neurological trimming experienced by children as they develop is hardly an impairment. The need to separate the machine from the experience seems petty at best, and at worst an assault on neurodivergence, claiming the subjective experience of LSD to be impairment. Ahhh the foibles of the just say no generation 😸
I do appreciate this kind of impairement as much as the-very-selected-few-who-appreciate-this but you can't deny that this kind of experience every week is not sustainable for months. Plus it's hard to fit some busy schedules.
Now come to think of it, the tolerance might build up to the subjective effect but not to the BDNF effect.
I'm not saying we need human guinea pigs but I'm not saying we don't need human guinea pigs.
By the way, as most antidepressants I've heard of (psilocybin, SSRIs, MAOI, ketamine) trigger this BDNF increase, why hasn't it been tested to directly *inject* BDNF into human patients? Serious question btw.
Well if I'm not mistaken those are psychiatric medication wheras ketanserin is an antihypertensive. Thus I think only ketanserin (so far) is fit for staying as sober as possible.
Since there has to be *some* comment of poor enough quality to get binned, in order for this experiment to work, let me step up.
Latest advertising email from a French perfumier whose scents I do like and sometimes buy. This one is for the gentlemen out there (though not confined to them):
"The ideal gift for the man who is looking for you, the one you are looking for; the one who loves you or whom you love; for a father, a brother, a friend, or for yourself. After all, perfume has always been gender-neutral."
Four writers, from Casanova to Ernest Hemingway, and I'll quote you the Hemingway one.
https://www.histoiresdeparfums.com/blogs/hdp-blog/four-leaf-masculinity
"1899 - ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The Frenchest of American writers, Hemingway is one of the few to be equally revered on both sides of the Atlantic. An inveterate Parisian to the point of naming the bar at the Ritz after him, Hemingway was also known for his liberal drinking.
A great lover of rum, gin and champagne, he even invented the Papa Doble, replacing the dose of sugar with... a double dose of rum. A worthy heir to the opiated poets who made the great hours of French Romanticism, Hemingway is remembered as the embodiment of a right-bank intellectual epicureanism that is the antithesis of the Saint-Germain existentialism that today's authors claim as their own.
1899 emerges as a warm woody fragrance, free of treacly ambers without losing any of its generosity. Juniper and Bergamot echo gin and the mineral bubbles of the glasses of champagne that Hemingway swallowed during his interviews, then give way to a heart of cashmere-like Iris warmed by a voluptuous and sugar-free Orange Blossom, Papa Doble style.
Vanilla and Cinnamon underpin this heart in an old rum effect enhanced by a peaty whisky-like Vetiver, anchoring 1899 in the register of silky tobaccos; of a charming and irresistible sapiosexuality.
An image - Hemingway leaving the Ritz past midnight, the Place Vendôme covered in silent indigo, his wool and cashmere overcoat exhaling aromas of amber spirits, leather and vanilla-flavoured cigars."
Now this is teetering on, if not tumbled over into, pretentiousness but I like the way this guy weaves little stories around his scents and it is very French literary style. And who can resist having a go at "Saint-Germain existentialism", whatever that is when it's at home? It's a whole production around what are, to reduce it to the bones, a set of nice smells in little bottles.
If the description fascinates you, you can buy the four listed scents plus two others in a sample set:
https://www.histoiresdeparfums.com/products/for-him-discovery-set
Note: Unsolicited testimonial, no money or freebies changed hands for this.
I'm fascinating by the concept of using a perfume just for yourself, which I think women sometimes do (maybe even men for all I know). I get the use of perfume for the sake of someone else -- I've responded positively to perfume on a woman, although I have no good idea about why -- in my imagination she smells like herself only more so, if that makes any kind of sense.
But for me I *don't* want to ever smell myself, pretty much any conscious awareness of such would make me uncomfortable and want to go shower. To my mind smelling better is fully equivalent with smelling less, although I concede that women who are attracted to me almost certainly feel differently. I can resolve that weird tension by saying well, we look at the same thing (me) with very different perspectives, so we value very different aspects of it.
But how to resolve the idea of a woman wanting to smell good to someone else -- let us suppose a man because my Neanderthal mind works that way -- *and also* wanting to smell good to herself. Is she thinking "this would smell good to someone else to whom I want to smell good, even if there is no someone else in the immediate offing?" Or is it really only for her own satisfaction, e.g. "I want to smell as if I've spent all morning walking through fields of flowers?"
I wear cologne just for myself, like, even if I know I'm going to be at home all day. I like beautiful scents, and, for whatever reason, the way our culture consumes the art of perfumery is by putting it on yourself.
Humans are mammals; mammals orient themselves in the world by scent. I don't think we need any more of an explanation than that.
I rarely use perfume, but when I do, it's because I want to smell good *for myself*. I'm not interested in how it affects others, and indeed I don't wear it outside (partly because where I work involves being in the vicinity of kids with sensory issues so strong scents are out, but partly because I've never cared, and also partly I think because I had experience with one of the strong scents of the 80s, Poison, and the woman wearing it left a discernible trail behind her where even after she had left the room, you could still smell it. That put me off wearing strong scents in public).
Some of I think is hormonal;, when I've tracked my desire to wear perfume, it interweaves with the menstrual cycle. Or when I'm feeling down/depressed/blue, then I feel like wearing something that smells good and so makes me feel good (the idea behind aromatherapy in a nutshell, I guess).
That is fully consistent with the women I've known. But I'm still curious about the "why": does wearing it make you feel "more attractive" -- but perhaps in some abstract or general way? Not necessarily more attractive to any particular individual, or even any category of individual, but....sort of...to the universe? Or does it having nothing to do with your sense of self, more like...I want to carry around a pleasant scent with me, as if I worked all day outdoors in the gardenia garden, instead of in a cubicle faintly smellilng of air conditioner gear grease?
I realize I'm probably phrasing this in a very silly way, but this is reflective of the problem, which is that I don't understand how this works from the inside.
>I *don't* want to ever smell myself, pretty much any conscious awareness of such would make me uncomfortable and want to go shower.
This is fascinating to me, because it reads very similar to how I've heard several people describe dysphoria that is totally outside my experience as a cis male. In the same way, the idea that smelling a scent attached to myself would be inherently negative is contrary to my experience, since I happily use shea-butter-scented beard oil because I like the smell (and being literally under my nose, I do smell it during the day)
Does this aversion exclusively extend to smells, and are you really opposed to even pleasant smells attached to yourself?
Well, I wouldn't freak out if I happened to stroll through a field of lavender, if that's what you mean, but no I wouldn't ever deliberately add a scent, even a pleasant one, and if I found one clinging to me for some reason I would definitely get rid of it when the opportunity arose. I wouldn't be in nearly as much of a hurry if it was lavender versus stepping barefoot in dogshit, of course.
I recommend the latest episode of the Contemplative Science Podcast on Jhanas, an interview with Jhana researcher Jonas Mago (who studies under Karl Friston).
In the podcast, they described Jhanas through the lenses of predictive processing and active inference, discussed how research shows that Jhana experience is culturally dependent and mentioned an ongoing study of Jhana practitioners.
My takeaways from it were that Jhanas are actually studied in the academia both from neurological and sociological perspective, and we'll soon have even more published research discussing some of the same questions that were asked on this blog.
https://www.thecontemplativescientists.com/ (the latest episode isn't on the web yet, but you can find it in any podcast app)
In a similar vein to your "challenge mode":
There is a well known German blogger, "fefe", an IT-security expert with a highly visited website:
https://blog.fefe.de/
While it is absolutely minimalistic, it has probably more hits than most news sites in Germany!
And part of the "minimalistic" thing is: There are no comments!
But for a while (about 2010-2014) another IT-expert (Linus Neumann) "copied" the website and made comments available. And it was basically a "social experiment". Comments there were not moderated in the slightest! You can guess, how that looked liked ...
_But_ then they changed something: They put CAPTCHAs in front of the comments/commenting. Also they basically added a "word filter" for slurs and hate. And if this filter saw some "wrong words" the CAPTCHA did get a chance of failing, even if it was correct. I don't remember the real percentiles, but if you used a slur, the CAPTCHA had a "50%" of failing. And "the more the merrier", it gets more and more complicated to get a message through. Some people were quite presistant to get their terrible comment through and tried it 10+ times :D
All of this was disclosed in a talk (German):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA
I thought there are no bloggers in Germany... :D
What are the most plausible examples of politicians actually playing 4-D chess?
RBG ftw https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1590904325169369088?s=20&t=oNrfADKbfXyIeN3rm7CaeA
This is a really interesting question. One of the takes that stuck with me on this was from Greg Cochran -- I think it was on one of his COVID podcasts in the early days of 2020. Who has the real information, the best expertise? Who are the most informed people capable of action in the face of a crisis and where are they congregating? In other words, where is the inner circle?
Answer: there isn't one. There's only a messy undifferentiated network of people and their decisions. There is no 4D chess. Since everyone is accountable to some sort of boss, practically their decisions revolve around keeping jobs, minute to minute, crisis to crisis, with very little planning or follow through.
Has any politician ever played Achron? That's more like 4D Starcraft than 4D chess, but it does have deterministic time travel.
Mitch McConnell has a pretty good reputation for long term planning, although I'm not sure it rises to the level of "4D chess."
One problem with such a query is that a truly successful politician playing 4D chess would be one who could do so successfully without it being known. If everyone knows he's a genius that's playing on a totally different level, then they don't trust him and his plans fail more than they should otherwise.
That said, I have heard that George W Bush played some pretty good games. He was apparently extremely intelligent, but would pretend he was dumb and more folksy, and intentionally garnered a reputation for misspeaking.
Herbert Hoover may be another example, but he might have just been an overbearing bully who was willing to use underhanded approaches to getting his way.
>That said, I have heard that George W Bush played some pretty good games. He was apparently extremely intelligent, but would pretend he was dumb and more folksy, and intentionally garnered a reputation for misspeaking.
Well he got a lot of people to believe this so it must be true.
I think "4D chess" ends up working sort of like "conspiracy theory."
There are both actual conspiracies and people who build evidence-proof shells around some bizarre conspiracy theory that explains everything. That is, both conspiracies and conspiracy theories are real (different) things that it is useful to know about.
Similarly, there are both genuinely clever maneuvers done by politicians/activists/etc., and people who build evidence-proof shells around their view of some politician's competence by retconning every misstep into another move in some super-deep Xanatos gambit.
Right. The people who said Obama or Trump (very different populations, same effect!) were political geniuses often excused lots of clear mistakes or sub-optimal decisions and made other outcomes, which may or may not have been intentional, out to be more clearly positive than is usually true in real life.
Not as complex as '4-dimensional' , but certainly absurd/awful/effective(in the short term):
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democrats-risky-midterm-strategy-elevate-election-deniers-appears-pay-off-2022-11-09/
Why absurd or awful? I think probably not worth the risk, but I don't see anything particularly *wrong* here. I mean, other than our unregulated spending on political ads, but given that we're going with money=speech, this seems fine to me.
If it isn't worth the risk then it likely doesn't stack up under a utilitarian analysis.
Coming at it from a virtue ethics angle: if money=speech, it is wrong to lie.
It is awful to advocate through your speech/money for a candidate undermining norms of democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.
*Especially* when you are simultaneously telling people right of center that they are morally obligated to vote against their other values in order to preserve democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.
I heard good things about LBJ's skills but don't have anything specific to mention.
LBJ was effective, but I always understood his approach to be direct bullying. Things like getting uncomfortably close and looming over people (he was quite tall), yelling at them, etc.
This is nsfw and culture-war-adjacent, so please skip if that's not your thing.
I've recently come across the term 'autogynephilia', meaning roughly sexual arousal because of feeling and appearing female or feminine. I believe this was originally intended to refer to men with crossdressing kinks, but seems to be usually used these days in reference to trans women, implying that they are not really women but men who fetishize femininity.
I'm a cisgender woman and that argument seems wrong to me. In popular culture, and confirmed by many of my cis female friends, many cis women have something very similar to autogynephilia. Wearing lingerie that exaggerates feminine features like your hips is very common and many women seem to find it sexually exciting; similarly, some people like to see themselves in mirrors etc. 'Feeling like a woman' links to many arousing emotions/states of mind, such as feeling desirable, feeling weak or submissive, and feeling that you’re taken care of.
Is there something I’m missing here? If any amab people experience autogynephilia, does it seem like what I’m describing above?
I agree - see https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
My standard answer for these sorts of questions is ‘Sex ,even traditional procreative sex, is weird and we will never understand it.
I feel like Simone de Beauvoir probably covered this in "The Second Sex" but since it has been decades since I read it, don't quote me on that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex
There is a construction of female sexuality which women, as well as men, are conditioned by socially. Since men (until recently) have not been presented as sexual objects of desire in imagery by the mass advertising media, movies and the other elements, what both "the male gaze" and any women consuming such media imbibe is a particular notion of femininity.
We can see this in its most exaggerated form in drag, but if we look into what is considered 'sexy' or 'appealing' then we have to question how standards of what is considered erotic or arousing arose. There are arguments around high heels, even dragging in 'evolutionary scientists' to back up that Science Has Spoken on this:
https://www.glamour.com/story/study-high-heels-sexy
But why fishnets? Why thigh-garters? Why a particular face-full of makeup? Once you look into it, there's less nature and a whole lot of artifice. And, as I said, this is in the cultural water. Growing up, both boys and girls learn that this is what is sexy, this is what sexiness is about. For men, attaining an object who ticks all the boxes of what is culturally and socially considered highly desirable and sexy, dressed appropriately for the evocation of lust, is the goal. For women, being or becoming that object is the goal. A woman knows she is hot or sexy when the stimulus evokes the response of desire in herself, and she is taught to desire this model of femininity by existing in the world where this is the model of sexual feminine. So for some women, maybe a lot of women, of course living up to the ideal will evoke arousal, since all our responses are being conditioned to find "this is what is arousing, this is what should arouse you" (now is where "cis hetero-normativity" as a useful phrase comes in).
Okay, that's women. What about men? Men don't have a model of "hot sexy arousing" unless it's "be the type of guy who's tall with big muscles who is attractive to women". But they do have a model of what is arousing, and is expected and intended to evoke arousal in them, when it comes to the Feminine Image - the pouting blonde with big boobs and tiny waist in corset, push-up bra, thigh-garters, stockings and heels, wearing makeup, long nails, jewellery, perfume, and so on.
Here's where the theorising comes in. If you're a man who is not sure about being able to attain the masculine model of 'hot sexy', then it's hard to feel desirable. But the same way that women can feel desirable, by performing femininity by dressing up in lingerie etc. and evoking the sensual reaction of desire in themselves, a man who has accepted that this is the social model of what is 'hot sexy' can, by performing femininity himself, evoke that same feeling of desirability.
And if he successfully evokes the sensual reaction of desire *in himself* by makeup, lingerie, heels, skirts, dresses, and so on - then it's reinforcement. He feels good, he feels desirable, he feels like he is succeeding in that social role, by 'becoming' a woman. Where we move on from cross-dressing to trans autogynephilia is where becoming a woman and arousal are inextricably intertwined, so the man who feels he may not be a sexually successful man as a man, can feel like he will be sexually successful as a woman, and should be/is a woman, in reality. And how (s)he succeeds in being a woman is measured by the sexual arousal and desire the performance of femininity evokes in him/her: if (s)he doesn't find her/himself aroused by dressing up and putting on makeup and taking a new, feminine, name, then that is failure.
(By "sexually successful" I don't mean "attracts a lot of partners, has a lot of sex", I mean "successfully fulfils the role of being a sexually desirable object").
But all this is just pulled out of thin air, so don't take it any more seriously than the usual kind of hypothesis with no data to back it up.
The question I always have about this hypothesis is: if this is the full story, then why do a lot of people (e.g. many people with fetishes) have an idea of sexiness that is seemingly completely disconnected from what society says it should be?
I think you have to go to Freud for that one. I'm definitely not saying it's the full story or anything approaching it but with all the talk of trans rights and "gender is a social construct", there's a part we haven't approached about sexuality being a social construct in part as well.
I think maybe because people don't want the argument about "if you can choose to construct your sexuality in a non-conventional way, you can choose to construct it in a conventional way", hence the 'born this way' argument and the 'born in the wrong body' argument in early trans activism (it's my understanding this has been dropped now).
But there do seem to be some trans people for whom the appurtenances of current socially approved femininity* are what matters: long hair, facial makeup, jewellery, skirts, a very 'pink and fluffy girly' style. This doesn't seem to have so much to do with 'passing' (you can 'pass' by wearing a much more toned down style) but with a model of 'sexually attractive hot femaleness' in mind, and I do think that is at least in part mediated by what all of us, male or female, have been raised on in the media and around us as what constitutes the kind of stimulus to evoke (male) sexual desire and arousal.
So for *some* trans women, I suggest that there *is* an element of "to be a woman, to pass successfully, is to be an erotically attractive woman; this is expressed by dressing and behaving in such and such a manner; if I dress and behave like that, *and* evoke the erotic response in myself, I have succeeded in presenting myself as a woman/the woman I am".
*Whatever about high heels and red lipstick as mimicking biological markers of oestrus as in female apes, why are stockings and garters and lingerie considered sexy, why the whole Victoria's Secret kind of branding? It's a form of fashion that has cultural overtones, and in the past would have been different, and in the future may be different as well.
Aella did a huge survey and found that autogynephilia is very common, regardless of gender expression: https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia
A relevant quote:
> Cis people have a shockingly high amount of cross-sex-identifying sexual fantasies, to the degree that I wouldn’t consider it to be a particularly significant differentiator between cis and trans people. The best differentiator between trans and cis people is looking what they don’t like; trans people are much more opposed to non-gender-affirming fantasies than cis people are.
The argument is not "these men fantasize about being female and feel aroused by these fantasies, which women don't do, so they are not really women". The argument, as I understand it, is "their yearning of being seen as women, by themselves and others, starts out as a sexual fantasy and is then reconceptualized as actually being women, the newly invented concept of gender serving to explain why it's possible".
Personally I mostly agree with you, but: there's a norm currently that it's somewhere between crass and literal rape to involve people actively in your kink without their fully informed consent, even when it doesn't involve something people normally consider as sexually charged, say by having them call you by feminine pronouns and titles when you are "actually" [1] male.
It also gets brought up to delegitimize things like bathroom access and similar complications, by arguing that even if you respect people's right to have sexual interests society shouldn't go out of its way to actually *satisfy* such interests. And to delegitimize GAC given that doctors don't offer their services for body mod paraphilias generally.
Further, there's just a horns effect around men who are constantly horny in public which then gets transferred to trans women.
---
[1] These are scare quotes, not emphasis quotes.
Yeah, I really think this isn't generating the same set of images and associations in your mind as in that of the (stereo)typical AGP believer. They pretty much seem to picture either all or all "population 2" (later-transitioning, mostly lesbian) trans women as walking around in a pseudo-masturbatory haze 24/7 basically getting off every time they pass a reflective surface or hear their own name.
Ah, I thought you were more in a "what is going on in people's head that they think this a good argument?" space. If you're not, well, the middle points are the sticking ones. If the primary motivator to transition is AGP rather than dysphoria, it's arguably harder to square GAC with mainstream medical ethics, and it's also harder to argue in favor of everyday accommodations or even against people who stubbornly misgender ("if you find someone who wants to call you a woman more power to you but I don't"). It basically takes away one of the main arguments for allowing social or medical transition at all, because sexual frustration is not a class of suffering that is socially afforded sympathy.
Does anyone have good strategies on doing the personality/management type questions when applying to mechanical engineering internships. Having completed and been rejected from a few (they are among the most soul sucking things I've ever done) I get the sense they are looking for utmost rule following, snitching, and conformism in every sense. Am I correct here?
I always fill those out as if I were a maximally soulless corpo drone. It seems to get offers.
Alright will try that cheers
Any thoughts on the Nevada 'Top Five ranked choice' ballot initiative?
Seems to me like an excellent way to break up the two political mega-tribes into groups too small to contemplate civil war or permanent minority rule.
Hmmm, this has been implemented in a few places to unimpressive results. I believe Berkley and some surrounding areas have been doing this for years for municipal races and have not shown significant improvement.
How do you know there has not been improvement?
(mind you, for there to be improvement it would have to been broken in a way that can, in large part, be blamed on the voting system BUT NOT on the lack of proportionality in the voting system, since ranked-choice is nonproportional. So I expect state/national elections to be improved more by ranked choice than local elections, though none of the ranked-choice systems are ideal)
That's good to know of, but aren't municipalities (esp Berkley) relatively homogeneous/non-polarised?
Glad people are experimenting, but they sound like the places I'd expect to gain the least improvement from that reform
They're non-polarized but also highly heterogenous. Vote Blue no matter Who is a thing but within Berkley, and the edges of the Blue Tribe generally, you've got a lot of diverse options like the Green Party, socialists/communists like DSA, and even techno-libertarians.
So, the argument for these places being the best place for third/niche parties to break through is, quite frankly, that if the Green party could win anywhere in America, it should be Berkley or a similar places. If open socialists are communists could win anywhere, it should be Berkley. I think a lot of times ranked choice voting is sold as a potential moderating/centrist force is politics, and in the long-term it may well be, but in the short-term it's going to be based off existing third parties like the Libertarians and the Greens.
Great points! I definitely agree about existing parties being the most likely vehicle for rank choice involvement. I also expect fringe parties to benefit more from RCV than moderate centrist start-ups; But Also that siphoning off of activist energy to the other parties (which still preference back towards the centre right or left) will allow the duopoly to focus relatively more on the median voter than at current
Generally speaking I like the spirit behind this initiative but I have a lot of reservations about the implementation. The open primary with a single vote I honestly have little idea of the game-theoretic consequences of. But the ranked-choice/instant-runoff voting suffers from logistical problems (for a position with 5 candidates a precinct has to report 325 different numbers to enable the final tally to be carried out). It also does not always elect the Condorcet winner (candidate who would win a head-to-head contest against every other single candidate) if the Condorcet winner exists. And if you think "at least it will have some effect against gerrymandering by splitting the vote more in those 55-45 districts", think again, because a "mutual majority" is safe in RCV/IRV.
It might still be a good idea, though, as an intermediate step in a process of picking the best ranking-based method. I don't know whether Nevada voters are more likely to back out of things or double down on them when they try them and have problems, that would be crucial in figuring this out.
Agreed that it may be sub-optimal, but like you said- it's progress.
I'm from Australia, so we're used to RCV and have the infrastructure to handle the logistics easily enough, and figure the most powerful country in the world can manage it. But I also get that it would be a definite step up for places new to it. The 5 candidate system with the earlier vote would be a novel source of extra work and hassles too!
I like the idea behind the 5 candidate system though, as would also kick-start the breakup of the binary blocs as rival factions within the two current parties would go head to head in the general election (even as they're competing against the usual partisan enemy), and might also benefit from courting voters from 'the other tribe' if those candidates are eliminated first! It's like a recipe for in-tribe conflict and inter-tribe grudging tactical niceness, which sounds like a net win for societal cohesion.
Design-wise, I think (at the expense of having an even more complex thing to pitch to electorates)- the first two eliminations could be done with approval voting, counting the number of 1,2&3 votes each candidate got. Not sure if it would meet Condorcet standards, but I it think it should prevent the most polarising, maximally love/hated candidates from dominating their way to the final showdown?
>It also does not always elect the Condorcet winner (candidate who would win a head-to-head contest against every other single candidate)
Theoretically, maybe, but you'd have to *really* torture the distribution to get such a result.
99.999% of the time if there is a Condorcet winner, he gets in the top 2.
Simple example with three candidates named L for left, C for centerist, and R for right:
35% R C L
16% C R L
16% C L R
33% L C R
The centerist is the Condorcet winner (C beats R 65-35, C beats L 67-33), but is knocked out in the first round in an instant runoff. To avoid that outcome, the 33% of the voters who preferences are “L C R” should vote “C L R.” But if you think voters should be expected to vote strategically, rather than voting their actual preferences, the first past the post works pretty well. Why bother with IRV?
This example involves a fairly polarized electorate, where well over half the voters identify as left or right, and prefer a candidate who aligns with their views over a centerist compromise candidate. I see no reason to think that this doesn't describe the electorate in the United States, so I don't think I've tortured the distribution here.
Huh. What do you know, I was wrong, you're right.
Still seems like a very unlikely scenario, tbh. The politics in USA are polarized to left/right *because* you have a two-party system.
Pretty sure that exact scenario occurred in Alaska where they have introduced RCV.
And doesn't it make sense that it would occur? I figure Kenneth's vote flows above would produce a centrist Condorcet win even with a 47:5:48 split?
Being in the top 2 doesn't matter if you're not in the top 1 tho. (You probably have a better argument when using Single Transferable Vote for multiple offices.)
If he's in the top 2 and he's a Condorcet winner, he will win the final round of the ranked voting.
Oh, that makes sense.
I'll be interested to see if the comments reach the goal of "nicer, politer, higher effort" but fail harder on the goal of "interesting and good in the way that organic comments from a relatively smart commenter community often are". I think there might end up being an effect where everyone is eager to prove they can play with the big kids, and we get a larger amount of small kids trying to prove themselves as a result.
I was imagining posting a deliberately awful message to skew everyone else up.
Scott did mention (explicitly in the previous open thread) he's binning compared to a *normal* open thread, so presumably such a comment wouldn't have much of an effect, expect insofar as it affects Scott's mood-dependent memory retrieval.
Funny enough I suspect that that comment (and this reply) is a good candidate for binning.
Quite possible, and maybe even for the same reason I mentioned.
After reading SSC and then ACX for a few months I got major cognitive dissonance from learning that Scott favours libertarianism. Personally it seems just as likely to result in dystopia as communism, since people are just seen as cogs in the machine in both cases. Has Scott ever given a detailed argument for favouring libertarianism?
Update: Thank you all for the clarifications! It seems Scott doesn't unconditionally support what I thought was the central theorem of libertarianism, that unregulated market forces is the path to paradise.
Funnily enough, I first discovered Scott through reading his essay 'Why I Hate Your Freedom- the Non-Libertarian FAQ" https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
Someone has already posted his 2013 "something like a left-libertarian-ist manifesto". More recently, I'd think of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/
Maybe also his pitch for why prediction markets are great (can't recall where to find that one though)
I believe Scott endorses Hayek-derived libertarianism as opposed to Locke-derived libertarianism. Very briefly, the former advocates the use of markets as information aggregators designed to efficiently allocate scarce resources towards satisfying human preferences, whereas the latter views individual liberty as an axiomatic good to be maximized for its own sake (or government power as an axiomatically bad, to be minimized).
I recently saw a tweet that said "to understand how any argument in political philosophy sounds to someone with radical libertarian instincts, replace 'government' with 'Tony Soprano'." That's closer to Locke-derived libertarianism in your classification, but I think "government is a criminal gang" leads to different outcomes than "individual liberty should be maximised" - in the latter case, government can still have a role as a guarantor of liberties or a coordination point.
Thanks, I endorse this correction as probably closer to how most radical libertarians actually consider the situation. Maybe instead of Locke I should’ve gone with Nozik or Rothbard. The Tony Soprano thought experiment is pretty immediately illuminating, though.
And they're not entirely wrong - AIUI a common theory about the origin of government is that it evolved out of bandit groups who settled down, and organised crime does provide some government-like services (indeed, this is a key part of the Maoist playbook for guerrilla movements). And (again AIUI) there are too many examples of corrupt police forces acting like just another gang.
There's also an important distinction between the global style "left libertarianism" and the Randian American style libertarianism.
Usually, one of the arguments I hear against libertarianism is that people aren't viewed *sufficiently* as cogs in a machine. Not wanting to be seen as a cog in a machine not of one's choosing sounds like a motivation towards classic liberalism as opposed to most other philosophical systems.
In left politics, there's a distinction between socialism and communism. Sweden is socialist while China is communist (or at least was in the past). I don't know if there are analogous words for libertarianism, but the analogous concepts certainly exist. The "maximalist" version of libertarianism does sound dystopian to me, in complementary ways to Communism. But as far as I understand what Scott (and most rationalists I know who lean libertarian) believe, it is a "soft" version of libertarianism, analogous to socialism, which is the idea that pragmatic libertarian policies can make people's lives better on the margin in most Western countries. It might be wrong in many instances, but it doesn't inherit the apocalyptic nature of "hard-core" libertarianism, any more than socialism inherits the apocalyptic nature of communism.
No-one seriously considers Sweden to be "socialist", except for Americans )both left-wingers and right-wingers)…unless a welfare state is automatically considered "socialist", which is wrong IMO...
Sweden used to be much more socialist than it currently is. All of the cabinets were social democrat from 1936 to 1976 without a break, and that was time when "social democracy" still had more brand recognition as a form of socialism than as "social democracy" as its own thing. Since then there have been periods of the right-wing governments, but social democrats had the government for significant part of the 1980s and then later on.
There was a period when the Swedish income marginal tax rate was over 100%. In the 1980s there was an explicit attempt to socialize private companies with "Löntagarfonder", were ownership of the companies were to be siphoned into trade union controlled wage-earner funds. The plan did not work out for various reasons, but the attempt was there.
The welfare state of Sweden was more expansive in the 1980s than today, due changes in the government.
However, one could make the case the post-WW2 UK was a better example of state socialism than Sweden, with National Coal Boards, British Steel, Energy Authority .... In Sweden, the state ownership does not appear to have been as all-encompassing as the UK nationalizations.
If I'm being snarky, the 'soft' version of libertarianism is "don't interfere with me making money investing in the stock market, don't interfere with the stock market so I can't make money off it, and let me legally smoke weed/take soft drugs recreationally".
Not the worst version, when compared with "contracts rule everything, including legal assassinations, and the weakest go to the wall and the devil takes the hindmost" harder versions.
"and let me legally smoke weed/take soft drugs recreationally"
Considering how many club drugs are being conscripted for therapeutic use, it's worth questioning just how much of what's labeled as 'recreational use' is an attempt at self-medication.
But snarking classic liberalism is rather cliche. Steelmanning the position would probably be more conducive to an interesting conversation. For example; Scott noted how many individuals took measures to avoid Covid prior to lockdowns. And some studies rolled the benefits of those private activities in with 'the benefits of lockdowns.' I find this kind of bias, which gives far too much credit to coercive measures and zero credit to consensual private action, to be common in the formal literature. That's a bias and a problem.
To give another example; In America in the early 20th century there was a temperance movement and a prohibition movement. In the UK there was just a temperance movement over a very similar period. The UK saw a greater relative reduction in alcohol consumption, which endured for a longer stretch of time, than the United States did. And the UK secured this benefit without the side effects that the US saw. (Government poisoning of citizens, increased crime in regards to bootlegging, decreased taxes in regards to bootlegging, produce gluts from excess agricultural products which could not be fermented and preserved, etc.)
And yet there are a great many studies which assign 100% of the reduction in alcohol consumption in the US to prohibition and 0% to temperance. This is a bias that is worth addressing. And it's almost exclusively those who identify as some flavor of classic liberal/libertarian who bother to address it.
"including legal assassinations"
Who are you referring to? I've never heard such a view presented by any self-described libertarians.
> legal assassinations
The classical formulation of libertarianism is that "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose". A common criticism of libertarianism is that, taken strictly, this means it's legal to request an assassination, offer a contract for it, provide a weapon and pay someone to do it, even if the assassination itself is illegal.
Describing this as "legal assassination" is strictly incorrect, but it's my best guess as to what Deiseach intended. Deiseach, would you like to correct me if I'm wrong?
No, you're correct. The idea of hiring private enforcers once the government monopoly on violence is broken, and the right to self-defence being taken to the extreme - the jokey "why can't I have a private nuke in my backyard to fire at the neighbours if they infringe on my rights?" idea.
I talk to a lot of libertarians and I have literally never heard of this before. At absolute worst, this guy seems idiosyncratic and there's no organized group of libertarians (or people, for that matter) advocating for 'legal assassinations.' Classic liberalism holds to a notion of individual rights, minimized coercion, and self ownership which would strongly preclude any form of legal assassination.
The idea of socialism as a softer version of communism is poorly supported by historical usage. I've seen, for example, French propaganda circa 1942 claiming that the strength of "socialism" (meaning the philosophy of the National Socialist - i.e. Nazi - government in Germany, and its puppet Vichy government in France) would triumph over "Bolshevism" (meaning the Lenin-inspired communist government of the USSR).
Why do you say that people are just seen as cogs in the machine under libertarianism? That just doesn't match my experience at all, having moved to a country that has some libertarian aspects in comparison to my country of origin.
This piece isn't so much an endorsement of a libertarianism that exists as a description of a libertarianism that he would endorse (with the caveat that it's from nine years or seven-and-seventy generations of Discourse ago), but it's definitely relevant and may contribute to a fuller picture.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
He's given arguments for specific ideas (e.g. why he thinks jobs guarantee programs are worse than just doing UBI). Afaict he mostly favours libertarian-ish directions (which I mostly personally agree with), but wouldn't support following the ideology off a cliff.
I'm honestly not sure how pragmatic libertarianism sees people as cogs in machines (except to the degree that all political or economic theories kind of do). Can you give an example of what you mean by that/somewhere where you think a pragmatic libertarianism would still reach a wrong object level policy for these reasons?
Not that I'm aware of, but he did write a long article explaining why he's *not* (or at least wasn't) a libertarian: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
Speaking for myself, I think libertarianism is an elegant idea and a useful corrective to the statist instincts of many politicians, and it's good to have libertarian voices in the debate. But I would be very surprised if a place ran on full-blown libertarian lines worked well.
From the article:
> To many people, libertarianism is a reaction against an over-regulated society, and an attempt to spread the word that some seemingly intractable problems can be solved by a hands-off approach. Many libertarians have made excellent arguments for why certain libertarian policies are the best options, and I agree with many of them. I think this kind of libertarianism is a valuable strain of political thought that deserves more attention, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with it and find myself leaning more and more in that direction myself.
> However, there’s a certain more aggressive, very American strain of libertarianism with which I do have a quarrel.
Scott, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that you're reading this Open Thread more carefully to specifically recommend to you a book: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barret.
https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
I'm making this recommendation in a bit of a rush: I haven't finished reading the book yet, and I haven't yet read your "Can People Be Honestly Wrong About Their Own Experiences?" article, but the brief skim of part of that article, plus what I have seen you write about Jhanas, and what I've read of the book so far, suggests this might help fill in a missing piece of the model you seem to be trying to build. (Assuming the psychological science in the book holds up, I'm not an expert in this area.)
My layman's understanding of the gist of the book is that it argues that people don't all feel emotions in the same way: they might have drastically different bodily sensations and brain activity patterns that they decide to label with something like "anger" or "happiness" for the purpose of communicating between people. And that we take into account context a lot when "constructing" these emotional labels.
Worth a book review maybe? It's an interesting hypothesis at least, and it could be good to get another opinion as to whether it's a solid one or not.
A tag filter like lobste.rs story filters would be fantastic for open-ended discussions like this, to exclude whichever subject threads (crypto, AI, meditation, meta, what have you) I'm just not interested in. In this case in particular it would be really useful to exclude all the meta.
I'm curious about various ways such a system could be implemented.
One way would be for anyone reading comments to help moderate by tagging them. In a high-volume blog like this that could be enough to get decent tags, similar to Stack Overflow.
Does Substack support tags, then?
I remember when the forum Sufficient Velocity did something akin to Challenge Mode, it didn't work very well. I'm slightly more optimistic about this case, both because of the basic nature of the commentariat and more obviously, because while Scott has repeated the SV admin's step of asking for criticism of the "delete low-quality comments" area *in* the "delete low-quality comments" area, I don't think he's going to delete 90% of the criticism as "low-quality" the way said SV admin did (this is, um, not a good way to make a project succeed).
I have a high degree of trust in Scott's judgement, and especially his willingness to accept criticism. Very few people keep a "mistakes" page, and I don't think anyone else is so quick to add items to it.
That said, I do wonder if Scott is going to delete many/any posts? He's remarkably kind-hearted, and removing any good-faith posts would probably bother him. Of course, that may have been known to him and he only actually plans to delete obviously bad faith posts, and this is just an experiment to see if we'll post better mostly because he asked us to. If this is the case, he would probably also want to delete any posts that seem to recognize this, as that would defeat the purpose. I guess we'll see if my post sticks around, and if not, have to determine if it's just not very good, or too good!
For a while I have not been receiving notifications related to comments on this Substack, but I do receive notifications regarding comments on other Substacks. Does anyone know why this might be and how to rectify it? Thanks!
Me too.
I’m reading The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan. A central argument is that America will stop policing the ocean / shipping lanes, and global trade will collapse to regional trade and there will be lots of pirates and state-backed piracy (of things like oil and bauxite).
I feel like I missed the part about why America is going to stop policing the oceans. He goes on and on about how the US Navy is 6-10x as strong as all other navies, but not why we would stop.
Is anyone else reading this or familiar with these arguments?
I find his naval argument somewhat unconvincing, after the multilateral response to Somali pirates. They found a niche for a while there, but the global system couldn't allow them to continue and didn't; multiple nations stepped up to keep shipping lanes open, while companies worked out a way to defend ships with security contractors. Capital dislikes uncertainty and will find ways to avoid it. He may be prescient with regard to demographic change in East Asia, though, and he does have some interesting ideas that I found more compelling before the midterms. The idea of an isolationist US seems slightly less likely after the rejection of the populist right in the midterms, and the tone of the recent German-Chinese talks was somewhat reassuring with regard to the idea of a hostile Chinese-Russian trading bloc hastening the end of globalism.
Well, Zeihan's entire "thing" is the 'end of globalization'. He takes this idea to the extreme and literally means the US will choose to stop doing that because we will judge it to be in our national interest to deglobalize to the greatest extent possible. I don't mean that he thinks we will do this unilaterally, just that we won't have much to protect anymore as globalization unwinds and we will stop investing in it.
In the last few years there has been a flurry of research on this and on hyperphantasia, the opposite condition.
I’ve devised a “virtual Stroop test” for those who want to try:
Imagine someone using a red marker to write the word “blue” on a whiteboard. Easy for some to imagine, challenging for many and impossible for a few. Some people report seeing purple!
Recently discovered that someone with intense olfactory imagery (think involuntarily smelling toasted baguette) was able to halt the imagery by holding her nose closed.
As all the other commenters struggled, I'd better mention that I didn't.
I think I have total or near total aphantasia, so when I "visualise" something, it's conceptual. In that sense, I have no problem "visualising" the word blue written in red ink on a whiteboard.
First I want to point out that the word 'imagine' is quite ambiguous here: I can generally 'imagine' any arbitrary object or scene including its visual properties, but I can't/don't 'see' anything in my 'mind's eye' because I'm completely aphantasic. So for me, *metaphorically* imagining a thing is easy, but unless I'm asleep and dreaming, then literally rendering it in my mind as a mental *image* is beyond my capabilities.
Anyway, that said, I initially thought it would be trivially easy to conjure up this red/blue thought experiment as a mental concept and then proceed to think about it (albeit without any actual visual mind's eye 'image'), but to my surprise it turned out to be impossible! Like Matthew Talamini below, I found it literally unthinkable. The concept just wouldn't gel. The visual attributes were ungraspable. It felt like I was trying to hold the north poles of two magnets together; the colors and meanings slipped past each other and wouldn't stay put. I could *only* conceptualize red written in red and blue written in blue. If I tried to change the combination, my mind balked and the mental construct collapsed.
It was also a little bit like trying/struggling to get my head around some slippery physics demonstration, like eg the double slit experiment, or spooky action at a distance.
I think in this particular red/blue case though, it must be something specifically to do with the contradiction between the sensory content and the semantic content, because it turns out I can (metaphorically) imagine the word 'white' written in red on a whiteboard without any problem.
I think I have severe aphantasia, but I don’t know how to fully convince myself. It seems easier to prove to oneself that they have hyper-phantasia. Testing a positive seems more tractable. I can’t even imagine a flat color in my head— it’s all darkness.
There's a weird red-blue double mental vision happening there, but I can make it stably red when focusing.
Not only can I not do this, I can't even imagine the word "blue", written in red marker, at all. Very interesting.
From curiosity: can you imagine the word "white" written on a whiteboard in red marker?
I don't seem to be able to. It's difficult to visualize any word. I have to stop, close my eyes and concentrate. If the word I'm visualizing is the same as the color it names, I can do it. If not, I can't seem to.
Oh! Hmmm. Except in the case of the color black. If I imagine it in a typewriter font, I can picture the name of any color in black.
It might be a hang-up about the look of handwritten words? I was just able to visualize the word "red" written in black spray paint on the side of a building.
But trying to imagine the word "red" written in blue spray paint on the side of a building results in the word being blue in color.
This seems pretty easy to me. Not effortless though. Bummer.
Tried it. The first attempt, I visualized holding a red marker. Started writng 'blue' and the marker instantly changed itself to a blue marker. Went back to instructions to double check, what I was supposed to do. Then mentally loopied instructions, so that the marker didn't get replaced. Computing 1 in blue and 4 in red would be more annoying, as I trained myself into a specific digit-color synesthesia, where red is 1 and blue is 4.
But because my full synesthesia system is very complex and I made lots of refactoring for optimization over time, I am quite used to having old versions giving me conflicts. I learnt some flexibility in that regard.
That is fascinating as a test of visual thinking, but I wouldn't call it a Stroop test. I can *read* colour words just as fast whatever colour they are in, but I can't imagine the word red written in blue to save my life, which is surprising because I could imagine the person, the whiteboard and even the whiteboard marker in its red plastic case which inexplicably left blue writing! My brain decided it must have been an error at the whiteboard marker factory - there is clearly no other explanation :-D
Hm, I took it as the *word* "blue" written in red marker, not that it was a red marker that *wrote* in blue.
I can imagine the first, and with a bit of effort make myself imagine the second.
I'm trying to see if anyone knows a way to look up really obscure songs. I've had a fragment of a song stuck in my head for about twenty (five?) years now. I heard it once on satellite radio while driving through Western Canada/Upper Western United States, and I'm pretty sure the radio announcer said it was "amateur hour" when they played it. I remember a facsimile of the main beat, and the tune and lyrics of a single line of the chorus, which hasn't show up in Google searches.
I figure at the very worst it's probably got copyright somewhere, but I don't know which country it would be in. I might be able to talk myself into combing through that if someone knows where I would even look.
(This is assuredly the content Scott was hoping for for Challenge Mode.)
There are 'identification of music' groups on Facebook which tend to work much better than programs like Shazam. It reaches a lot of people and everyone wants the prestige of getting the ID. Try posting in a few of those
Try https://www.watzatsong.com. They sometimes manage to identify the weirdest songs!
If you Google search for "Aha Music" you can search by humming, which may help.
Hm. Humming got me Brightest Blue, which is definitely not the right song. I get the feeling I can't hum.
There's an old episode of Reply All (now defunct podcast, but episodes still findable) where someone was in the same situation as you. They eventually tracked down song. I can't remember much about how they did it, but if you listen to the episode you might get some more ideas for searches.
If I recall correctly they found the song by searching for the lyrics on Facebook, rather that a search engine.
Yes but there’s was more. Guy who was looking for the song had actually had some musicians record his remembered version and they played it for some people in the music industry. And I think it was a disc jockey who had played or heard the song a couple times who finally recognized it. Yeah, great episode
Quite a fun episode. Peak podcasting.
What is the line of the chorus?
Also can you hum it at all? There's apps for humming or whistling.
"(some. thing something), I don't. mean. to bo ther you, but-there's some. thing. on. my. mind." High note on whatever the first syllable was, high note on 'don't' that descends pretty smoothly to 'you', same high note on 'something' and 'my'.
And I'm realizing I'm probably way off on when I heard it. I made that trip a whole lot of times.
There's several songs that have vaguely similar lyrics. Special Love for instance. But they don't seem to fit the rest of the description.
I don't listen to enough genres to know. The main beat made me think "JRPG Robot Village music." Then the lyrics were smoother over the top of it.
Trying to play it on Virtual piano gets me G g d f, d g f d# d c a# lower g x2 gx2 f g f for the lyrics. I remember the main theme being g a# g a# high f high d c low dx2 low fx2.
https://www.musicca.com/piano
I take my other comment back, this absolutely has to be it right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0lQ585f2Uw
The lyrics start at ~1:20. Not the chorus though I don't think but it matches the musical style you gave and the pattern in the high notes.
...and weirdly, that video seems to have cut a verse out. An important one too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npGWyn1cFGA
"And when the wheels cease to spin, the walls and the fences will grow higher than redwood trees.
And I know your demise. And I fear what will happen when the road fails to flow under me."
Not sure if they wanted to turn it into a breakup song, or if they just couldn't scrape together that extra forty seconds of footage.
Woo-hoo, that's got to be it!
Man that video is hard on the eyes!
I'm trying to jump around some genres to find something close. So far, the closest thing to the song's clunky main rhythm is, like, techno music, or alternately Stomp playing with hosepipes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-0lrHhpvGM&t=375s But my memory of the lyrics is closer to Simon and Garfunkel.
Some musings on FTX and EA. My parents started a non-profit in India that builds healthcare and physical infrastructure in poor government schools since 2013. They've also partnered with an ex-IIT professor for the past five years on a talent search-nurture program in my hometown.
I happened on the FTX Future Fund earlier this year. Long-story short, we are running a much larger program that identifies top performing rural students (15-16yrs) in logical reasoning and STEM ability in Northern Karnataka with an annual family income <$2000. We provide them with tabs+internet and connect them with top teachers and well-connected mentors, the latter of whom will support their future college tuition. Based on the reception so far, it seems likely we have raised aspirations+increased probabilities of the students having careers with larger impacts for their families and communities.
Granted the FTX situation is still evolving, but it does seem somewhat likely that the money in the Future Fund was not sourced ethically. Possibly, tons of people will lose a bunch of money they invested through FTX.
I'm not how accurate of an equivalency this is — the money helping bright rural kids comes from 'defrauding' innocent crypto investors. Even if such is true, I'm unsure of whether it's still in some sense ethical - seems true in the classic EA utilitarian sense but not in a deontological framework. I vaguely recall an EA vibe-shift that changed people's priors on earning to give, where being a top executive from *insert evil big consulting company* so as to give away million stopped being the recommended choice. Anyways, this doesn't affect any material decisions but curious to know what folks think.
Perhaps Robin Hood was an effective altruist all along.
Congratulations on your programme. As an adjacent-EA working in crypto, I feel particularly well-placed to comment on the FTX aspect.
Tldr. The money in the Future Fund comes from retail traders, a portion of which is just normal fee revenue, and a portion is from taking the winning sides of bets made by retail traders. Depends on your perspective, but the arg they were exploited would be convincing to most people I think.
Most of SBF's wealth comes from FTX, specifically fee revenue, which is fine, and taking the opposite sides of the trades made by retail traders, which is more questionable. Given that 80% (roughly) of retail traders lose money, and SBF spent many years working at Jane Street before founding Alameda, those bets are largely only ever falling one way.
In addition, something you can verify on the blockchain is that Alameda consistently dumped their holdings on retail traders experiencing FOMO. (You can verify timing, not intent, here's one example: https://cryptoslate.com/bitdao-suspects-alameda-of-dumping-bit-tokens-asks-for-proof-of-funds
)
There's a bunch more allegorical claims that I'm aware off which seem plausible: pushing exotic options on inexperienced traders, exploiting the benefits of being largely unregulated, and of course, the FTT token, which FTX inflated to the great benefit of SBF and other early/whale holders.
The implied SBF argument, I believe, is that a million retail traders would allocate the money less effectively than the Future Fund. This argument is convincing to me, so given that SBF is a Benthamite utilitarian (see Cowen interview: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-fried/), I think he probably feels morally complied to pursue it. At huge scale: FTX was making tens of millions a day, and still felt the need to pursue high leverage that has now brought everything down.
But beyond questionable retail activities, FTX was also a very big exchange that made a lot of money from legitimate fee revenue as well.
I will stop short from offering a judgement on the morality of the FTX money. I have heard there is an $8bn hole in FTX
FAO Scott: Challenge Mode prompted me to include sources, moderate the extent of my claims, and not to speculate on the morality of FTX money (because I didn't want to give briefly-considered judgement)
Thank you, this provided some useful context I wasn't aware of
I also live in India and am very curious to learn more about the workings of this talent finding program. Could you elaborate, either here or over private communications?
Sure thing! The basic premise was that many bright rural kids studying in government/aided schools were likely not being challenged intellectually or exposed to models of success. We focused on Northern Karnataka because that's where the foundation has been based and is well connected.
We did the selection in two phases. first using data from the National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship Examination (NMMS) conducted every year by the government. Only students having family income of less than INR 1.5 lacs ($2,000) per year and studying in Government or Government-aided public schools are eligible to write the NMMS Examination. The NMMS had two parts - a quantitative reasoning section (very similar to IQ tests) and a subject-based section, we weighted the former more highly (one reason being schools often engage in malpractice by dictating answers to students) and shortlisted students district-wise. In the second phase, we conduct an independent test where we teach a small new topic and assess their ability to understand and apply the concept to solve non-trivial and practical problems.
Selected students were given Samsung Tabs and a SIM card with stipends for data. We then setup an online classroom using TeachMint and hold daily classes on Math, Physics, English and logical reasoning, taught by highly experienced teachers. The emphasis is on teaching from first principles, primarily through questions, and focusing on applications. We also facilitate weekly sessions with volunteer mentors, who are engineers/scientists/professionals, and who have pledged to support batches (8-10) for their college tuition.
I'll pass on the project homepage via DM.
Just realized Substack doesn't have such a feature, feel free to email at kulgod[at]pm[dot]me
I'm ignoring the question of whether FTX "defrauded" investors, or whether investors took a risk and lost for now. But to the interesting question of ethics: even a deontological framework can allow for "non-ethically sourced" money to be used ethically. After all, if agreements were made between FTX and the beneficiary of the money in good faith, it really isn't clear said beneficiary has *any* responsibilty to give back any money. After all, they acquired the money legally, that the money was involved in fraud at some point (even directly) before shouldn't matter. And indeed, this is how legal systems - which are in some sense deontological - often deal with cases like this, though there are of course lots of variations and gray areas.
This is roughly what I thought as well and it's helpful for it to be articulated (more succinctly) by someone else, thank you :)
Here’s an interesting dinner conversation:
Ask people to imagine a bicycle.
Then quiz them on what they “see” - you’ll be amazed by the diversity of response, from a detailed picture of a specific bicycle against a known remembered background to nothing - no images. I’m in the latter camp having only a few bytes of fleeting visual memory.
Ask where the image is located - for some it is in the back of their head, for others it is floating in front of them. For those, ask if it interferes with their image of the real world and watch their puzzled expression.
Recently it’s been found that most people when asked to imagine a bright light will dilate their pupils. Those with aphantasia (no pictures in head) do not.
Any other aphantasiacs here? Only a few percent of the population. Think of all the gigabytes of brain storage that can be dedicated to other stuff!
People assume that others think like they do. Most aphantasiacs are astounded to find out that they are different from the rest of the world.
I cannot conjure anything visual in my mind, nor do I dream the vast majority of the time. I do imagine talking to myself constantly though, not in an actual audititive way, but certainly verbal. It’s constant. My every thought is projected into my consciousness as a narration.
But dreams are often forgotten, so how would you know? I can elaborate if you're interested.
Personally, when I do remember a dream, it's purely a conceptual memory. No images.
I do a lot of maintenance and repairs on my bicycle. For this test I first see a very simplified and wrong form, that rapidly gets overwritten with correct details as I remember various characteristic parts. It's almost like a level-of-detail jump in a video game.
Curiously, the details do not come from my bicycle, and contain parts (such as a chain guard) that none of my bicycles ever had.
That seems fairly similar to me - I start with an outline that gains details over time, and it ends up as a portmanteau of bikes that I have seen or owned. (Though I haven't had or ridden one in decades.)
It's in front of me, by the way. Not floating, but on a floor, propped against a nominal wall. I don't see the floor or wall, but they are understood.
I'm skeptical of this "only a few percent of the population" claim; my hit rate when asking people about aphantasia is something like 30%. (Maybe it's just very overrepresented in the kinds of environments I happen to hang out in - most such environments do filter for psychological weirdness in many ways - but I'm skeptical because I have unusually *good* mental visualization and seem otherwise pretty typical in these social groups.)
In my experience the degree of aphantasia varies wildly from both person to person and depending on the object pictured. I, for example, can picture a bike mostly fine, but have almost total aphantasia when it comes to faces, to the point where (much to my brother's frustration) asking me to describe the hair/eye/facial features of someone I've interacted with less than daily is almost totally useless.
One more angle-- how much of your imagined visual field can you fill?
Well I can “fill” the whole thing, but not with any detail.
This is quite a familiar topic for those who have been following Scott for a long time: here is him posting about it in 2009!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example
If my dreams are visual and my waking imagination is totally different from my dreams then am I am aphantasiac?
That's how it is for me. The only thing I can reliably visualize while awake is motion; no colors, textures, or really any features at all unless I 'trace' them mentally and visualize that motion. But I have, at times, observed myself falling asleep where at some point there is a 'switch' thrown and I see exactly what I am thinking about with full texture, color, and contours. Then I wake up (or forget and go back to sleep, probably).
Relatedly, the only sounds I can imagine are ones I imagine making with my own voice. I can imagine myself humming a song (and hear it nearly exactly as if I actually were humming) but not the actual vocals and instrumentals. But when I am drifting off to sleep, sometimes I hear beautiful music playing, as if a full symphony were present. Noticing it is enough to wake me up, though. I think this happens earlier than the visualizations becoming real.
As little OtT (Off this Topic), but I remember as a child being very puzzled when my parents told me that it was a dream and not real (whatever "it" happened to be).
Reportedly about half of aphantasiacs still have visual dreams.
Curious about this experiment. My expectation is that average comment quality increases, but variance goes down.
The seen may be better comments on average and fewer terrible ones, but the unseen may be fewer potentially high-quality comments from low-confidence people because a) there's a chance the comment will get deleted so there's a lower EV of posting, and b) that person with low-confidence will not want to risk getting their confidence lowered any further.
This is kind of a random/open-ended question, but- is the arms/defense/weapons industry basically the most technologically sophisticated industry, or at least in the top 3? I've noticed that a small number of countries dominate global arms sales- some of them like the US and Russia have strong militaries, but I notice that Germany consistently pops up as a major international arms dealer, despite having a fairly weak military. Germany seems to produce a large array of missiles, rockets, and tanks that are sold all over the globe, and of course they're famous as being a major industrial power- just not a major military one. I've also noticed Norway and Sweden appear to have a very sophisticated arms industry, and while they do have a military tradition, they're absolutely tiny countries- but are quite wealthy and technologically sophisticated. Norway has been making a number of the rockets used in Ukraine, and I recently learned that for a time the missile defense system that protected Washington DC was actually manufactured by a Norwegian company!
So- is the arms industry a function of a country's technological/engineering sophistication, and *not* a function of how strong or prominent the home country's military is? Is making rockets, missiles, tanks, warships etc. *more* challenging or sophisticated than manufacturing say laptops, home appliances, automobiles, cell phones, electronics, and so on?
To answer the initial question, yes, it very much is. Modern weapons are incredibly sophisticated, with top of the line warships generally holding the title for most complex things built by man. As for who does the work, well, that's going to be a question of who has the skills, which in turn is going to rest on who had the skills 10 years ago, and then 20 years ago and so on. Oh, and because this is defense, there's a lot less incentive to offshore stuff than there is in most places. Germany survives because it has an arms industry left over from the Cold War, and can sell stuff to other countries.
This isn't to say that we in the defense industry is perfect. There are lots of structural issues, many of which come from the fact that the government is a terrible customer and we're often forced to be terrible in self-defense. We can't go find other customers, and they have limited options to take their business elsewhere. And we're doing really complicated work that usually has life-and-death consequences, To put it simply, it's the kind of system where you can get yelled at for being under budget, and it kind of makes sense given everyone's incentives. (He assumed that we'd padded our estimates to inflate our fee, which was a fixed percentage of the bid. We hadn't and had just been efficient, but it wasn't a completely crazy idea.)
(Epistemic status: based on anecdotes.) The defense industry is very sophisticated in some specific ways. They are very good at systems engineering (they invented it). They are very good at aerodynamics. They are very good at radar and electromagnetic waves. They are very good at explosives (duh). If you want the best people in the world on these topics, you should look in the defense industry. These are skills that have been culturally ingrained over generations (no country that didn't build fighter aircraft during WW2 has ever built a decent fighter). These skills are also highly dependent on intelligent engineers spending most of there working life in the field.
The defense industry is pretty unsophisticated in some other areas. Software engineering is the biggest part (as it is in most non-software industries). A DevOps engineer from a Silicon Valley unicorn would not be impressed with the delivery practices at your random defense contractor.
I think the reason why a random second-world country can't start producing high quality weapons is that it would require training a generation of engineers in some highly specific skills that are not really relevant in other industries and will not be relevant if your industrial experiment fails. The risk and lack of transferability will make it hard to motivate engineers to start the training, which makes it hard to get the best engineers, which reduces your chance of success.
Making weaponry is, as far as I can tell, differently challenging - not necessarily more so - than the other machines you list. It often must be made to exacting standards of quality, the components are dangerous and must be handled with (expensive) care following strict protocols, and the batch sizes may be small enough that a full automated production line is out of the question. (Citation: did engineering in a missile factory for one of the American prime contractors. Not a wide perspective, but perhaps useful.)
My impression is that an arms industry is less a function of the state of a country's military - there are plenty of militaries and plenty of customers - and more a function of their... cultural view of the worth of precision/exactness, perhaps. The US would break that pattern somewhat, but I don't think military size is nonnegligible, and the States certainly have one big enough to push the bounds on that function.
A big part of it is how *independent* a country's military is. If, like pre-2022 Sweden, you have a fairly small military but you're deliberately standing outside of the local alliance structures, you'll want to maintain your own production capability for just about everything up to and including modern multi-role combat aircraft if you can. And Sweden, albeit barely, can.
See also Israel and Taiwan. Also Ukraine from independence to 2014, a major exporter of a broad range of weapons - no jet fighters, but e.g. pretty good affordable tanks. After 2014, exports went down as they kept more of their production local for obvious reasons.
The US, UK, and France are all in the "NATO needs us, we don't need NATO" game, so they set up to build everything in-house (or in France's case, as the lead player in a multinational European consortium).
Germany, I think underproduces in range and scale relative to its general position as an advanced industrial economy. Japan produces a pretty broad range of armaments domestically, but for political reasons basically never exports them.
As for Norway, that air-defense missile system uses missiles made in the United States that Norway can't duplicate; they just built a new ground-based launcher because the United States basically doesn't do serious ground-based air defenses. Norway and Finland do jointly produce a lot of ammunition through a consortium called "Nammo" (for "Nordic Ammo"), but aside from that it's just small arms and a few specialized bits of gear. They do have pretty good small antiship missiles optimized for shooting at targets in tricky fjords and whatnot, because nobody else was going to make that for them. We do buy a fair bit of stuff from them when their narrow specialties line up with our needs. Including, yes, air defenses for the White House, because that's the one place in the US that even the USAF admits needs serious ground-based air defenses.
Thanks. I considered @'ing you when I wrote this, because this question was specifically designed with you in mind :)
Other questions, if you don't mind:
1. Why doesn't the US 'do serious ground-based air defenses', out of curiosity?
2. I've read that the US has over the decades basically lost our entire diesel submarine industry/knowhow of how to build them. Is that true? Kinda sucks. Of course we're experts at making nuclear submarines, but I guess just due to our lack of needing diesels for anything, we seemed to have lost the capacity. (The Japanese are supposed to be real pros at it, including having the world's quietest diesel submarines from what I've heard).
It's hard to understand why, politically, the US wouldn't want to manufacture even more weapons systems (like diesels) here. They're skilled blue collar jobs, Congresscritters tend to like these kinds of job programs, and as I think we've all heard a thousand times 'the defense/aerospace industry knows to scatter a little bit of every weapons system in every state for Senatorial support', etc. etc. Why don't we just.... build diesel submarines here, if just for sale to other countries if nothing else?
While I endorse what John says, I think the stuff on diesel submarines bears elaboration. The USN very much does not want the US to have the ability to build diesel boats, because then Congress would probably buy some. A diesel submarine is very much not like a nuclear submarine. It's been memorably described as a mobile minefield, and that's pretty accurate. It can't move fast, particularly if it's being hunted, but it is very quiet. A nuclear submarine can stay at 25+ kts for weeks at a time if necessary and never has to come up for air. This is quite useful tactically, because if you want endurance on a diesel boat, you're limited to maybe 5 kts. But the nuke boat is also very expensive and somewhat louder. For the USN, nuke boats are very much better, and the only real case for having diesel boats is for training purposes. We've found that the best way to do this is to borrow them from our friends, because then there's no risk of Congress getting confused and deciding to save money by buying diesel boats.
Kts?
Also I’m confused about the antecedent in “It's been memorably described as a mobile minefield.” I’m thinking it’s the diesel but I’m having trouble making it out.
"kts" = knots, nautical miles per hour. Nautical miles are about 15% longer than statute miles (or ~1.8 km), but they are conveniently one minute of arc on a Great Circle route so they are traditionally preferred by people who navigate over long enough distances to need spherical trigonometry.
And "mobile minefield" because a diesel-electric submarine effectively defines a modest area of the sea wherein any enemy ship is likely to suffer an underwater explosion without warning, but outside of which area nothing happens. Unlike fixed minefields, this sort can be shifted if you don't like where it is right now, but only at ~5 knots. That's much slower than any of the ships that will be trying to avoid the minefield, so in strategic terms "We need to block the Macassar Strait, not the Sunda Strait" is a thing a diesel-electric submarine can deal with given a bit of notice but the tactical problem of "oops, they're going to sail past us thirty miles away" is not.
Knots. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me; thanks. And I guess the greater speed of a nuclear sub is what keeps that from also being a mobile minefield.
I don’t know anything about the relative speed of a nuclear sub and a surface ship. I would *guess* the latter is faster, but I could easily be wrong, and if not I still don’t have a clue about how much.
The US doesn't do serious ground-based air defenses because the USAF has several thousand wannabe Mavericks and there aren't enough MiGs to go around. Letting some Army NCO take out a MiG with a ground-based missile is low, crass kill-stealing that would deprive some hero fighter pilot from his shot at making ace, and it demonstrates a profound lack of confidence in the ability of the almighty Air Force to maintain full air dominance without anybody's help. The Army can have Stingers, which are mostly for shooting down mere helicopters, and they can have Patriots because those are mostly for missile defense these days - can't dogfight a ballistic missile warhead, so that's no loss. And the Navy can have whatever it wants, because Air Force fighter pilots aren't going to be flying combat missions in the middle of the ocean.
But for land-based missiles designed to shoot down enemy jet fighters (or bombers), it kind of does come down to that being an affront to the Air Force's ownership of that mission. And they'll spend their political capital on that, if they have to. So the Norwegians had to buy a bunch of missiles designed to make USAF fighter pilots super awesome at shooting down MiGs, and figure out how to let a Norwegian (or Ukrainian) Army NCO shoot them from a truck.
As for diesel-electric submarines, in the modern era those are only really useful (or at least cost-effectively useful) in your own coastal waters or not too far beyond. So, very good for countries like Japan, Sweden, and Germany, which are major players in that industry. The United States Navy isn't plausibly going to be fighting serious naval wars anywhere within a couple thousand miles of the US, so it makes sense for all our boats to be nuclear. A conventional sub very likely wouldn't reach the war zone before the war was over.
If we built diesel-electric subs it would be only for export - or possibly because some idiot congressman wanted to saddle the navy with a bunch of subs it doesn't want and can't put to good use. US submarine builders whose bread and butter is nukes are not going to be able to compete effectively with people who specialize in diesel-electric subs, and the Navy doesn't want an economically uncompetitive US diesel-electric sub industry whining to idiot congressmen about how the Navy should be buying their useless boats.
>ground-based air defense
This is protecting a piece of real estate from air attack via equipment on the ground. The USAF thinks this ABGD is stupid because it's better to use planes and pilots to counter that threat, the US Army thinks that ABGD is stupid because 1) that's what they put up with the USAF for and 2) it's better to use people and equipment to attack instead of defend and 3) it's even more stupid to commit to defending a specific strip of land (rather than maneuvering to a better position for reattack.) All of this makes more sense when one realizes that the USAF is in the business of blowing up stuff (preferably other aircraft) with aircraft, not in the 'living on an airstrip' business and that the USArmy has not had to deal with an environment not controlled by the USAF for a couple generations now.
Before one gets worked up over fossilized attitudes, remember that we have not gone back to using mules. Some tech changes last.
Re diesel subs - because there is nothing they do that nukes don't do better. And the American taxpayer isn't actually made out of money.
Because they're useless for military purposes.
Belgium punches way above its weight in terms of selling weapons vs having much of a military. For a long time in the Cold War the FN-FAL was known as the "right arm of freedom" vs the AK-47. I only know of their history of producing small arms though, rather than artillery/rockets.
I was going to say this but you beat me to it. That’s where Browning took his stuff after he fell out with Remington (?)
That has absolutely nothing to do with the question being asked.
A Modest Proposition
Winner-take-all voting systems, like in the US, naturally produce two parties that roughly evenly divide the national vote. Forms of media that emerged in recent decades, like cable TV, talk radio, and social media, give people more choice to absorb news the way they want, and lead people to self-segregate into echo chambers and vote for more polarized politicians, driving these two parties further apart and making it harder for them to compromise and thus pass laws. Citizens are frustrated by this deadlock. One way to reduce it may be to introduce national propositions so that we can directly vote on laws, like many cities, counties, and states already do.
Why would voting directly on issues be any more successful than voting indirectly, by electing our Congressional representatives? As citizens, we have diverse views, but to elect representatives in a two-party system, all these views on a huge range of issues must be sorted, often arbitrarily, into just two boxes. It’s not just squeezing a square peg into a round hole; it’s putting a hypercube with hundreds of dimensions into a dot. An analogy would be a supermarket that offered only two choices: a basket on the left or one on the right. If you want cabbage and cashews, but don’t want kiwis and cookies, tough luck; cabbage and cookies are in one basket, and cashews and kiwis are in the other.
There are issues that majorities of citizens agree on and want action on, but which aren’t acted on because of the representative system. Voting directly on these issues would get things done that majorities want, relieving some of our frustration. Another benefit of offloading some of the contentious issues from Congress would be to reduce pressure on representatives and perhaps let them relax their adversarial stance and cooperate more to get bills passed.
Propositions aren't radical. Many local and state governments in the US already use them, as does Switzerland, which is pretty conservative, stable, and successful.
Another way to reduce political polarization may be for politicians to pledge to simply represent constituents’ views by polling them on major bills or issues. This might be done by an app on which the representative would ask constituents how they should vote on each pending bill. Two potential problems are too much or too little participation: by people either trying to stuff the ballot box or people not responding. I don’t know much about internet security, but I suppose there are technical ways to verify participants. On the other hand, if few constituents express their view, particularly on minor issues, that could be dealt with either by simply following the views of whoever responds, or by actively polling constituents to get a more representative sample, or by the politician trying to predict what constituents would want.
This pledge seems bizarre compared to our current tradition, where politicians declare their platforms, and voters choose between two. But if we compare with the relationship between employees and employers, the current political tradition seems strange. Typically, employees don’t declare what they’ll do if they’re hired, take-it-or-leave-it as one fixed package; rather, they generally do what employers want—either asking what to do for major issues or predicting what employers want on minor issues. Why not shift to such a tradition for our elected representatives, who are our employees in government?
I think the natural drift towards 50/50 splits is actually a basic aspect of politics (people tend to polarize on an underlying composition of issues, and parties/blocks move positions until they just about hit the 50/50 equilibrium).
As a case in point, take the recent Israeli election - it's multiparty proportional representation, but the vote split between the pro- and anti-bibi blocks still ended up almost exactly 50/50 (Netanyahu block ended up a bit better in terms of seats for rounding reasons). Seems like most countries end up somewhere like this (with a few exceptions like Japan and Singapore, but that seems independent of voting algorithms).
That does seem to be the natural tendency. The exceptions that you note often are when one of the parties grabs the center position, like the LDP in Japan, or for decades the PRI in Mexico (with the PAN on the right and the PRD on the left), or now Macron's party in France.
The tendency of politics to drift toward a 50/50 median is a specific instance of Hotelling's Law, which describes how products in a market tend to become less differentiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
That would predict party platforms being almost identical, which they are not. Absent this, the 50/50 remains a mystery.
Compared to the scope of possible positions, or the range of positions held by individual voters, they're pretty close to identical. I suspect they're also presented in campaigns as being more distinct than they actually are.
The confusing thing for me is why they are not even *closer*, as Hotelling or Median Voter Theorem would predict. Surely you can imagine some difference between parties/candidates that one of them can narrow. In other words, where does the need to be distinct feature in your model? I wrote about it in more detail here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EdoCrSGM8FzJhez3C/why-are-politicians-polarized
Referenda have lots of practical issues, and I think the sheer number of them in California is usually held up as an example of why it's a poor system. You have to somehow decide which items get on the ballot, which tends to favor a raw number of signatures for this or that issue, which tends to favor very wealthy people or groups who can afford to pay thousands of staff to gather signatures.
A lot of people don't want to hear this, but tons of regular people hate politics, hate thinking about it, and simply don't have strong opinions on most policy issues. You can poll them or give them an app or something, but they can simply dodge the call or not use the app- they do this because they.... really don't care. I find this is really tough for high-information voters who love & follow politics to understand, but a huge number of people just don't want to be bothered with making these decisions. Sorry.
A much more efficient way to find how voters really feel on issues would be to use a proportional multiparty parliamentary system, and not just FPTP with only 2 parties. This is the system that actually works in practice, not endless referenda
AIUI the big problem with California's ballot measures is that they're very hard to repeal. Switzerland holds referenda all the time, but I don't think they have this problem because most Swiss referenda propose normal laws rather than constitutional amendments. That said, from a quick skim of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Swiss_referendums and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_ballot_proposition the two systems look pretty similar, and I'd love to hear from someone with direct experience of the Swiss system!
I agree that a proportional multiparty parliamentary system would be better than FPTP. I was just trying to think of improvements than can be done in the US without changing the constitution (which is now practically impossible to amend).
And I agree that most people don't care much about politics. But that's fine. For most issues, only a small fraction of citizens will be interested enough to use the app, while abstaining by not using the app will express an opinion, too: that this particular issue doesn't matter much. Occasionally, an issue will arise much interest, and the app would be there to show the public opinion.
1. Have open primaries, with as many candidates from as many parties -- think the New York Mayor's race. This means that all candidates have to appeal more to the median voter than the extreme in their party.
2. Implement some form of ranked choice voting.
3. Eliminate gerrymandering by requiring (1) electoral districts that reflect the percentage of the political vote in the last 5 elections (that is, if your state goes 54% R and 46% D, then your statehouse must reflect this as well as your congressional delegation), (2) cross a minimum of political boundaries, and (3) do not advantage one party over another (i.e., party X's districts are all toss-ups while party Y's are all certain).
“This means that all candidates have to appeal more to the median voter than the extreme in their party.”
Not how it’s worked in California.
Good ideas. Some cities and states have implemented some of these and can show the way.
>For most issues, only a small fraction of citizens will be interested enough to use the app
Yes- this is the exact issue- this is what leads to polarization and political tribalism. You're optimizing for hearing *even more* from the highly ideological, slightly crazy voters who have Really Strong Opinions On Everything, who view every single issue as Unrelenting Ideological Combat. You're making the situation *worse*, because now politicians hear directly and constantly from what political scientists call 'intense policy demanders'. Outside groups will optimize to get their fanatic voters to click this way or that on the app- nutso ideological groups or nutso ideological wealthy people will spend money and media coverage targeting their voters to influence the politicians even more.
Again, a lot of people don't want to hear this, but the real solution is to make American politics a bit less democratic and a bit less responsive to the voters, 20-30% of whom are raving ideologues. Build stronger political parties who can tell the intense policy demanders to cool it a bit, who can strike bargains without highly ideological voters breathing down their neck every day. Garret Jones wrote a great book entitled 10% Less Democracy, I highly recommend it
You make an excellent point. Another solution may be to conduct frequent, small surveys on bills coming up for a vote, to get a representative sampling of constituent opinions.
The U.S. House of Representatives could get most of the way to a proportional system (where each state is one multimember district) based on a simple act of Congress. Now, if you want to assert that getting a majority of Congress to vote against their own incumbency is unlikely, I won't disagree! -- but still easier than a constitutional amendment.
Yes. People may feel better about government to have more democracy, with such opportunities to have their opinions respected and registered.
I ran across the website of Sapien Labs, which says (https://sapienlabs.org/about-us):
<QUOTE>
OUR FOUNDING STORY
In 2014 our founder Dr. Tara Thiagarajan, a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford, was running a microfinance company called Madura that was working across 25,000 villages and small towns in India. ... A large field team gathered data on ecosystem and individual level variables to identify those that predicted the economic success of both individuals and entire villages. …
One Saturday they recorded a few minutes of resting brain activity [EEG] from themselves and some friends and colleagues and then drove a couple hours on Sunday to a small village where they spent the entire day recording brain activity from any willing adults. ... The brain activity from the village brains was very distinct from the urban brains. The differences could be several fold, and in some cases distributions between the two groups barely overlapped.
</QUOTE>
Their postings, which are mostly on biorxiv (not peer-reviewed, which is why I don't call them publications), include the following:
<PAPER SUMMARY>
Complexity of EEG Reflects Socioeconomic Context and Geofootprint
Dhanya Parameshwaran and Tara C. Thiagarajan, 2017
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/125872v1
This paper looked at EEG studies of 402 adults from 48 locations in Tamil Nadu, an Indian state, ranging from small villages with no electricity or motor transport, to large modern cities. Subjects ranged in income from $300 to $150,000/yr. The study concluded that their measure of EEG waveform complexity (based on correlations of different points in time of the EEG signal) showed that EEG complexity correlated very strongly with the "modernity" of the subject's hometown, and even more-strongly (r = .93) with performance on Raven's progressive matrices. That is (roughly), city folk had much more-complicated EEG signals and were much smarter.
</PAPER SUMMARY>
<PAPER SUMMARY>
Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG
Dhanya Parameshwaran, Tara C. Thiagarajan, 2019.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/125898v2
This is based on the same subject sample as the 2017 paper.
Its abstract says, "Oscillations in the alpha range (8-15 Hz) have been found to appear prominently in the EEG signal when people are awake with their eyes closed, and since their discovery have been considered a fundamental cerebral rhythm. ... It has been shown to bear positive relation to memory capacity, attention and a host of other cognitive outcomes. Here we show that this feature is largely undetected in the EEG of adults without post-primary education and access to modern technologies."
</PAPER SUMMARY>
Rural pre-modern people don't have alpha waves?! These claims are startling enough that we all should have heard of them if they're correct. I only skimmed these papers, but they look pretty good. And as far as I know, the authors are correct in their observation that no previous researchers have ever gone out to remote, poverty-stricken, uneducated and unmodernized villages to find subjects for EEG studies.
My first guess is that it's due to nutritional deficiency. Many poor rural areas of India suffered greatly from hunger in the past, and hunger during gestation or childhood has devastating, permanent effects on IQ.
My 2nd guess is that it's because the smart people left the little pre-industrial villages.
Any other opinions or guesses?
Supposing rural agricultural or cattle-based village does stultify intelligence, I bet you'd find no such effect in tribes without cattle or agriculture. Getting your food from nature every day is IMHO far more mentally challenging than most city lives.
I have some ideas about this. My (admittedly very naive, I’m by no means a neuroscientist) first thought is that maybe “modern” brain activity follows similar patterns precisely because they’re modern, and the types of activity we’ve identified as correlated with intelligence could be more accurately described as correlated with “modern” intelligence, and that if we went backwards in time and scanned Socrates’s brain it would look more similar to these rural Indians than to a modern philosopher. Sort of reminiscent of the idea of Bicameralism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
I wouldn’t think they are less intelligent, although the word “simple “ is used to describe such people. A less abstract world breeds different brain patterns. That’s my take.
Don’t know about Socrates but I bet Archimedes’ head was full of alpha.
Zvi's conflicted review of Marvel Snap actually convinced me to try it, and I love it, despite his criticisms being largely accurate. The card acquisition mechanic is truly terrible, but I don't honestly feel like it's out of greed, in particular. It's extremely difficult to get cards quickly, and impossible to target anything in particular that you want for a specific deck. But they've stated that the goal behind it is to try and keep people's collections somewhat unique, and if I view the acquisition process as a general strategy for keeping the game fresh, there are definitely some really clever ideas:
In particular, I'm really intrigued by your collection level increasing as a result of upgrading the cards. On its own, this is incredibly dull, but one of the criticisms the game regularly gets is the way each card has to have its own specific boosters to be upgraded. These boosters are primarily earned by playing the cards, and you get relatively more collection level points the first time you upgrade. In other words, they've developed a system that actively incentivizes you to play with every card in your collection. Every time I get a new card, I actively slot it into a deck to get enough boosters for its first upgrade. Regardless of whether it's any good, they've convinced me to at least give every card a chance. This is cool!
They didn't quite manage to kill off netdecking, but they did better than average. I see a lot of variety on the ladder. I think it also helps that they rotate the locations you have to win, which means the fundamental rules of how the game is played are in a constant state of flux. It's largely impossible for any one rock paper scissors to develop in an environment like this. I can see this actually being off-putting for a lot of players who like honing and developing a single archetype they can grind, but for me it's much more fun for every game to be a test of situational adaptability.
Zvi also mentioned how much he like the cube snapping, and frankly, I don't know if he went far enough. Between that gambling mechanic, and the very short games, laddering feels more like poker in some ways. Going up the ranks is not in any way about winning every game, the sky-high variance makes that impossible. Instead they've given players a way to assess their own confidence of victory, bet accordingly, and to fold when the opponent raises too aggressively.
In spite of all this progressing your collection still feels terrible. I don't know exactly what the solution to that is, because I like the philosophy behind it all, and I can see how it's all supposed to work, but somehow the way it's locked down still just doesn't feel good.
Just a musing: If the game mechanics are good but the monetization sucks, it should be quite easy to just create a game that copies the mechanics directly. You will need to reword some terms, but game mechanics don't fall under copyright (as of my understanding). Then you replace the Marvel theme with a general superhero theme and you have an actual good game. Funding the development for such a game wouldn't be that expensive: the mechanics seem quite simple, I wager the art would be the largest part of the budget (and you can do with stock art or DALL.E at the beginning). A couple of superfans could probably fund (and or develop) the entire game themselves. The only issue would be that the player base for the copy game would be smaller, but likely not small enough to make the game repetitive or unplayable (I've played some pretty niche online card games and they have worked).
Agreed on all of the above. My take:
1. It’s a fun game. Great for quick pickups
2. After 10+ hours of play, progression stops very abruptly, unless you pay. It really feels like a gacha game for the first 5 hours though. I think this was Zvi’s main concern.
3. The design space feels very limited. Destroy, move, reveal, ongoing, discard. Those are the current mechanics and cover pretty much everything you can do with the board. I’m really curious to see what else they will add. Factions? Spells? Mana generators? The total space of things they can do doesn’t seem very wide IMHO
I imagine they'll stick with just creatures for a while. Could do some Morph/Trap creatures that flip if the opponent triggers them. Kicker costs. There's a lot of room in the Merge space they haven't explored, too. I think the biggest danger will be the temptation to release cards that kill variance, like a Scarlet Witch that always changes it to a specific location with a beneficial effect
Question for Scott: Is there going to be a collection of deleted posts kept/posted anywhere (anonymized, if appropriate) so folks can see what didn't make the grade and calibrate accordingly in future?
One of my earliest Internet memories was the Dysfunctional Family Circus, in which people submitted alternative (usually dark) captions for the painfully-wholesome newspaper cartoon The Family Circus. Accepted captions went to the Green Zone, captions which needed more work went to the Orange Zone, the vast majority of submissions went to /dev/null, and a handful of submissions which were so bad the mods wanted to hold them up to ridicule ended up in the Red Zone. Of course, the very rarity of Red Zone captions meant that people started trying to compose them deliberately, driving the mods insane. I suspect something similar would happen here.
When Andy Weir had no time for his webcomic "Casey and Andy" and therefore let his readers submit their self-made strips, he published this one, which is its own piece of art in a weird way:
http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=505
Several Red Zone captions were brilliant (possibly unintentional) absurdist humour in their own right, and many became DFC in-jokes. Say "poop keeps the tent wher it is" or "I think my hands are made of wood" to a former DFCer and watch them dissolve into fits of giggles.
(Alert DFCers have noticed that since Jeff Keane took over, occasional references to DFC in-jokes have appeared in the strip. We think he used to be a lurker.)
No, it's a reasonable request but I have no way to automate it and it would take forever to do manually.
My weekend was busier than expected. Here's a seemingly-working python script, link obfuscated for privacy reasons: bit.ly/ACXPruneScript
Edit: obviously, have someone you trust to read code give this a once over, don't run unvetted code from strangers on the internet.
Hm. Substack doesn't have a public API, but it appears it *does* have a private JSON API to dynamically fetch comments[1]. It should be fairly trivial to make a script that Scott can run once before pruning, then run a second time afterward, and it'll just do a tree-traversal diff on the two responses and output anything missing from the second comment tree to a file. It'll probably miss some comments, since substack collapse long threads under certain conditions? But that still puts us in the ballpark of "good enough". I might code this up some time after work or this weekend, if another commenter doesn't want to beat me to it.
Scott, what computing platform do you use when you're moderating, and/or what OS is your desktop if the answer is a mobile platform? Because it'll probably need to run on a desktop computer, but that can be separate from the device you do your moderation on.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/api/v1/post/83607618/comments?token=&all_comments=true&sort=most_recent_first&last_comment_at
Well, you could do this in two stages. In Stage 1 (say the first 12 hours) you simply add a comment to every post you feel like deleting: "Going to delete this." Don't even bother saying "why" because (1) it takes time, (2) it takes away from the value of the experiment, which is to see if people can figure out on their own what is/is not good, and more interestingly (3) you might be wrong about your own motives (or not express them clearly) and the comment less helpful than one might hope.
Then in Stage 2 (say after 12 hours) you just do all he deletions. You can put as much or as little time between the stages as you like, and you can repeat them or not, depending on how much time you want to spend on this (and honestly it sounds like you are already spending a ton of time on this, way more than I would be willing to spend if it were my blog).
I think for this to work and not just degenerate into a thousand arguments you'd have to be really rigid. *Never* explain, never respond to arguments about a particular comment once its tagged, and always follow through. But I personally would be quite interested to see what happens, it would be a cool social psychological experiment.
Writing up on 'I mainly deleted comments that were such and such' would serve some of the purpose of OP's post I guess.
Understood, thanks. Someone more patient than me could probably use the web archive to do this if they were curious.
ETA: Or not, as it appears to not be archived, and when I requested it got a 'job failed' response. That's weird?
One of my friends has a stats assignment where she needs to find an example of a bad graph with an accessible dataset so that she can make a better one. Anyone have any favorite (semi-recent) bad graphs?
I wrote a 2010 lesswrong post about a bad graph, "Subtext is not invariant under linear transformations". It talks about how a person can change the subtext of a graph by rotating it around an axis, or around y = x. Unfortunately the graph it talks about was in the linked pdf, which no longer exists!
But while searching for that graph, I found this tweet with another terrible graph:
https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1269068345032269825
There is also a facebook group called "this is terrible data presentation and we're rejecting your paper"
Is there one called r/you_suck_more_than_all_those_graphs?
I have found r/dataisugly and shall peruse
Yesterday someone posted on Twitter about traditional Burmese weight measures. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_units_of_measurement, you'll see that in the list of weight measures (which Burma/Myanmar is still using, although they plan to go metric)
1 mu = 2g (approximately, see wiki for exact numbers; I also took off the -tha counting suffix)
1 mat = 4g
1 nga-mu = 8g
So what exactly is the problem with 1 mu being 2 grams and 1 nga-mu being 8 grams? The problem is that "nga" means "five" in Burmese. And no, there's no other meaning of "nga" that applies here. The wiki notes this in a footnote - "literally five, but in fact is only four", but doesn't explain how this situation could arise.
How *could* something like this have happened?
Someone asked this on Twitter without an answer. I couldn't let it go, so, after several hours of reading and looking up what I could find about the historical measurement and monetary systems used in Burma (I must admit to knowing next to nothing about the country and literally nothing about the language and writing system), I have a theory. It's just a theory, mind you, because I didn't find a source that would outright say "this is why". But I find it convincing and pleasant. So, here goes. Your last chance to try and guess any major ideas on your own ends with the next paragraph.
I'll try to be brief, and I think numbering paragraphs might help with that:
1. Burma was independent for a long time, and was only conquered by the British in 1885, at which time they aligned their monetary system with colonial India. But the weird thing we're discussing was already evident as early as 1850s, when second-to-last Burmese king Mindon started minting coins for the first time in Burmese history. Coin collectors made sure lots of these survive and are catalogued and weighed. As an example, in this catalog https://en.numista.com/catalogue/myanmar-1.html
you can see that a silver 1-mu "Mindon Min" coin weighs ~1.5g, and a silver 5-mu coin weighs 4 times that, ~6g. Only the 5-mu coins are like that, other silver/gold coins seem sane.
2. Before coins, the Burmese used straight-up ingots of silver/gold for their monetary exchange, and they weighed them. Two interesting things about that which have nothing to do with the main problem: one is that a special class of weighers/assayers developed, and 2.5% of value was written down on each occasion (1.5% as payment to the assayer, 1% presumed wear&tear). Two, weighing was done by comparing to sets of standard weights which were animal-shaped, typically birds. These survive in large numbers from many past centuries and by weighing them we know which sets of standard weights had been used and how they changed with time.
3. The measures of weight were developed/used especially often for weighing gold and silver, so e.g. "1 mu" was both weight and monetary value (the context supplied, silver or gold, or it could be specified; typically an exchange rate of x16 or x17 between gold and silver was maintained), and the measures changed and developed according to monetary needs. The chief standard measure was in fact the silver kyat, which was equal to about 16g of silver, and more importantly for trade, at least in the 18th-19th centuries was kept equal to the Indian rupee; it was also known as the tical, and the British used this name most often. Interestingly, it used to be a lot less, 11g many centuries ago, and slowly rose in weight, as attested by the bird weights; it seems that kings found it useful to raise the tax income by very slightly upping the standard weight without changing the nominal burden).
4. Now given a kyat that's set at some fixed measure and in harmony with neighboring countries, you can build other measures up (2 kyat, 4 or 5, 8 or 10 etc.) or down (1/2, 1/4 or 1/5, 1/10 etc.). And it appears that, building down, both a binary system of 1/2 1/4 1/8 etc., and a decimal system of 1/2 1/5 1/10 etc. was in use in different eras in Burma (I find this alluded to in several sources but didn't find an authoritative list of which was used when). The binary system was influenced by India, and the decimal by China. Using the standard names for measures smaller than kyat, they went like this:
1 kyat = 4 mat = 8 mu = 16 pe = 64 pya (binary)
1 kyat = 5 mat = 10 mu = 20 pe = 80 pya (decimal)
5. We're set to introduce The Theory. At some older time, the decimal system was in use in which 1 mu was 1/10th a kyat. Then nga-mu, literally 5 mu, was half a kyat, and I suppose this could be an especially convenient unit of measure, used more widely and often than 1 mu itself. In time, the actual word "nga-mu" came to mean or at least strongly connote "half a kyat" in people's minds. Then later, perhaps in the 19th century, there was a reform to the binary system, and 1 mu was re-evaluated as 1/8th a kyat. The name "nga-mu" stuck by that time and it remained half a kyat, which now was, by weight, 4 mu. And that's how this came about.
6. A competing hypothesis would be that the decimal and the binary system were in use *at the same time* somehow. And wouldn't that be fascinating! But two arguments speak against that; first, the weights of the coins mentioned above. Second, the contemporary accounts of Englishmen travelling/trading in Burma in the 19th century - and there are quite a few - as well as dictionaries of measures, trading guides, etc. etc. nearly unanimously document a binary system: 2 mu = 1 mat, 4 mat = 1 kyat. I found one contrary source that seems to say "10 mu make up a kyat", as well as a definition of mu (မူး) on wiktionary.org that says "1/10th a kyat during the Konbaung era" - that's the era prior to the British conquest. But these are rare exceptions, and I want to explain them away by saying that if one didn't know about the discrepancy, one could wrongly "deduce" this from the 5-mu coin being half a kyat.
7. A strong affirmative piece of evidence, I think, is that the definition of "nga-mu" (ငါးမူး) in a Burmese-English dictionary, both wiktionary.org and a "real" one at http://www.sealang.net/burmese/dictionary.htm, gives several different meanings of "half of": not just half a kyat, but half an inch, half in acre, etc. This makes me think that literal "five mu" could in fact have developed towards a presumed meaning of "half a standard unit". But I didn't find a source that outright says that, or confirms my theory of the decimal->binary switch being responsible for this.
That's it! If you're an expert in historical Burmese monetary/weight systems or know one, I'd love to know what you/they think of this!
An obvious western comparison-point is the hundredweight, which is (usually) 112 pounds or eight stone.
I expect it would be similar to the process by which a Roman centuria ended up as 80 men.
Sounds plausible! Reminds me of the 1824 Weights and Measures Act in the UK, in which the gallon was redefined to be the volume of ten pounds of water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units
A great thing about your theory is that it aligns so closely with the controversy about the meaning of "kilobyte", "megabyte", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte
In this case, there was a power of two and a power of ten that were similar in value (10³=1000 and 2¹⁰=1024). As these differ by only 2.4%, people were sometimes happy to use them interchangeably, even though they are, in fact, different quantities. As a result, there's some confusion when someone says "my Internet connection lets me download at a megabyte per second" or "my hard drive has a capacity of two terabytes".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Multiple-byte_units
> Some systems are based on powers of 10; other systems are based on powers of 2. Nomenclature for these systems has been the subject of confusion. Systems based on powers of 10 reliably use standard SI prefixes (kilo, mega, giga, ...) and their corresponding symbols (k, M, G, ...). Systems based on powers of 2, however, might use binary prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, ...) and their corresponding symbols (Ki, Mi, Gi, ...) or they might use the prefixes K, M, and G, creating ambiguity.
Your theory also describes essentially the same kind of ambiguity, albeit apparently based on the similarity between 2³ and 10¹.
Persistence: Expert level!
Guesses from before I read your answer:
1. The units started out with a 5:1 ratio, but had poor standardization, and drifted separately over time, until most people were using approximately 4:1 at whatever point in history someone standardized everything.
2. Someone did it on purpose to give themselves a way to state quantities in a misleading fashion.
3. The unit was associated with 5 of some other thing, in some historical accident whose details would be impossible to guess. For instance, maybe 1 nga-mu of spice was traditionally sold in a 5-sided container.
4. The original word wasn't "nga", but someone had bad handwriting.
Really interesting. For some reason I thought of a baker’s dozen.
You sir, at least, have surely cleared Scott's challenge bar.
Great stuff, thank you.
I woke up Sunday morning so happy to finally be back on Standard Time. Since then, I keep reminding myself, “What a relief to be back to reality!”
If only we could drop DST, that would be the greatest. I’m very aware though that most of the country is in favor of permanent national DST. Sleep scientists seem to agree that that appears to be an unhealthy choice, but I can understand people wanting sunlight at the end of a workday.
I’m bummed to be in the distinct minority. I’ve thought about moving to Arizona. I don’t think my GF would join me so that’s out.
I kind of like DST during the shortest days of the summer. I don’t want to mess with installing blackout curtains for the three weeks or so we’re the sun rises very early at my latitude.
Screwing with the clocks is evil. But perhaps I would have been crabbing 150 years ago when "railroad" time started the evolution to time zones we have today. Damn it, noon is when the Sun is overhead, why should I agree it's when the Sun is overhead in some burg 200 miles away?
Maybe we should all just use UTC, and develop ideas about what the meaning of "0800" is based on our regular location on the globe, and our personal situation. Is it really necessary for everyone in the same shtetl to agree on the psychological connotations of "8 am?"
I'm from Arizona and no longer live there. Learning to deal with time changes is distinctly wack.
Daylight Savings Time is the systemic oppression of evening people by morning people.
I don't understand, I would have said it's the opposite..? Namely, "oppression of morning people by evening people"
At least that's my perspective as someone who typically wakes up at daybreak.
Daylight savings time means everything happens earlier in the sun-cycle. We all wake up closer to daybreak and we all go to bed earlier. So it makes life more comfortable for morning people and less comfortable for evening people. So I think Phil is right. (But Phil retracted so am I missing something?)
Most people set their lives by the clock, not by the sun. Daylight savings time means that it stays light for longer in the evening, so evening people get more daylight when they want to do things. This is particularly noticeable at high latitudes, when DST ends and suddenly it's getting dark in the middle of the afternoon. Conversely, we get less daylight in the morning when we're trying to sleep. Historically, early DST advocates seem to have been evening people who valued after-work daylight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History
Yes, people set their lives by the clock, but their bodies still respond to the sun (in fact I'd argue it's your body's response to light that determines whether you're an evening or a morning person). I'm more towards the evening end of the spectrum, and when all the clocks go forward I feel like I'm being dragged from my bed before my circadian rhythm expects it.
At my latitude (56 degrees) there's basically no evening light for half the year anyway. The clock change just changes when in the afternoon it gets dark - the evening is dark anyway.
(Edit - I see from your other comment that you're also an evening person at 56 degrees North. Now I'm even more confused that we seem to disagree! :))
My perspective is: getting up in the morning is miserable anyway, but when the clocks go back it feels like the government is calling time on me just as I'm getting functional. This was particularly noticeable before I got a car and used to access the hills by public transport. Under DST I could get up a bit earlier than normal, catch a train or bus to the Highlands (in the dark if it's late in the year, but that doesn't matter), snooze on the train, get out at my station with a decent amount of daylight ahead of me and do a full hill day before either my return train or the sunset called time. But then the clocks go back, and suddenly I'm wasting precious, precious winter daylight sitting on the train rather than hiking, and I have to heavily curtail my hill day in order to be safely off by nightfall. But even on office days, dragging myself out of bed is a pain even at midsummer, but cycling home in the daylight is a joy and cycling home in the dark is depressing.
This seems a bit confused. Which do you want to keep, DST or winter time?
If you think sunlight in the morning, and sunlight helps your mood in general, then the present system of clock changes benefits you.
Evening people, in my experience, don’t care about sunlight.
Evening person here: I care *very much* about sunlight. I just feel like a zombie in the morning, which is why I'd rather have the sunlight later on in the day when I can make use of it.
As an evening person who lives at 56 degrees north, I think that normal time is oppression of evening people by morning people.
Wait, you're right. Never mind. Move along. Nothing to see here, morning people.
Seriously. I felt the same way. Time 'feels' correct now.
It's so weird to me that we invented time of day with noon defined to be when the sun is highest in the sky, and then didn't like our own definition so we change that to be 1pm sometimes.
The sun doesn't know what time it is. It rises when it rises and sets when it sets. We can change when we do things based on what the sun is doing, but we've decided that's too hard and stick with doing things when our made-up time of day says we should do them instead.
Reducing the coordination problem of “everyone shift what time of day they do things during the winter/summer” to “increment/decrement a measure by one” is a vast simplification. As witness that we do the latter regularly with little more than some biennial grumbling, where I suspect the former would be basically impossible.
(You could have government entities shift their hours by legislation, but that would either straitjacket the departments or have a de minimis effect. The knock on effect would be far less than DST. And regulating private activity would be far more intrusive and demanding of resources than resetting the clocks.)
I’m an evening-oriented person by nature. (So I don’t personally care if it’s dark in the morning, since nothing makes mornings good as such.) would happily take year round DST or even double DST if it we’re offered, and I’d find year round standard time crushing. I’d certainly vote and donate against losing DST entirely if it came to it.
I recognize that many people have the opposite response, and that there are practical issues with schools, etc. (School should probably start later, but that leads to knock on issues for parents’ work schedules, etc.) I lived through the “going to school in the dark” years of the 70s and didn’t find it measurably worse than getting up for school otherwise as far as I recall, but the remembered consensus is certainly that it was bad.
I suspect that the current compromise (give or take moving the date of the change back and forth) is probably pretty close to the compromise we’d wind up with if we opened it up fully to renegotiation.
Unless you are living on the meridian of the time zone you are in you will be off by +/- 30 minutes. If your time zone is accurate. In some parts of the world, like Spain, in standard time the country is +1 from solar, and in summer +2. Want solar time in Spain use a solar clock.
DST makes a lot of sense in northern latitudes. Where I live, with 17 hours of sunlight mid summer the sunset should be 8:30pm. ( 1/2 daylight). The sunrise should be 3:30. (12 - 1/2 daylight). Instead by being in DST and 30 minutes west of London sunset is at 9:50pm and sunrise at a more respectable 5am.
All good
DST would suck all year around though, so the clock change is a good idea.
Before European time arrived in Japan there were 6 day hours and 6 night hours that adjusted for length of day. The first western clocks were regarded as defying both sense and reality. A few decades later temporal colonisation was complete.
The Romans had that.
Yes; it was the standard in the West (with 12 hours instead of 6, of course) until the advent of clockwork clocks.
For a while the Japanese made mechanical clocks that changed speed at sunrise and sunset in order to keep the six daylight hours and six nighttime hours. You had to keep adjusting them as the seasons changed.
I’m a Software engineer at a big tech company. I work remotely from a medium close of living area.
I am very social and meet very few programmers with similarly high compensation. In fact my job is viewed as exciting, unique and prestigious!
Am I smartly being a big fish in a small pound or lamely opting for complacently in the slow lane.?
In other words where do you fall on pushing yourself to achieve vs relaxing. I don’t buy that being maximally ambitious is optimal here.
It's really just about your goals. If you can meaningfully highlight where you see yourself and where you'd like to be and whether you're on track to getting there, as long as that plan is working what you do with the rest of your time is not relevant.
That said this can get very fuzzy at high performance/expectation levels. At one point when I was preparing for interviews I came across this study plan: https://github.com/khangich/machine-learning-interview/blob/master/how.md . What I found most interesting however wasn't the 'what to read' part, but the small section on 'how to read' which is what I've linked. One linked article talks about the capability of highly performant individuals to treat complex concepts as incredibly basic. They've thought about and learned about and obsessed over them to the point that the complexities become the building blocks that define their approach to learning new things. Which obviously makes learning new things a lot easier! But also clearly requires a lot of effort, so much so that to execute it you might be asking yourself to be a completely different person. Balancing relaxation and effort doesn't make too much sense for this state/goal.
So it depends? I apologise for this incredibly cliched conclusion. I personally push myself as hard as I can without punishing myself for failure.
Idk how to say this. But how on earth do you push yourself as hard as you can when you also spend time commenting on message boards?
Well in this particular case I was traveling and wasn't able to do very much as I was boarding, so I quickly typed that out. I have things I want to learn and do but don't have much success forcing them into the spaces between things. Most of what I want to do requires focus, so I don't try to do too much when traveling or waiting.
I should also mention that the whole statement is subjective and very deliberately so. Maybe for you this _isn't_ what pushing yourself hard looks like at all and that's cool. Whatever lets your actions align with your thoughts and gives you peace of mind works.
Do you like where you live? Do you find your job reasonably enjoyable?
The ceiling on the amount of glory you're going to get as a big company software engineer isn't all that high, no matter where you live.
I do. I may be transitioning to “work to live” mode from “live to work”.
I do pine for the excitement/glory/self-fulfillment of some of the careers I hear about here and elsewhere. But I don’t miss being “smart male software guy #8” which would be my life in SF type places
Not sure if this helps, but in my experience the people who are 'maximally ambitious' don't seem to have actually made a conscious choice to be that way.
A common analysis of last night's election is that moderates have rebuked the GOP for running candidates who are too crazy, and the party needs to forsake (some extreme version of) Trumpism.
Is this a thing that can happen? Is there some sense in which there are some Republicans in a room somewhere who can say "We've been rebuked, let's start running more moderate candidates"? Or is it just that more extreme candidates can run, will win among primary voters, and nobody thinking of "the greater good of the party" has any way to stop it?
Any party in the U.S. can choose to have a primary where its own members do not select the nominee by voting and the nominee is chosen some other way -- even by "a bunch of guys in a smoke-filled room." This right -- to use a method of choosing a nominee other than by vote of the party members -- is a First Amendment right that can be exercised by any association (and a political party is really just an association).
So, yes, there is a way in which Republicans *could* conceivably say, "let's start running more moderate candidates, to hell with what Republican primary voters want, we'll take away their primary vote and choose the nominee ourselves."
Having said that, if the Republican party (or any party) were to decide to go back to the "smoke-filled room" model of choosing a nominee, the party would probably bleed members.
There are still however more subtle ways in which a party (any party) can influence the outcome of primaries in which party members do vote, such as by giving certain candidates more support.
Party heirarchies have been losing power steadily since the machine era, and I would say there's not very much that can be done now. The only remaining influence is where party committees send party money, but these days people are much less inclined to give money to parties anyway, they prefer to give it to individual candidates and (once they go over McCain-Feingold limits) to PACs.
Interested wealthy people could set up a PAC specifically for the purpose of funding moderate candidates in both parties, and see how well that works. Not real well, is my guess, in the modern era politics has become religion for too many people.
I'm surprised to hear this. Aren't Congressional votes more or less in lock-step these days, with Democrats all voting one way and Republicans the other, with only a few exceptions? Doesn't that suggest the parties control everything?
And didn't there used to be a lot less of that?
I think that is not because of party discipline -- it's not like there are significant numbers of Rs or Ds who wish they could cross the aisle, but fear the repercussions from leadership. This I think is more a reflection of 50/50 government, and the fact that voters from the outer wing of each party[1] are better organized and can more easily threaten someone who does that. You have only to look at how Manchin and Synema (on the Democratic side), and Ryan and McConnell (on the Republican side) have been savaged by the fanatic wing of their own parties.
At the election level, neither party is willing to go to the extent of requiring permission from the party itself to call yourself a "Democrat' or "Republican" (and it's possible some states might not allow that), so nobody needs the permission of the party to run as its candidate. You just throw your hat in the ring of a primary and call yourself what you like. If you win -- you get the delegates, whether or not the party leadership approves.
That gives us strange things like, in California, a candidate winning an election as a "Democrat" even though the Democratic Party of California endorsed one of her opponents, as happened to Dianne Feinsteinn in 2018. It's also the case that a significant number of Trump supporters despise the Republican Party per se, which they will call the "GOPe" or "cuckservatives" et cetera, and see their man as to no small extent at war with the party heirarchy.
Certainly it was the case 75 years ago that parties had a great deal of control over who came up through the ranks, because parties had a lot more control over money and outreach efforts. But the TV age broke that, first with the election of John Kennedy in 1960, and the Internet has only made it much more the case that candidates can appeal directly to primary voters and donors "over the heads" of the party heirarchy, so to speak, so that the parties end up with candidates selected directly by voters self-identifying with the party[2], with the party leadership exerting suprisingly little influence over the process.
---------------------------------
[1] Of which there seem to be either more, or at least they are are better organized and louder than they used to be, not sure which. Perhaps both! We are as people growing more and more isolated from those actually physically around us: a shocking (to me) number of people pretty much have their entire social life, all their connections and friends, online, where they can choose pretty precisely their "neighbors," and never have to interact with actual physical neighbors, who may readily run the gamut of attitudes and situations in life. As with all forms of apartheid, this form would seem to lend itself to growing tribalism, mutual incomprehension, and suspicion.
[2] That more states allow "open" primaries where *any* voter, and not just those with a stated affiliation with a given party, can vote, has jumbled this up even more. In many states it is perfectly possible for a Democrat to vote in the Republican primary, and therefore help choose who the *Republicans* will run for office -- and vice versa.
From what I understand, that's more a function of stronger ideological sorting effects than increased central control.
Fewer liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats to cross the aisle, and more coherent activist blocs punishing 'collaboration with the enemy'. Looks like order from the outside, but it isn't *controlled*
If that's a true thing (and I believe it is), then it's not a back room experiment, but something happening in real time in full view. As with the Democrats, the Republicans are a broad mix of people with varying positions. Even at it's most Trump-influenced, most Republicans were not particularly pro-Trump (or anti, for that matter). If Trump is good for the party, more people will support him. If he's bad for the party, he loses support. Some of the wackier candidates who failed badly, like Doug Mastriano, will signal to primary voters and party officials (who help funnel money and support) that those are bad candidates and should not be supported later. It's a decentralized and iterative process, so it will take time. Similarly, Democrats are going through the same process with analyzing how and why their own candidates did or did not do well.
You'll notice some really good data points here, where there are two or more statewide elections in the same state, but one candidate does significantly better than another. Walker/Kemp + Warnock/Abrams is a great example, but also Shapiro/Fetterman + Mastriano/Oz. The final tallies were much closer for the senate candidates than the governors, which clearly means people were voting for more than just party affiliation.
Certainly harder to stop when some Dem donors helped fund election deniers in the Republican primaries: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democrats-risky-midterm-strategy-elevate-election-deniers-appears-pay-off-2022-11-09/
Even if it produced a win I thought that was a terrible tactic.
I thought it a terrible and insane tactic until it worked.
Now, I wonder..
Would it be better if the Dems instead took a principled path that lost to Republicans who are 'moderate' by virtue of avoiding the subject of insurrection, but who'd predictably kowtow to Trump- refusing to ratify valid elections and using the 'regular' Republican toolkit of gerrymandering and voter suppression to entrench minority rule?
I don't know which gamble is the lesser evil :/
What does it look like when both parties are working hard to make sure the other party nominates a fruitcake?
Would be awesome if that meant some independents got elected, but likely it just means whichever fruitcake is most palatable in a given constituency.
Pretty much the latter under the current structures & rules. Direct donations paired with the internet, a greater range of TV options and social media have eroded the power and authority of backroom dealmakers.
To the extent that party figures still have control, thinking of 'the greater good of the party' is itself a force against healthy reforms because they would erode the political duopoly the US has.
Ranked choice voting, and/or proportional representation in multi-member districts) would allow the radical activist bases to pursue radical rarely-elected politics without spoiling the big party, decreasing the risk of primaries. Those reforms would also make 3rd party moderates a real possibility.
On that note- any thoughts on the Nevada ballot initiative?
Also (if you like it) - How can we promote that kind of initiative more broadly?
There are always kingmakers inside any party. They don't always get their way but they're usually important.
More broadly I think any attempt to draw major narratives from an election which to first approximation looks like the last election is a bit doomed. Republicans didn't do badly, they still won the election overall, just by not as much as the polls had anticipated. Blame the polls for being wrong.
I don't think the take on the polls is correct. I wasn't following this election closely but the impression i got was that polls were much better than the "vibes" which predicted a huge red wave that the polls weren't seeing and people just said "oh well polls have been under counting republicans" and assumed it would happen again
See here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/the-pollsters-seem-to-have-had-a-good-night/
Yea, that's how it seems to me as far as the polls.
And I would question the statement that the GOP "won the election overall". For one thing context matters. If a national party can only barely make any gains in a national election in which the other party is in charge and has Joe Biden's approval ratings....I'm not a Democrat but can understand why they are feeling pretty good today.
Reminds me of [obscure sports-fan reference alert] when my beloved Chicago Bulls lost the first game of their first-ever NBA Final but Michael Jordan walked off the court saying "We've got this, those guys can't beat us in this series." Because Jordan and the team had played well below their norm in that first game, and knew they had, but still only lost it by a whisker.
And that's just about the federal election results. In statewide elections too the GOP had disappointing results in all regions of the country, e.g. they lost on statewide referendums all over the place even in states like Montana and Kentucky. The Dems netted two more states in which they hold all three bases of electoral power (the governorship and both houses of the state legislature); the GOP stayed flat on those. The GOP held serve in state governerships that it already held (e.g. FL and GA), but struck out in the swing states where they hoped to gain that key office (MI, PA, WI, and it appears also AZ).
The latter. Moderate, confused or “libertarians” don’t show up for primaries. True believers do.
2016 is what happens when you don’t have superdelegates.
I think the answer is 'the whole thing is a complete mess of idiosyncrasies and special cases such that there's no satisfying way to answer this question briefly, but in general they can exert a lot of influence.'
How primaries for Senate seats work varies by state, so the GOP may have more or less control over who gets on the ballot in the first place depending on the state.
The GOP and RNCC spend a lot of money on helping their chosen candidates run, as well as trying to find and advance good candidates in important areas, and connecting them to campaign resources in their area. Famous and powerful individuals withing the GOP and RNCC also get quoted a lot in right-leaning media and do a lot to help set the narrative for the election.
Thus, it is very possible for these groups to choke off support for primary candidates they don't like, or pour support on the ones they do.
This may not be enough to oust a well-connected long-term incumbent, nor to stymie a well-connected billionaire or celebrity or w/e who has their own base of power and support. But it can definitely squash less-connected and less well-known candidates that they dislike, and bolster others that they favor.
The GOP cannot choose which Republican will be on every ballot across the board. But they can apply pressure from many angles that will make things much easier for the candidates they like and much harder for the ones they dislike, and in aggregate that has an effect.
So...sort of? I mean, the party can decide who to support, including in primaries and can bring pressure to bear on some potential candidates to back off, though that can backfire.
But more crucially, the moderates have rebuked the extremists by causing them to lose (in some places), which, in turn, makes them less likely to run. The goal wasn't (mostly) to be the failed Republican nominee for the Senate in Pennsylvania, after all, it was to be a senator. And for the most part, the extremists would, in fact, prefer a moderate to a Democrat.
People like winning and dislike losing and so if being an extremist means being a loser, fewer people will do it and fewer people will vote for them, even if they agree on the merits (you see this all the time in 'electability' debates on the left, and, I assume, the right, though I have less visibility there).
At least, that's my theory.
I think it might be. The fact Stacey Abrams also lost could be taken as the electorate punishing people who won't gracefully accept defeat. And that might bode very ill for Trump. Which I think would be good. Then again, I think that was the last election too. I think the American people generally want moderates but neither party can fully get them through their primary coalitions.
The most interesting thing in terms of intra-Republican politics is how badly the Trumpists/National Conservatives failed to deliver. Republicans overall didn't have an awful night. If you were an establishment type or a Rand Paul type or whatever you were (mostly) personally fine. But the NatCons collapsed which leaves the Republicans with an anemic majority (if at all). Insofar as there was success it was mostly DeSantis and Thiel, the latter notably someone who's already broken with Trump back when he was in power.
Meanwhile Desantis's star is rising which is probably why Trump decided to insult him in what's the first open break between the two. DeSantis clapped back and his supporters chanted "two more years" which is an obvious reference to 2024. This race highly increases the chance of a Trump-DeSantis fight for that lane because Trump underperformed and DeSantis overperformed. Some conservative figures have been openly commented on how Trump needs to step aside which gives DeSantis a very clear incentive to knock him out to receive both that lane of the party and the gratitude of the more mainstream party.
It doesn't need to be a smoke filled backroom, by the way. The NatCon caucuses will be have less members and so be less influential. Although because the majority will be thin the Republicans will have the same problem the Democrats have: they will need literally everyone on board which means going all the way from the moderates to Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the Democrats are the better organized and more disciplined party. Then again, agreeing on simply blocking most things is probably easier than legislation.
Thiel may have broken with Trump once upon a time, but they seem like they were back together this year. Thiel hosted fundraisers earlier this year decrying the few Republicans who had voted to impeach Trump: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/peter-thiel-maga-money/amp. And then Trump endorsed both Thiel-backed candidates: Vance and Masters.
Is that so? I have no connections to that part of the spectrum so I couldn't say. Still, I expect Thiel will survive even if Trump goes down in flames so Masters and Vance have an exit some others didn't. But most of those people lost.
I don’t think the common complaint about the candidates is their level of moderation. The usual phrase used is “candidate quality” which in this case is a polite way of saying “don’t have a ton of kids out of wedlock and pay for abortions and constantly lie and struggle to make coherent arguments” or “don’t be a self-promoting celebrity who just wants power for powers sake and you should probably actually be a resident of the state for which you’re running for senator” or “don’t call the popular sitting governor of your own party a communist and member of the CCP”.
The AZ race is a much better test of the moderate/extreme hypothesis but is yet undecided. Both Lake and Masters have been getting puffed up as fantastic candidates by the right so if they can’t win that is not a good sign. I should also point out that JD Vance is frequently lumped in with the MAGA group despite his past, and he won.
I think the main lesson the right will take from this is that everyone should copy DeSantis and that he should be president. Then there will still be a 50/50 chance they’ll continue to vote for whomever Trump picks and Trump will lose in 2024 to whomever the Dems nominate.
> The AZ race is a much better test of the moderate/extreme hypothesis but is yet undecided.
The implications of the Arizona race for other races are almost exclusively about the margin, not the outcome. 49% and 51% should tell you pretty much exactly the same thing, whereas 30% and 49% are very different.
I disagree. 49% tells you that you lost and 51% tells you that you win. That 2 % is the critical difference upon which power is decided and all strategies are designed to get that 2%.
The complication to all of this is that the Democrats also have the opportunity to run bad candidates, and that gives the Republicans a lot of slack. Fetterman wasn't the best candidate in the world before he had his stroke. After his stroke he almost lost a state to a Muslim snake-oil carpetbagger. Kotek badly underperformed in Oregon, as did Hochul in New York. Warnock and Walker both are poor candidates - but they each give the other slack on that.
At the national level, Clinton gave us Trump and Trump gave us Biden. I don't know anyone who thought any of our choices in 2016 or 2020 were great, once we got to the general election.
I don’t think there are many Trumpian true believers in the GOP. Most of them are just waiting for the fever to break.
Within the politicians, yes. Within the voters, not at all.
I know a *lot* of Trump voters, and don't know that I know a single one who actually likes Trump in a vacuum. What Trump provided was an outlet to repudiate both sides typical offerings (a common refrain from the 2016 election before Trump was "No Clinton, No Bush"). If the Republicans can field a non-Trump candidate that the people feel is not more of the same corporatist elitist party politician, they'll easily dump Trump.
DeSantis figured this out, and started playing directly into that line of thinking. The people are wary of a fake though. They've been tricked before and know that the politicians would much rather pretend to be on their side than to actually follow through. We'll have to see if DeSantis (or other politicians) can embody the politics of Trump without the dumpster fire, in a credible way.
I think that's right. Trump was a tool, that's all, for quite a lot of his voters, and if anyone can duplicate the rejection of the intellectual aristocracy, the relative conservatism, and the Reaganesque sunny disposition Trump the man will be history in a flash.
But I also agree with you the same demographic is deeply suspicious, not least of all because Trump is personally demonized by their political opponents, and the more The Wrong People keep saying "well if you have any positive thing to say about Literally Hitler than you must be a Nazi" the more they feel like digging in their heels.
Agreed. The elite who attack Trump don't seem to realize that the one currency Trump has that counts as irrefutable proof he is genuine is his complete lack of support among those same elites. Every time they attack him, especially the more unreasonable the attack (e.g. attacking Trump for something all politicians do but that normally doesn't result in the same attacks), the more the people feel that Trump is, and must continue to be, on their side.
When DeSantis started getting hammered by the media during Covid my very Trumpian family members took the heavy media criticism as evidence that he was the "real deal". In a Trump vs DeSantis primary match up the worst thing that could happen to DeSantis is for the media to crow about how much better than Trump he is.
I think it’s starting to play out with voters. I speculate that it played out in this election. It’s the start of Trump jumping the shark.
Strange days indeed.
I believe in the back room. Republicans, at least the ones in power, seem to have a coherent ideological agenda and a plan to enact it.
Remember how Madison Cawthorn went around blabbing about how he got invited to a cocaine orgy by some people who you'd never expect?
And then that video came out?
Some people still remember how to play politics.
Reading the Mahabharata right now and I’m struck by the similarity between Karna and Achilles. Both are born invulnerable (Achilles isn’t said to be so in the Iliad itself, but other additions to the mythos have it; Karna has his special earrings and armor). Both are also somewhat rude and coarse of manner—Karna is arrogant and boastful, and just consider Achilles’ behavior with Hector’s body. Both refuse to fight for a time on account of a feud with the supreme commander of their side’s forces (Agamemnon and Bhishma). And of course both are renowned chariot-fighting heroes who fight even harder after their near friends are slain (Patroclus and a whole bunch of kids and brothers) and have a legendary rivalry with a hero on the other side (Hector and Arjuna).
Are there any other mythic characters that fit this pattern or nearly so? Or are there any inquiries as to whether the legends of Karna and Achilles both stem from some even earlier proto-Indo-European source?
There's definitely close connections between Indian and Greek mythology so I would plump for the proto-Indo-European source.
Indra, king of the gods, who rules the element of sky/aether and has the thunderbolt (vajra) as his weapon gets into as many extra-marital tangles as Zeus. Parvati creates Ganesha as Hera creates Hephaestus, without the aid of her spouse. Ganesha has his head cut off by his father and replaced with the head of an elephant, as Hephaestus is (in one version) cast out of Olympus by Zeus and is lamed as a result of the fall. The wars of the Olympians with the Giants and the Titans are like the wars of the devas with the asuras for the control of heaven.
There are many instances where you can see echoes, or how this was developed into that, between the two sets of myths. So yes, I think it's not implausible to have a pattern going on, though I'd say that in some respects Achilles more closely fits with Arjuna than Karna; Achilles dressed as a girl sent to live among the maidens in another royal court, by his mother, in order to try and keep him out of the war is on a parallel with Arjuna cursed by a celestial nymph, his remote ancestress, to be impotent/a eunuch and so spending his time in the Pandava's last year of exile in the court of the Matsya king as the eunuch/hijara Brihannala teaching music and dancing to the princess. Modern adaptations often have Arjuna dressed as a woman when in disguise as Brihannala, and referred to as "she/her", as here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSmKDYtpdsA
Great point about Achilles being raised like a girl! I hadn’t thought of that.
I forgot to mention the "False Helen" trope as well; some versions of the Iliad have it that Helen never went to Troy, but remained in Egypt while a fake version of her was the one who lived with Paris in Troy, so when Menelaus was returning from Troy and stopped off at Egypt he could take his real wife back without incurring dishonour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_of_Troy#In_Egypt
Some versions of the Ramayana also have a 'false Sita'; the fire god, Agni, created an image of Sita which was the one abducted by Ravanna, so when Rama put this Sita to the test of fire, his real wife was restored to him and he could take her back without dishonour (until later, the disgruntled citizens of Ayodha demanded he put her aside just for the suspicion of having lived with a man not her husband):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Sita
Interesting. Even in the Mahabharata you have this protection of honor when Draupadi is assaulted by Duhshasana and new clothes magically appear beneath each layer he tears off.
I vote for an earlier proto-Indo-European source. There are parallels between the Iliad and Germanic and Norse myths as well, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied
>After killing the dragon, Siegfried then bathed in its blood which rendered him invulnerable except for a single spot on his back where a leaf from a linden tree had fallen on him.
The parallel to Achilles is obvious.
Definitely related and thanks for pointing it out. Given the dates, I wonder if Siegfried is more the “son” of the Achilles myth than the “brother”; Karna’s and Achilles’ myths are somewhat closer in age. But I’m really not sure how well Homer was known in the German Middle Ages.
Cuchulainn is an arrogant chariot warrior who sits out battles when he wishes and fights on when his charioteer is killed—but in this case, he is not the invulnerable one, it's his frenemy Feridad who has impenetrable skin (and whom Cuchulainn slays by spearing him through the rectum).
I've only read the Mahabharata in William Buck's rather free adaptation (and in some ACK comics), so I can't be sure, but I wouldn't have interpreted Karna as being rude or boastful. He always seemed like the best guy around, just on the wrong, or ill-fated, side of the war (maybe like Hector, then?).
"whom Cuchulainn slays by spearing him through the rectum"
Despite ass-based comments presumably automatically falling foul of the challenge mode rules, I have to point out that while the gáe bulga does enter through Fer Diad's anus, at least in Recension 1 (the oldest), the killing blow is when "Cú Chulainn struck him with the spear above the shield, and it broke his ribs and pierced Fer Diad's heart." This suggests that the horn-skin is actually not some innate trait of his hide, but a feat which Fer Diad can perform, hardening it by force of will or something, until he's too injured to uphold his concentration and can be stabbed not in the butt.
In Thomas Kinsella’s translation (_The Tain_), Cuchulainn stabs Ferdiad through the heart first and only afterwards gets the gae bolga blow in (Kinsella modestly forbears to specify its place of entrance) and only after the barbs from the gae bolga go “coursing through the highways and byways of his body” does Ferdiad say, “That’s enough now. I’ll die of that.”
My assumption, based on this, was that being pierced through the heart simply wasn’t that big a deal for a guy as tough as Ferdiad. After all, earlier that day the combatants hewed from each other hunks of flesh “the size of baby’s heads.” “If ever birds in flight could pass through men’s bodies they could have passed through those bodies that day and brought back bits of blood and meat with them out into the thickening air through the wounds and gashes.” And yet they kept on fighting.
Is this a crazy reading? Should I interpret the initial heart piercing as the killing blow and not the butt wound?
I’m writing a middle-grade book for Odd Dot/Macmillan about legendary warriors, and I have the Cuchulainn / Ferdiad fight (they’re probably going to let me use the word “butthole”) so I want to make sure I get this correct.
I *think*, but will not swear up and down, that Kinsella just translated Recension 2 straight off. (I've read both, but long ago, and I have neither on hand.) The deal with Recension 2 is that it's much more complete, much more elaborate, and much newer, if that's a phrase we can use about something written in the 1100s AD, than Recension 1; R2 is written in Middle Irish whereas R1 is written in Old Irish. Basically, a monk probably took all the Táin materials he could get his hands on and straight up rewrote it after his own head. In R1, the fight itself doesn't last longer than half a page and there are no baby's heads being hacked off, and the various weird prescriptions about the use of the gáe bulga don't exist either: the charioteer drifts it downstream, and Cú Chulainn throws it with his toes, because he's just been thrown off Fer Diad's shield and is lying on his back in the ford, not because he *has* to to use the weapon. Likewise, in R1 it's unambiguous that Fer Diad gets struck by the gáe bulga, that causes him to lower his shield, *then* Cú Chulainn stabs him in the heart over the shield, *then* Fer Diad utters the beginning of the death poem which Cú Chulainn finishes.
Anyway, without getting too far into the weeds of this stuff, I think you're good if you say Fer Diad is killed by the gáe bulga, that's the conventional modern understanding anyway. And if you *do* want to get into the weeds, the books you want are Cecile O'Rahilly's "Táin Bó Cúailnge Recension I" and "Táin Bó Cúailnge from the Book of Leinster"; then you can compare the original texts and very accurate translations of the same side by side and make up your own mind.
You are correct, I looked it up on CELT and there is a translation of Recension 1 where it's clear where the gae bolga enters:
https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T301012/index.html
‘Look out for the gaí bulga!’ cried the charioteer and cast it to him downstream. Cú Chulainn caught it between his toes and cast it at Fer Diad into his anus. It was as a single barb it entered but it became twenty-four (in Fer Diad's body). Thereupon Fer Diad lowered his shield. Cú Chulainn struck him with the spear above the shield, and it broke his ribs and pierced Fer Diad's heart.
Strong is the spear-shaft cast by your right hand. My ribs like spoils are broken; my heart is gore. Well did I fight, but I have fallen, O Cúa!
Alas, O noble warrior! O brave Fer Diad! O strong and beautiful smiter, your arm was victorious.
Our friendship was fair, O delight of my eyes! Your shield had a golden rim. Your sword was beautiful.
Your ring of white silver on your noble hand. Your chess-set of great worth. Your cheeks were rosy and beautiful.
Your curling yellow hair was thick—a fair jewel. Your girdle, supple and ornamented, you wore around your side.
Alas! my loved one, that you should fall at the hand of Cú Chulainn! Your shield which you wore against force afforded you no protection.
Our fight ... our sorrow, the din of our battle. Fine was the great champion. Every army was defeated and trampled underfoot. Alas! O noble warrior, Fer Diad!
All was play and pleasure until I met with Fer Diad in the ford. Alas for the noble champion laid low there at the ford.
All was play and sport until I met with Fer Diad at the ford. I thought that beloved Fer Diad would live after me for ever."
I know there are versions where the story of the Táin has been lost, so a king commissions searches to find it and put it together, presumably this is where the Recension 2 and other versions come from - as you say, a later transcriber putting all the scraps he could find together and creating a whole story out of it.
Another version, by the same translator Cecile O'Rahilly, is the version from the Book of Leinster:
https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T301035/index.html
"By this time the two combatants were at the edge-feat of swords. Then Fer Diad caught Cú Chulainn unguarded and dealt him a blow with his ivory-hilted blade which he plunged into Cú Chulainn's breast. And Cú Chulainn's blood dripped into his belt and the ford was red with the blood from the warrior's body. Cú Chulainn brooked not this wounding for Fer Diad attacked him with a succession of deadly stout blows, and he asked Láeg for the ga bulga.—Such was the nature of the ga bulga: it used to be set downstream and cast from between the toes: it made one wound as it entered a man's body but it had thirty barbs when one tried to remove it and it was not taken from a man's body until the flesh was cut away about it.
And when Fer Diad heard the mention of the ga bulga, he thrust down the shield to shelter the lower part of his body. Cú Chulainn cast the fine spear from off the palm of this hand over the rim of the shield and over the breast- piece of the horn-skin so that its farther half was visible after it had pierced Fer Diad's heart in his breast. Fer Diad thrust up the shield to protect the upper part of his body but that was help that came too late. The charioteer sent the ga bulga downstream. Cú Chulainn caught it between his toes and made a cast of it at Fer Diad. And the ga bulga went through the strong, thick apron of smelted iron and broke in three the great stone as big as a millstone and entered Fer Diad's body through the anus and filled every joint and limb of him with its barbs. ‘That suffices now’ said Fer Diad. ‘I have fallen by that cast. But indeed strongly do you cast from your right foot. And it was not fitting that I should fall by you’.
…‘Well, my friend Láeg’ said Cú Chulainn, ‘cut open Fer Diad now and remove the ga bulga for I cannot be without my weapon’. Láeg came and cut open Fer Diad and removed the ga bulga. And Cú Chulainn saw his bloodstained, crimson weapon lying beside Fer Diad and spoke these words:
¶1] O Fer Diad, it is sad that I should see you thus, bloodstained yet drained of blood, while I have not as yet cleansed my weapon of its stains and you lie there in a bed of gore.
¶2] When we were yonder in the east with Scáthach and with Úathach, there would not be pale lips between us and weapons of battle.
¶3] Sharply Scáthach spoke her strong firm command: ‘Go ye all to the swift battle. Germán Garbglas will come.’
¶4] I said to Fer Diad and to generous Lugaid and to Fer Báeth the son of fair Báetán that we should go to meet Germán.
¶5] We went to the rocks of battle above the sloping shore of Loch Lindfhormait. Four hundred we brought out from the Islands of the Victorious.
¶6] When I and valiant Fer Diad stood before the fort of Germán, I killed Rind mac Níuil and he slew Fúad mac Forníuil.
¶7] On the battle-field Fer Báeth killed Bláth son of Colba of the red sword, and Lugaid, the stern and swift, slew Mugairne from the Tyrrhene Sea.
¶8] After going in I slew four hundred wrathful men. Fer Diad slew Dam Dreimed and Dam Dílend—a stern company.
¶9] We laid waste the fort of wise Germán above the wide, many-coloured sea. We brought Germán alive to Scáthach of the broad shield.
¶10] Our fostermother imposed on us a pact of friendship and agreement that we should not grow angry with the tribe of fair Elg.
¶11] Sad was the battle, that slaughtering battle in which the son of Damán was struck down in weakness. Alas! the friend to whom I served a drink of red blood has fallen.
¶12] Had I seen you die amidst the warriors of great Greece, I should not have survived you, we should have died together.
¶13] Sad what befalls us, the fosterlings of Scáthach. I am wounded and covered with red gore while you no longer drive chariots.
¶14] Sad what befalls us, the fosterlings of Scáthach. I am wounded and covered with red gore while you lie dead.
¶15] Sad what befalls us, the fosterlings of Scáthach, you dead. I alive and strong. Valour is an angry combat.
‘Well, O little Cú’ said Láeg, ‘let us leave this ford now. Too long have we been here’. ‘We shall leave it indeed, friend Láeg’ said Cú Chulainn. ‘But to me every battle and contest I have fought seems but play and sport compared with my fight against Fer Diad’."
Ah, perfect! Thank you!
I take you, Anonymous, as the ultimate source here, because the author of both recensions of the Tain Bo Cuailnge is, if these sources are correct, Anonymous.
This reply had better not be judged in the bottom 50% of ACX comments generally :-)
It’s in the top quintile for me!
I’m reading the Penguin classics abridged translation by John Smith and in it at least Karna is definitely arrogant and boastful. He’s always going on about how he’ll beat Arjuna while the wiser voices of reason tell him he’s out of his league and Arjuna’s invincible. He’s “good” and “righteous” in that he gives gifts to Brahmins, most notably his earrings to Indra, and he’s unfailingly loyal—to a wicked man, but one who showed him kindness and took him in despite his low birth. But he also takes issue with Bhishma who is one of those morally-flawless-and-never-done-anything-wrong-in-his-life sorts and whatnot. He’s more “righteous” than Achilles, I would definitely say, but he’s not the righteous Hector of the story, I’d definitely say that’s Arjuna, Krishna’s best friend. Karna also isn’t just “ill-fated” to be on the wrong side of the war, Krishna himself actually gives him the offer to switch sides (and become king, since he’s actually Yudhisthira’s and Arjuna’s older brother!) before the war and Karna refuses him.
"But he also takes issue with Bhishma who is one of those morally-flawless-and-never-done-anything-wrong-in-his-life sorts and whatnot."
That's one of those six of one and half a dozen of the other situations. Bhishma is fighting for the Kauravas because of his oath to protect the throne, but his heart is with the Pandavas and he believes they are on the right side of all this. He disapproves of Karna because of his friendship with Duryodhana, because of the caste differences (as far as he is concerned, Karna is indeed a sutputra and not a real kshatriya https://brainly.in/question/33692187 even though he is aware, at least in some versions, of Karna's real birth) and he deliberately hobbles the Kaurava war-effort by not permitting Karna to be the commanding general or to take part while he, Bhishma, is in command because he knows Karna's abilities and fears he will be able to win against the Pandavas.
Karna is aware of this, and pushes back against Bhishma by declaring that while Bhishma is in command, he will not enter onto the battlefield. He feels slighted and insulted, and he's not altogether wrong, so he lives up to the warrior code of upholding one's honour and rights by demanding proper respect, which if he is not given, he will not participate. But he is also honouring his elders, by respecting the command Bhishma laid on him. It's only after Bhishma is fatally injured that Karna takes over command of the entire army. So there's a lot of complex motivations going on for everyone involved.
The boastfulness is part of a warrior's character, though; vaunting about your deeds was how warriors established their pedigree and reputation, and that they were entitled to fight with you/you didn't have to fight with them.
There's definitely some thumbs put on the scales when it comes to Arjuna and Karna; the older versions are not shame-faced about how Krishna fixes it so that Arjuna comes out on top, even by breaking the rules of battle (e.g. encouraging Arjuna to attack Karna when the latter is dismounted from his chariot and trying to free it because of the wheel stuck in the mud). Later versions put it down to fate/destiny and how Karna accumulates a lot of curses due to hubris which all coincidentally and very conveniently kick in just when needed so Arjuna can vanquish Karna.
We see this even with Drona who promised to make Arjuna the best archer in the world, and when there is a rival equal in skill, Drona resolves it by hobbling him: "To resolve the matter, Drona accepted Ekalavya as his student, but demanded the thumb on his dominant hand as gurudakshina, or teacher's payment, in order to limit his abilities and further growth in archery, thus pacifying Arjuna."
Karna is sympathetic to modern eyes because a lot of what happens is not his fault; he is excluded and indeed insulted by the Pandavas, his unknown half-brothers, due to his position as the reputed son of a charioteer even though his skill and abilities are equal to his. Duryodhana wins his undying loyalty and friendship by treating him as an equal (even if it is for ulterior purposes, to use Karna against his cousins/rivals the Pandavas):
"At the martial exhibition where the Kaurava and Pandava princes demonstrated their skills before their elders, their guru Drona and the people of that kingdom, Karna appeared and challenged an unsuspecting Arjuna, who is considered to be the best of the princes. But Karna was stopped when Kripa asked him to ascertain his lineage, as it would be inappropriate for unequal to compete. Karna, not being a kshatriya, bowed his head in shame.
Duryodhana immediately defended Karna, arguing that it is skill and bravery, and not birth, that defines a warrior. Using the boon granted to him by Dhritarashtra, Duryodhana made Karna king of Anga so that he was regarded as Arjuna's equal. Karna pledged his allegiance and friendship to Duryodhana."
This is in part why he refuses Krishna's offer to switch sides; he won't abandon the man who stood up for him when everyone else insulted him, he owes everything he has to Duryodhana, Duryodhana is his liege lord, and what kind of traitor would he be to jump ship when it looks like Duryodhana will lose, in order to be on the winning side?
Everyone has flaws in this story; the villains have good points, the good guys have bad points. The worst part of Karna's behaviour is supporting Duryodhana in the dice- hall when they insult Draupadi:
"Duryodhana's jealousy of the prosperity and fame of Indraprastha and being humiliated by the Pandavas made him furious and he wished to throw down the Pandavas. To support his will, Shakuni devised a scheme to rob Yudhishthira of his kingdom and wealth by defeating him in a Pakida or game of dice, in which Shakuni couldn't lose as he had dices which he could control.
Unable to decline the invitation, due to diplomacy, Yudhishthira gambled away his entire kingdom, his wealth, his four brothers and even his wife, in a series of gambits to retrieve one by staking another. After Yudhishthira lost Draupadi, Duryodhana encouraged his brother Dushasana to drag her into the court as she was now his property. Dushsana pulled Draupadi's hair and dragged her into the court. Duryodhana ordered Draupadi to sit on his left thigh, showing and patting it to insult her for revenge. Draupadi refused and Duryodhan ordered Dushashan to disrobe her. Following his brother's orders, Dushashan laughed and started pulling Draupadi's saree. Duryodhan, Shakuni, Karna and the other Kauravas (except Vikarna) also started laughing. However, by Krishna's grace, Draupadi's amount of clothing remained the same."
Well an alternate explanation is that the “degrees of freedom” for creating such stories aren’t a lot. So you are going to end up with similar sounding stories.
Once you have a story about a super powerful hero, you sort of need a reason he isn’t wiping the floor with everyone. And so they are “sitting out”, and once they are sitting out you need a motivation to get them engaged with the narrative again.
Shane.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
High Noon
Mike Tyson and Mohammed Ali…
Oh, sorry…
I agree with this analysis, and it's interesting to note re: Cú Chulainn above that in the Táin, the pattern is reversed: it's the *entire rest* of Ulster that sits out so that the story can be about Cú Chulainn in fact wiping the floor with everyone. (The invaders even have their own form of sitting out, where they come to fight him one by one so that they can't be wiped out too quickly and make the story brief.)
Also, it's pretty obvious that this, or the failure to figure out a good way to implement it, however you want to formulate that exactly it's clearly the same root problem, is why Superman sucks. All the stories have to be about some idiot zapping him with Kryptonite, otherwise he can literally punch any enemy into the sun and there's no narrative challenge. But "aha! I *also* have a chunk of the Plot Mineral! Now taste the fury of... Rando #53!" grows so old it emits cobwebs pretty much immediately.
I largely agree about the “problem with Superman” but I think the case can nevertheless be overstated, as I hope to show by introducing two complicating factors, as represented by two stories from the Silver Age.
In Action Comics #300 (1963), Superman pursues a hostile space ship forward through the time barrier and into the future—so far into the future that Earth’s yellow sun has become red and suddenly a depowered Superman comes crashing to the ground. Now he finds himself, helpless under a red sun, in a strange and dangerous future world that has been completely abandoned by humanity—all that remains are robotic versions of Superman’s friends (and enemies) forced to march every year in a memorial parade in honor of Superman.
Superman recalls that he has a time machine hidden in his arctic Fortress of Solitude, and accompanied only by a robotic simulacrum of Perry White he starts the long trek into the polar wastes in a last ditch effort to return to a time when he has powers.
This story, by SF stalwart Edmond Hamilton, is wonderful, and reads like something JG Ballard would have written a decade later. But the point is that Superman, like his readers, is so focused on kryptonite that his other weaknesses—by the 1970s this includes the bebulou category of “magic”—can really sneak up on both hero and reader. In a clever Superman story (of which Hamilton write several) the very absence of kryptonite can lull readers into a false sense of security.
Of course, the red sun only doubles the number of possible threats; magic merely triples it. But my Batman question is: how threatened IS Batman, really, but thugs and Jokers and such?
In Batman #170 (1965), one enterprising gangster makes an observation: no criminal has ever managed to kill Batman, but on occasion they have humiliated him. The gangster declares his his intention to trick, surprise, or scuff up Batman—events that are possible, he points out, in the universe in which he finds himself—and never to seek to murder Batman—an impossible event by the rules of the universe as determined by induction.
And he succeeds! Batman in powerless against this fellow, and has to goad him into making an attempt on Batman’s life, an attempt that by necessity will fail. And at that point an unmurdered, unmurderable Batman catches the crook.
This story, by Gardner Fox, is surprisingly postmodern in the degree of self-awareness the characters evince. They have gained knowledge out that the reader, to enjoy a Batman story, must suppress—the sure and certain knowledge that Batman is in no real danger.
Perhaps later Batman stories offered at least a more persuasive illusion of danger; perhaps this revelation is most apt in 1965.
But I guess the point is that the problem of Superman is surmountable by a skilled enough writer and that it is to some extent present in every franchise story.
"But my Batman question is: how threatened IS Batman, really, but thugs and Jokers and such?"
I think this equivocates between concerns internal and external to the narrative. Of course, outside the narrative we know that Batman can never die – he's far too valuable. In this way, he's if anything more invulnerable than Superman. But the Superman Problem has nothing to do with that; it's that Superman is barely threatened *inside* the narrative. If a thug points a revolver at Batman, Batman has to care about that, because *within the story* he isn't defined as invulnerable, whereas Superman can just laugh and say "go nuts, fire away".
The red-sun story sounds fun, but as you say it lacks expandability. Also, I note there are a few stupid features even in that, such as "Superman has the power to fly so fast it breaks the time barrier, thus presumably faster than the light which ostensibly powers him" and of course, "the last human remnant on a blasted, abandoned Earth is coincidentally Superman-related".
"the problem of Superman is surmountable by a skilled enough writer"
I think this is true of nearly every narrative problem, but that doesn't in any way indicate that the problems don't exist. Skill in some sense *means* "ability to overcome problems", doesn't it?
I mostly agree, but I did hope to show from the Batman #170 story that Batman's immunity from harm is so obvious even in-story that a low-level thug could piece it together. It reminds me of a Superman story from around the same era when a disgruntled crook, despairing of ever harming Superman directly, decides to wreck his Fortress of Solitude trophies.
The Silver Age is my favorite era for Superman, at least in part because, freed from the need to put Superman in peril, writers were willing to look for ways to make Superman's world weird. The fact that the last human remnant is a robotic Superman tribute is, for me, a value-add. (It also makes sense, as in DC continuity of the time it was well established that Superman was canonically Earth's greatest hero in the same way that Demosthenes was canonically earth's greatest orator. In the 30th century, the memory of Superman's teenage exploits (as Superboy) inspires future teens to form the Legion of Super-Heroes.)
In the '80s, Mike Baron and Steve Rude created a great series about a superhero with such tremendous power that he very rarely suffered even the appearance of danger—but instead of superhero fights, the comic focused on the inner turmoil of its main character's psyche. This series, Nexus, remains a high-water mark for super-heroes, at least for me.
Even in story, Batman has reached the point that Superman will tell comparably powerful White Martians that, having captured the entire rest of the Justice League, they’re doomed because they missed the most dangerous member. And it’s not just bravado, since the same run established that the entire League could be taken down by Batman’s preset plans.
Arguably Batman’s capability inflation is greater than Superman’s, not least because it doesn’t have the same sorts of explicit loopholes. While I don’t know that it’s the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if Superman’s actually been wounded by guns (that happened to have kryptonite bullets or involved magic, red sun radiation, or other assorted chicanery) more often than Batman has.
I think the problem of Batman has only become more salient with the years and the need to justify his being peers, or even the most valuable player, when teamed with demigods. As witness that for the last generation or so, when a fight between Batman and Superman is contemplated (as it so often is), Batman is the clear favorite.
(Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was probably the turning point for that. But there, Miller sets up extrinsic reasons for Superman to be off his game that later stories generally don’t feel the need for.)
The ultimate reason for Batman beating Superman in DKR is also that Miller personally likes Batman much more than Superman, and probably hates the whole morality the latter stands for, as being unrealistic goody-two-shoes pap.
While that’s probably not an unfair read given Miller’s later work, it’s worth noting that in TDKR itself Superman is treated pretty sympathetically within the limits of being the antagonist for a chapter. (He’s only vulnerable at all because he chose to save millions of lives at the risk of his own.) And despite having reason to hold a grudge, he explicitly chooses to support Bruce’s final gambit when he could have exposed it.
Interestingly, in the black and white TV show “Superman” Kryptonite didn’t exist. Superman simply didn’t have weaknesses, though his power set was a bit less dramatically OP. Most of the time he ran into problems because 1) there were hostages, 2) he didn’t know where the person he needed to save was, and 3) he wanted to keep his alter ego secret.
I haven’t watched the show since I was a kid, but I enjoyed it then.
Superman started out with a set of superpowers, but limited to some extent - so, "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" but that's not super-speed like Flash or able to fly or strong enough to punch someone into the sun.
As time went on, and new writers needed better/more/different powers for Superman in their plots, power creep happened so he ended up like a god amongst mortals, able to reverse time by spinning the earth backwards and so forth.
But all that happened quite quickly. He got his super senses within a year or so, flight in about two, and in less than a decade he was flying between stars, traveling through time, and shrugging off atom bombs.
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2020/07/supermans-developing-power-set.html?m=1
His overall power set has been pretty stable for a while, though there have been periodic efforts to scale them back a bit (notably in 1970 and 1986).
It generally doesn’t really last, though his ability to fly faster than light and time travel on his own do mostly seem to have gone away post-1986.
Superman doesn’t suck. Like him or not, the fact that he’s been a pop culture icon for more than eighty years demonstrates that there’s something there that grabs the imagination.
The best Superman stories are no more about his being zapped with kryptonite than Achilles is all about being shot in the heel. Some are iconic stories, where the point is about the encounter of someone else with incorruptible power. Some are about the man who can do anything being faced with his limits. Some are wish fulfillment, not so much about power per se, but about power employed in the creation of a juster world.
None of it is about realism, since Superman is necessarily a fantasy. (By my lights, anyone trying to do “what it would *really* be like” is taking a wrong turn, though the approach has its fans.) None of it may be your thing. And at multiple stories a month for the better part of a century, there’s plenty of room for Sturgeon’s Law to come into play.
But there’s at least a Chesterton’s Fence question to be answered about Superman’s durability if the character were really as empty as all that.
"Like him or not, the fact that he’s been a pop culture icon for more than eighty years demonstrates that there’s something there that grabs the imagination."
My belief and experience is that he's an icon in the *abstract*, because he's something like the pure archetype of the superhero, but that people vastly prefer to read Batman or Spider-Man in practice. Figures that are easier to challenge without ridiculous contortions. I'm doubtful about how many of the people who consider Superman an icon can name even *one* comic-book story with him in it. And remember that his original popularity was built on a much less preposterously superhuman set of abilities!
"The best Superman stories"
I won't deny these exist or that they have the nature you ascribe to them, but how many have there been, in eighty years? The only Superman-centric story I can remember ever really enjoying is Red Son, and even there, is that really focused on Superman, or on the Soviet Union? On the other hand I can think of about forty zillion oafish stories, or if you count the Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen books as parts of the same property, eighty zillion.
His early popularity, sure, but he escalated fast. (And lost some powers that were central to his first stories, like being able to change his face at will.) He survived the crash that ended most Golden Age heroes’ runs as the flying invulnerable guy with X-ray vision, not the one who could leap an eighth of a mile and had to worry about bursting shells.
(Though he didn’t really. Early Superman, pre-kryptonite, was nominally weaker but in practice more inexorable.)
He comfortably outsold Batman until I think the 80s (so basically half their mutual existence), and was the first superhero who successfully carried a big screen feature film franchise. (Which crashed and burned due to pretty obvious quality decline in the later installments, rather than fatigue with the character.)
Superman isn’t even the only character like him with legs. Captain Marvel was just as invulnerable and sold even more comics in the Golden Age, spun off a serial, was only shut down by legal action and general superhero backlash, and still gets the occasional spotlight. The archetype clearly speaks to people. It’s only boring if the story is about an adversary trying to win a straight fistfight, which few Superman or Captain Marvel stories are.
(One of my old grudges against the 90s Death of Superman is that it was pretty much that. But it sure sold.)
Granted, Superman is also a personal favorite. But if that were some rare quirk I’d have had to discover him digging through 40s discards instead of being presented with continual reinventions in multiple media.
I haven’t loved them all, and generally I’ve least liked the ones which think that the best approach is to somehow bring the character down to earth (either his powers or his morals). But some people do.
One way or another, there hasn’t been a decade without some incarnation of the character with success well beyond comics, even when it’s been fashionable to dismiss him as stodgy or two dimensional. I think it’s clear there’s something in Superman a lot of people like to see.
(I also think Silver Age hijinks with Jimmy and Lois are hilarious and often have more ideas per page than modern comics have in a year. But that *is* a dated and niche interest. Unlike Superman himself.)
Dammit, I wrote a long reply and think I managed to tap Cancel instead of Post. To recapitulate the main points:
"He comfortably outsold Batman until I think the 80s"
You know what, I completely forgot about Horseshit Batman. That's on me and you're absolutely correct here. After the early gothic Kane/Finger ones and until Denny O'Neal, was it? reworked the character/property, the adventures were all uniformly abderitic, without exception.
I stand by the idea that Batman is easier to make good stories for, though, and the best Batman stuff is leagues beyond Superman – but I acknowledge that our tastes might just be too different to reach any meaningful conclusion here.
On a more concrete and falsifiable note, what do you see as the main Superman properties with success well beyond comics in the '90s, '00s and '10s respectively? My impression was that I was far from alone in regarding this latest movie outing as a bomb, and I don't remember any significant work before then, but I'm willing to believe that those just didn't penetrate my filter bubble, or that I forgot about them due to low Superman interest.
(And apologies upfront if the clipped tone here sounds unfriendly – I just couldn't be bothered to try to reconstruct the whole original post from memory, mainly due to frustration.)
Good insight! I think this might explain the sitting out on account of a feud with the supreme commander, and maybe even the rudeness and arrogance downstream from that. I don’t think it necessarily explains the invulnerability from birth specifically, since it does only rely on general combat supremacy and not a miraculous birth specifically. In any case it’s a good idea to consider the convergent evolution case!
On the other hand, these stories weren't developed on different planets. They are part of Eurasian culture.
In fact, the discovery that Sanskrit was in the same language family as the European languages was exactly the thing that led to that family being called "Indo-European"! (Or "Indo-Germanic" according to German linguists.) This was an incredibly surprising discovery for Europeans in the 19th century.
The language families themselves diverged long enough ago that very detailed stories might not have survived from before then (especially as oral traditions), but it at least goes to show another way that cultural connection between the Mediterranean and India is a thing.
There's debate in comparative PIE circles about how many stories and motifs were original to the PIE culture in what detail, but I think there's broad agreement that three or four myths must have belonged to the originator culture – Thunder God Smites the Dragon and The World Made From A Man Named Twin are the ones I recall off the top of my head.
I will have to look into these!
It was interesting for me when I went through the first half of an Introduction to Attic Greek how the author would point out “oh there’s these five cases, English just sort of has two while German has like three and one archaic one. But proto-Indo-European had like eleven and most of those are still in Sanskrit but already lost/absorbed by the time of Attic Greek.”
Indeed. I think it’s worth considering Martin’s point that some (maybe not all) aspects could be convergent evolution, but in the broader context there are a lot more parallels in Indian and Greek myth than could reasonably have arisen by chance, given their shared history. But that doesn’t mean Karna-Achilles is really one of them either!
Tyler Cowen often asks his guests if so-and-so is overrated or underrated. So I have to ask if anyone else finds Tyler Cowen really, really overrated. Some of us stuff is just annoying, like allowing for a thread on the election on your blog, but writing about it like this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/the-election-results.html The only reason people would want to discuss the results of an election is "mood affiliation" apparently. Maybe even more comically are his book reviews. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/07/rereading-catcher-in-the-rye.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/competition.html
If a teenager wrote like that I'd tell him that writing probably isn't in his future. I mean, maybe he's good as an economist but he gets credit as this polymath and I just don't see it.
I only consume "Conversations with Tyler" and it's my favorite podcast. He really prepares, brings interesting people and interviews optimizing for information. I also think he has some interesting ideas, and I like that he is genuinely curious about big questions (culture, religion, ...) instead of burrowing in smaller, easier to answer questions.
I actually like Cowen's original concept of "mood affiliation", which usefully points out how people can emphasize moods over objective facts (such as when a problem people are concerned about has gotten less pressing, perhaps through their own efforts). Unfortunately, Cowen himself is one of the worst offenders in misusing the word to mean something more like "partisan/loyalty signalling".
I agree, having heard him speak at a conference, he is overrated.
I don't like his Straussianism, and greatly prefer Robin Hanson's more literalist approach. However, he is extremely prolific and produces a lot of posts even if the average quality isn't as high as some other bloggers. He's also read a lot, so he's better informed than someone just churning out ignorant content.
I think Hanson is a bit more "alt-right" adjacent than Cowen though (who definitely isn't)…I mean, Hanson's takes are sometimes quite interesting, but overall I prefer Cowen, as he seems less partisan/biased and more "rational"...
Hanson doesn't strike me as "partisan", and instead advocates "pulling the rope sideways".
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/03/tug-sideways.html
I also think that Cowen doesn't even aspire to rationality as much as Hanson does. He once said: > I see [...] even "overcoming inadequate love of Sichuan chili peppers" as often a more important problem than "overcoming bias."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/08/where-do-i-disa.html
Hanson is known for pushing mechanisms for greater rationality, like prediction track records, prediction markets, "news accuracy bonds", etc. Cowen is not especially interested in them (and per Tyler himself, his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok is the best "truth tracker" of their lunch group. Tyler often brings up personal "production functions", so borrowing that terminology I think Tyler is optimizing a very different function from one aiming at rationality per se.
I can understand and appreciate this complaint, but I guess my defense of Tyler Cowen is that he seems genuinely curious about the world we live in, and doesn't appear predisposed to allowing a narrative take priority over facts. Or, in other words, he seems committed to trying to understand 'what is happening', as opposed to being committed to telling you a story about how the world works.
His comment section is a disaster.
When did it become so awful? I remember around the time Donnie T ran in 2016, the "alt-righters" showed up quite a lot...though Sailer commented there earlier than that...
Sailer is polite, which is why he is often tolerated. The comment section for marginal Revolution is angry, and hostile. Which is why the idea of being kind makes sense to me.
Yeah, even on his economics posts they are. I don't know why that is. But then he offers them a place to talk about the elections, and pre-emptively insults them for wanting to talk about them and implying he's better for not wanting to do so. The guy could do better.
As I recall, the comment section is completely unmoderated.
He also famously doesn't read the comments. No downside?
"Famously"? Many of his blog posts quote from and link to comments on his other posts.
Yeah, I'm missing something about this guy's mystique.
I can see how the quirks in his blogging style could grate. I haven't read enough of his longer and more formal articles to have an opinion about his writing. But the links are often interesting and he's a good interviewer. I appreciate that he often approaches topics with polite skepticism, but without often making ideological claims to the contrary.
Also, the "overrated" versus "underrated" question isn't really much of a question (compared to what?), but it's an opportunity to say your opinion, after picking between "overrated" and "underrated" randomly.
It needs to be considered that he posts daily to Marginal Revolution (and has done, almost without fail, for more than a decade, if I recall correctly) in between his regular duties as economist and general polymath. A lot of his posts are accordingly very off-the-cuff and casual; essentially tweet-level effort. The examples you give fall into this category, I think, but not all MR posts do. Whether you like this style of blogging is a matter of taste; regardless, looking at his work more broadly, I honestly think that no, he’s not overrated - if anything, he’s very underrated, in that relatively few outside the rationalist (and -adjacent) have heard of him.
That is regardless of whether, in addition to finding some of his writing annoying, one agrees with what he says. E.g. I found the arguments in Stubborn Attachments to be as absurd as their conclusion, so it’s not as if even his higher-effort work is beyond criticism. (But perhaps I’m missing a deeper, Straussian argument!)
Wait, what’s wrong with Stubborn Attachments? It convinced me that economic growth (with the caveats of sustainability, respect for human rights, etc.) is a moral imperative, and that we should be doing more to promote it.
Do you have a different reading of it?
For "GDP growth is actually maybe/pretty bad" take I cannot recommend enough Uruk Series by Lou Keep at Sam[]zdat blog. Can be a bit obtuse in writing at times, but I got to like his writing style, and still think the underlying point is well taken across and well explained.
I came into it assuming that "growth" is a bad abstraction and it didn't convince me otherwise. Yes, it's better to be rich than poor, but it actually does matter what kinds of economic activity we get more of. We need a more fine-grained way of thinking about the world than macroeconomics gives us. At least think about different sectors like health, education, and energy differently.
Underrated. I really enjoy his syncretic, heterodox, non-ideological style...I really think there should be more Cowen's!
Could you say more about his non-economic stuff that you like? Genuinely curious.
Food (his guide to dining is quite interesting)…Music. And yeah, I really enjoy the underrated/overrated part in his interviews...
The "Straussian" thing is what I find a bit frustrating. I get that he wants to keep certain positions close to his chest and doesn't want to broadcast every single view he has on every controversial topic. He's like an old-school professor who doesn't want to inject too much of his political leanings into the classroom. Nevertheless, I'd much rather a blogger be the heart-on-your-sleeve Rod Dreher type where you know exactly what he stands for.
With all that said, I think Cowen does a tremendous job when you consider how often he posts and what an interesting collection of links he comes up with on a daily basis. Also, if it hadn't been for MR, I might not have come across SSC until much later.
Straussian reading of a Beatles song...I forgot about that one. Yeah, I don't get how he's taken seriously.
It's entertainment...I mean, you could say the same about Caplan's children's books (and Caplan takes them seriously it seems...:D).
Yes.
Thoughts on at-home ketamine-assisted therapy? Looks like with the COVID-inspired loosening of telemedicine, legal ket in the mail has become as easy to get as boner pills.
I agree with Scott. I'm a psychotherapist working via telehealth with multiple clients on at-home sublingual ketamine protocols and have done it myself. It's not for everyone obviously, but I think it's a good thing that people have easier and more affordable access to it. I see it making a difference with both depression and anxiety, as well as facilitating deeper growth-oriented work.
I'm a therapist too and have also tried ketamine myself, both sublingual and via injection (which feels *much* more intense than sublingual). I'm curious whether you work with people while they're under the influence of ketamine. The injections dismantled my mind so thoroughly then I could barely communicate, but I would have been able to talk under the influence of sublingual ketamine.
I have worked some with people while they are on it, but mainly afterwards to help them integrate the experience. At sublingual doses, people can mostly talk if they want to, if not perhaps right at the peak. There's an uninhibited chattiness some people have on the way up and the way down that sometimes captures important perspectives or feelings to look at later. If people are good at writing stuff down in that moment, then having someone right there may not be necessary, but otherwise the integration after the fact can lack the immediacy to make the most out of it. Of course there's disagreement in the field about whether any of the content that surfaces during a ketamine trip is relevant for treatment outcomes for depression -- my sense is for people who are insight-oriented, that the content can matter a lot to them.
Strongly in favor. Ketamine assisted therapy at clinics costs thousands of dollars, is poorly covered by insurance, and a lot of people can't consistently make it to a clinic. Ketamine is an excellent depression treatment. It's no more addictive than a bunch of other things you can already get and take at home (eg Adderall, Xanax, alcohol). I think we lucked out by this being regulatorily possible.
That having been said, I don't think "as easy to get as boner pills" is how I would think of it, unless you're getting the Viagra from your doctor who knows you well and has assessed you for erectile dysfunction / risk of side effects. Or maybe there are sketchier ketamine places than the ones I know about, in which case I assume the government will eventually shut them down just like the sketchy Adderall places.
It's time for a poetry challenge. Below are lines from five famous poems or songs, with each word reduced to its first letter. Your task: find the poems.
To avoid spoilers, I suggest posting any answers you give using ROT13: https://rot13.com/
1.
I H M T,
T S I I S F.
I F O T P,
T O T T R.
2.
G O O F, K O O,
L O O F-F B-L,
B W A H W H
D O P A P --
L G O H, B W U Y,
L W F -- L W F!
3.
B T S O G G,
B T S B-S-W,
A T D O H W,
I T P S M,
H S A W.
4.
I T T I S N S
A P A L A A T.
A T W H M I P
A T E S F B;
A T T L A G A D,
A L H L A T P;
5.
I F F T P B
B T C, R O R,
T M O P; A I T S
T L, S B S, F
S H A T G B.
People have already found the first four. The fifth one is
Va Synaqref Svryqf ol Wbua ZpEnr
4. V guvax gung V funyy arire frr / N cbrz nf ybiryl nf n gerr
Replying to get the answers.
This would be a good question on University Challenge
2. Xvcyvat'f Erprffvbany
3. Fbat bs Uvnjngun
1. Uheg ol wbuaal pnfu
Avar Vapu Anvyf
Oh yeah, whoops
Paul Ingraham, who built the excellent site PainScience, now has a Substack blog called Try Everything, chronicling his efforts to recover from a post-viral syndrome he's suffered from for the past 7 years. So far nothing has worked, and he is planning to spend the next 2 years trying everything reasonable he or anyone else can come up with. He's smart, honest, articulate and funny, so the blog's a good read. Also gives you a miscellany of useful stuff Paul knows about what works and what does not for the vague but awful little symptoms that plague so many of us -- crappy sleep, fatigue, amotivational syndrome . . . The blog's comments section is also presents an opportunity to brainstorm possibilities. If you like the challenge of making remarks here that are 34th percentile or better in quality, you might try coming up with some ideas Paul thinks are worth trying. I managed to crank out 2, and felt like I'd found a golden egg. Plus Paul himself's a good egg. He's the only person who has ever given me a truly useful suggestion about reducing back pain.
Cool! I actually bought two of his online books. Very well researched.
Did he try Cold Immersion (if it did not work, did he try upping intensity to 11) + regular Wim Hof breathing yet?
I don’t know. You should go to his comments and suggest them, and maybe make a case for why they are worth a try.
Subscribed! Thanks for the rec.
If he really, seriously means EVERYTHING, I've got the final boss for him.
You gonna suggest shit?
Who, me? 💩
He should at least have his microbiome sequenced. If you're looking for why one person is sick and another is healthy, it's the logical place to start looking—especially if it's not something he's dealt with his whole life.
You've got this wildly fluctuating soup of biochemistry that can have any number of different semi-stable equilibriums. Plus he had a major illness that kicked it off; a lot of times that means antibiotics.
Antibiotics for a virus? According to Eremolalos, this was a post-viral syndrome, no?
Anyway, good luck with the shitposting.
Hah, thanks!
Half the time, you only find out that something is viral when you give the patient antibiotics and they do nothing. Not how things should be done, but a lot of docs operate under the doctrine of "eh, can't hurt, might as well try it"
Oh, huh: https://tryeverything.substack.com/p/all-the-symptoms
"For about two years, my poops were awful. It was like crapping toothpaste… and then I would leak sticky, slimy shit for hours after every bowel movement. I had to shower multiple times per day."
Sounds like bowel problems. He said the poops got better, but just bc the texture's improved doesn't necessarily mean the community architecture is back where it ought to be
"Half the time, you only find out that something is viral when you give the patient antibiotics and they do nothing."
This makes an unfortunate amount of sense. Thanks for explaining it!
I would questions whether any of those things are a “syndrome”
And are instead people misunderstanding aging and depression/ennui. I absolutely have worse sleep and more fatigue and a-motivation l times, and specially compared to say age 32 (I am now almost 42). I am open to the idea that these are part of some syndrome, but I suspect make the 30lbs and 10 years of wear/degradation on my body have infinitely more to do with it.
As for useful suggestions for back pain, there are a couple super simple ones.
1). Work you back harder and make it stronger.
2). Stretch and improve your range of motion of the associated muscles and ligaments.
3). Just wait, a huge amount of physical problems just get better with time (well until you get old and they get worse).
Isn't depression a syndrome, technically?
The syndrome I am talking about is post-viral syndrome, not the little list of miscellaneous symptoms I gave later -- crappy sleep, etc. (Though I do wonder if chronic lack of motivation might reasonably be thought of as a syndrome). Post viral syndromes are, I'm pretty sure, a real thing, w/ common symptoms being exhaustion, exercise intolerance, body aches & malaise. I had one myself that lasted several years, then faded away on its own.
As for back pain, you sound like you're assuming I have plain old middle-aged back issues, and that I have not tried just waiting (your 3), or taking the steps that any sensible person would (your 1 & 2). You are wrong on both counts.
Oh for sure they are a thing, but that doesn’t mean a lot of people who blame “syndromes” for their ails are misplacing the blame.
Also you would be amazed how often people haven’t taken basic steps before wish-casting on exotic therapies.
Yeah, OK. The fact that some people who claim to be suffering from something complicated are in fact lazy dum dums on whom it is possible to visit a gotcha is just not that important to me. There are plenty who really are suffering from something that they cannot shift despite sustained, intelligent effort, and those are the ones whose situation is interesting to me.
Ironic, given the tagline that pops up under your name when I mouse over it.
Maybe, maybe not, but really it is just a movie quote I enjoy!
commit 28cb7c37ea187e7dac20f6ef1e146697e718b9d1 (HEAD -> master)
One of the only useful things I have imagined done on Bitcoin is publication of various checksums. With the collapse of FTX, I am less convinced that there will be a Bitcoin in ten years. Perhaps Scott's comment section will be longer-lasting.
I hear the average length of time an empire survives is 250 years.
I just finished reading Reality+, and a couple weeks ago I read The Conscious Mind, both by David Chalmers. I enjoyed both greatly.
I'm stumped at the "seemingly brute fact" of subjective identity, that we each happen to occupy the particular subjective experience that we do. From The Conscious Mind, on page 85:
“The indexical fact expresses something very salient about the world as I find it: that David Chalmers is me. How could one explain this seemingly brute fact? ... The nature of the brute indexical is quite obscure, though, and it is most unclear how one might explain it. ... The indexical fact may have to be taken as primitive. If so, then we have a failure of reductive explanation distinct from and analogous to the failure with consciousness.”
I read Reality+ with the discussion above still fresh in my mind. In Chapter 15, Chalmers explores his intuitions about the circumstances in which he (i.e., the conscious, subjective experiencer writing the book) would survive, or not, in different cases of brain-uploading. He settled on the strategy that he would like to be uploaded gradually, given the option, to avoid being unintentionally killed and replaced with a digital doppelganger. Here's where I'm stumped: wouldn't continuity of consciousness in the course of any substrate change at all have to be arbitrary? In Chapter 15, Chalmers points out that the brain is undergoing gradual replacement all the time as part of normal biology. Why should there be any difference between that substrate change, through which presumably the subjective observer persists; and neuron-by-neuron digital uploading; and cortex-by-cortex silicon replacement; and hemisphere-by-hemisphere uploading; and complete cerebral annihilation and reconstruction; or what have you? What rule determines whether and where one persists?
Here's the best thought experiment I can come up with to make my point. Let's say we put you, the reader, under anesthesia, take out your brain and put it on life support, split it in half, and replace each missing hemisphere with a silicon duplicate, so that we now have two whole brains. Then, for the sake of isolating variables in the grisly experiment, we throw out your brainless body and install each brain in an identical host body, which we'll say are biological copies of the original. Then, we awaken both. Which set of eyes do "you" now see out of? Assuming the answer is not "neither" (because humans can survive a hemispherectomy), and not "both at once," then you must now inhabit one of the brains. Why one and not the other? Everettian quantum mechanics, which Chalmers discusses toward the end of his book, seems to beckon here, but I'll set that aside. I think any mechanism for making the choice would have to reflect some kind of "extraordinary discontinuity, unlike any other that we find in nature" (like certain alternatives to fading qualia that Chalmers takes up in Chapter 15 of Reality+). E.g., "you awaken completely in whichever brain includes the hemisphere with the greater number of neurons in it, and not at all in the other," or "you awaken completely in whichever brain includes the hemisphere that had the more powerful gasp of electrical activity prior to anesthesia, and not at all in the other."
What I'm getting at is that any determination of where a particular consciousness "goes" upon a substrate change of any magnitude must be arbitrary. It would even be arbitrary moment-to-moment in daily life: why should I still be here at time t+1, when my brain at t+0 was, atomically, in some ways a different thing? What if my brain's information-processing capability sufficient to correlate with consciousness is disabled by a knockout punch, or because I've taken a nap? What arbiter is choosing whether "I" should resume existence at t+1 when I get out of bed and my neural logic gates are all firing again? Maybe another way of saying all this is that the "brute indexical" does not just arise when we first blink into awareness, but it is continually reiterating itself.
It seems to me that, if any mechanism for determining continuity of experience would be arbitrary and extraordinarily discontinuous, and we are unwilling to accept such a thing, then we should accept that either: (1) no such mechanism is needed, because there cannot be continuity, because every substrate change does cause destruction of the previous experiencer, such that each experiencer only exists for a momentary flash, such that I am a different person now than the one who began writing this long sentence (notwithstanding the memories I inherited), and I will be gone and replaced with a new experiencer before I finish it; or (2) no such mechanism is needed, because there can only be continuity, because there is only one experiencer. I, the writer, am you, the reader, and we're both my dog, and each of the dinosaurs, and every fly that has ever landed on my window, and the alien AI on the other side of the galaxy. Experience is singular and omnipresent notwithstanding local expressions, just like a quantum field. There are many movies playing in this theater, but there's only one seat in the house.
Neither (1) nor (2) is very compatible with life as I'm living it. (2) would seem to unify egoism and altruism, which at the very least might motivate me to stop shooing away the stray cat. I have no idea what I'd do with (1). I could really use any guidance anyone can give me for further reading or thinking that might straighten me out.
I think 1 is probably correct, but I think that the future flashes of consciousness with memories of the ones you experience as you read this will probably be happier if you don't worry about it much.
Why isn't there a problem about why that chair is that chair and not some other? We accept that ordinary physical.objects are simply self identical, at least at a point in time. In terms of indexicals, every security camera has it's own perspective , quite unmysteriously.
The Vertiginous Question seems to require consciousness as a starting point. Perhaps because it's hard to accept that you are conscious without embracing dualism.
Most arguments for Open Individualism assume a kind of dualism, where individual minds get matched up with individual bodies, in a way that is somehow coincidental or mysterious. But it can only be a mystery in need of explanation of there is any possibility of Mary's mind finding itself in John's body. Under materialism, by contrast Mary's mind is just the activity of Mary's brain: there's no separate mind,so no possibility of minds getting mismatched.
You being you is only a mystery or coincidence if you are two. If you are a body and a soul, there is a question about how they get matched up. And it's conceivable that you could be a body and a soul, but it's also conceivable that you are not.
Materialists don't worry about why that chair is *that* chair, and they don't see anything special about persons that would make the question "why are you you" meaningful . For materialists, consciousnesses/persons are individuated the same way bodies are, since they are nothing over and above the body/brain. Materialism is also able to explain why one self does not perceivably bleed into another, and explain why minds only perceive the environs of the body.
So there is no problem from the materialistic perspective. Which means to argue for OI you need to argue against materialist metaphysics, because it has a lot going for it.
( "Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times. It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with empty individualism, the view that personal identities correspond to a fixed pattern thatstantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and with closed individualism, the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time")
Thank you! I’m going to spend some time continuing to digest the variety of comments I got here, but (among other helpful and interesting things) yours put a name to the nagging idea (open individualism) that unlocked the appropriate Wikipedia page, further reading and ordered thinking, etc. Doing my best to compare feelings across contexts, I think your comment here gave me about as much relief as a codeine prescription for a broken bone. I hope you’re having a great day.
Your thought experiment seems similar to Daniel Dennett's famous "Where Am I?" essay:
http://www.newbanner.com/SecHumSCM/WhereAmI.html
I think all these arguments stumble over a certain empirical question, which is whether anybody actually has experienced a discontinuity of self awareness. We certainly *think* we do, when we sleep, when under general anesthesia, but that this is true is an assumption which we can question, and perhaps should question, if it is to form a key foundation to arguments about the nature of self.
Perhaps there *is* at some unconscious level an awareness that persists through sleep, so that on awakening there *is* some part of our brain that is aware of continuity, realizes we have still existed and some kind of thoughts have taken place. Same thing for anesthesia, perhaps there is an awareness there, too[1]. (I vaguely remember reading once that a body undergoing surgery exhibits physiological signs of stress, and perhaps a person recovering from surgery exhibits some vague symptoms of PTSD -- maybe that experience is not as completely excised from our awareness as we think -- or hope, ha ha, the idea that major surgery under anesthesia is retained in awareness at even some murkery subterranean level is rather horrifying.)
If we question the empirical existence of any experience of actual discontinuity to which a human being can testify, then some of these thought experiments become problematic, because they assume things about human experience that may not be true. Perhaps the mind does not, and cannot, retain a sense of self past a genuine discontinuity, despite our intuition. Maybe our intuition is based around a (unjustified?) faith in determinism, that if we reconstruct at time t + dt exactly what a system was like at t, then we have ipso facto created the same thing, because the entire future of the system (which is what we would use to measure "sameness") is 100% determined by the state of the system at the starting point of measurement.
But determinism is not the only metaphysics of system dynamics, and moreover determinism need not be a Markovian determinism, in which complete knowledge at any instant is sufficient to determine all future behavior. Maybe there is some kind of "memory kernel" at work, which makes it necessary to integrate over all prior history to predict the future completely, and so maybe it is not sufficient to recreate a system at one point in time to have it behave identically going forward. That would call into question the assumption that a sense of self can cross a discontinuity.
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[1] Weirdly related: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/983675
Something like your thought experiment is the bedrock philosophical reason, for me, why some alternative to materialism is needed. If I gave up Christianity, I would have to find some other non-materialist explanation. There's just no way to explain my experience of the world that saves materialism from the destructive power of this thought experiment.
The idea of an immaterial soul solves the problem of the continuity of personal identity. But giving up on the continuity of personal identity dissolves it.
Also, you're the first person I've found anywhere who takes this seriously! I'd better read this David Chalmers fellow.
I couldn’t recommend it more strongly! Take up the Conscious Mind (not Reality+, which is more of a pop book), I predict it will feel like scratching an itch in the middle of your back you didn’t think you could reach. He calls the non-materialist position he arrives at “naturalistic dualism,” IIRC. Please reach out if you read it, I’d love to know your reaction. I’m realizing how hard it is to find fellow folks who “take it seriously.”
>I'm stumped at the "seemingly brute fact" of subjective identity, that we each happen to occupy the particular subjective experience that we do.
This brute fact is easy to understand if you accept that your consciousness is "owned" by your physical body, or more accurately, the computational processes instantiated by your brain. Your personal identity is a function of these processes combined with your memories and functional dispositions that make up your personality.
> He settled on the strategy that he would like to be uploaded gradually, given the option, to avoid being unintentionally killed and replaced with a digital doppelganger. Here's where I'm stumped: wouldn't continuity of consciousness in the course of any substrate change at all have to be arbitrary?
I used to be in favor of the "continuous change" idea for conscious uploading. But eventually I realized the idea of continuity of consciousness is a red herring. There is no meaningful way to characterize one's consciousness as being continuous in the sense of every time point having a unique property of consciousness distinct from every other time point. At best we can say that consciousness is *seamless* from the subjective perspective. It isn't even meaningful to say that you are conscious in any given instant. Freeze all the molecules in your brain; are you conscious in this instant or not? It's a meaningless question.
What does matter is *persistence*. The fact that my brain processes persist means that I am a conscious thing over the duration of this persistence. But persistence doesn't require continuity, it only requires continuation. When I wake up in the morning my conscious brain processes continue, thus I continue to be the same person I was. If my brain processes were stopped and a duplicate were to continue in silico, I continue to be the same person I was in the computer. If my meat-bag was then also continued, I would continue on in the meat-bag as well. The substrate doesn't matter, only the continuation of a particular set of dynamics.
>Which set of eyes do "you" now see out of? Assuming the answer is not "neither" (because humans can survive a hemispherectomy), and not "both at once," then you must now inhabit one of the brains. Why one and not the other?
This is a complicated question and I don't think we can dismiss the "neither" option. Human brains are asymmetric, language is lateralized and potentially other relevant traits like personality are as well. One side may be more dominant in the sense of carrying the features that one identifies with. We might say the repaired person receiving the dominant hemisphere will be the continuation of the original consciousness. But the hemispheres interact in complex and unknown ways. The interaction of functional areas across hemispheres almost certainly has consequences for personality traits and considerations of self-identity. Putting two hemispheres together from different people will probably result in entirely knew interactions between cross-hemisphere functional areas and thus result in a unified consciousness that is so unlike either original that it cannot be identified with either.
There's a much simpler non-philosophical explanation from biology. Simple organisms don't require a self to produce behaviour. A bacteria is a machine that ingest one or a few food chemicals and "sense" the change in concentration of the target chemicals. If it is increasing, they move forward. If it's decreasing, the change direction randomly. This works well without any need for a modelled self but it produces an extremely limited range of behaviours. There is an astronomical number of bacteria on the planet, none are happy, none are sad, none know they are here.
Plug a brain into the system and we add a capacity to adapt to different environments through learned behaviours. There is no need for a self but there a limit of behaviours - it's still running a stimulus response system. A dog can learn complex behaviours, it is awake and engaged, but it lacks even the capacity to plan or think things through or take and an ideological position.
When we bolt an internal world model onto the stimulus response brain, the game changes wildly. Model elements can be learned independently of direct experience, elements can interact, and a new universe emerges (almost literally). At the business end, behaviour can be driven by the model. A monkey won't give you its banana for a promise of bunches of bananas in the afterlife or even next week, but humans do variations on this kind of stuff all the time, naturally and relentlessly.
First question: given the wild power of the internal world model, what happens if it does not include a constructed self? A rapid Darwin award, experiment over. That's madness. Second question: What would if we do if we had the capacity to deconstruct and directly manage our constructed selves? We would immediately game it. Think heroin, then, just think it again. Like those rats that prefer pressing the lever to eating. Evolution presents another Darwin award. The mechanics of self is vital to human, but fortunately hidden. We live inside the illusion and it seems totally real to us. Phenomenological enquiry into the apparent self is doomed from the outset - by the compelling force of evolution. The self is an illusion anyway - you absolutely won't find it if you dissect a brain - but it is a wired-in, critical component of the world model that the brain runs. Without it, we are stupid, crazy, or dead.
I've made a lot of progress in this kind of conversation by asking folks to join me in tabooing the verb "to be." If you can rewrite your post without using any form of that verb - including be, is, am, are, were, was, etc. - I suspect you'll more easily see the vagueness in your conceptualizations.
Consider the seemingly simple sentence: I am me. To rewrite it without the verb "to be," you'll have to understand what it is that makes you, you. You'll have to specify coordinates for the clusters of thing-space that we call "I" and "me," and you'll have to specify some active relationship between those clusters, an action performed by the subject "I" upon the object "me."
I don't think you can do that without learning a good deal about where your understanding breaks down.
>which set of eyes do you now see out of?
There is no mystery, you have just been duplicated. That is an easy philosophical bullet to bite in this particular realm. There are now two “yous” both with a continuous experience back towards the single “you”.
My inclination is that "a consciousness" is a type error, because it's less like a noun and more like a verb. Not a separate object that we carry around inside our brains, but an activity that the brain does.
Both reconstructed half-brains would (assuming the premise that they're successfully alive afterwards and paired with an adequate replacement of the other half) then independently continue to do consciousness, and both would have memories of being the former single self.
I think of it like asking of the stomach... if you split it into two and repaired each half with an artificial half-stomach, then which one would be continuing your digestion?
Yes! I use this kind of language a lot, like "if you treat a verb as a noun, you're going to have a bad time." Nobody has this kind of confusion about visual processing - no one discusses the hard problem of vision, or proposes the pan-visual-processing hypothesis where vision is a fundamental aspect of quantum something something something...
What's so hard about treating consciousness as "just" another cognitive process, like visual processing?
Well there is option 3) - that you are the same person who started the post because “because every substrate change does not cause destruction of the previous experiencer” - which is the world as we experience it.
I was a zombie once. I was cycling my bicycle at the back of my parents house, aged twelve, and then the scene faded away (literally it swiped away like a cinema effect) and I was lying on the sofa with my mother wiping my brow. In the meantime I had cycled out on the road, hit my head somehow (was a car involved - I can’t say), was found on the road by a neighbour, brought home and had conversations with my mother and grand aunt, if a bit groggily. The awakened me was not obvious to my mother or aunt, as in I was talking beforehand and afterwards. My mother did say a few minutes later that I sounded back to normal. Zombie me spoke groggily.
Since this isn’t my normal experience I’m pretty certain my consciousness is normally continuous.
I don’t get why the answer to your thought experiment *can’t* be “both at once”. If I separate a room of air into two rooms of air, both contain the same original air (in the large-scale sense), after all.
As soon as AI can interview a veteran claiming a mental disorder, determine the validity of the symptoms and aggregate the various domains of functionality affected by the disorder that approximates the VAs percentage rating system, half of what I do will become obsolete.
The forensic half of my practice will still be a thing for a while longer.
Couldn't you formulate a similar response for just about any job? I read your post as "once [Hard Problem] is solvable by [Hard Problem], then [current solution] is no longer needed." AI is a Hard Problem, but once you even have AI, so is getting the AI sufficient ability to do this specific task.
"Mental disorders" are hazy enough I doubt AI will ever take that over. As Thomas Szasz says, our mental medicine men are "soul doctors", and we don't entrust the soul to computers.
That really isn’t totally clear. There are some realms currently where simple flow charts outperform experts, but people don’t replace the experts with flowcharts.
I recently found an AI-powered tool called ExplainPaper.com that lets you upload documents, highlight any word or phrase you don't know, and then have AI magic instantly generate a clear definition of the phrase. It's intended to to help you read academic papers, which isn't really a use case that interests me.
It makes me wonder if a general version of this tool is coming that will follow you around the internet everywhere you go and can define/look-up/comment on anything you highlight. That would be the killer tool.
Google has been quiet in the recent slurry of awesome AI tools coming out, so I wonder if this what they have coming. I am ignorant about these things and too lazy to research deeply, so I am hoping generous commenters will generously comment with information and/or theories.
Kindle has a similar feature, although it doesn't use AI magic, it just uses ordinary dictionaries + wikipedia, and it sometimes fails in surprising cases.
The most annoying failure mode is when you look up something like "perenacologist" and it defines it as "one who practices perenacology" but then you can't look up "perenacology" because it only works for words/phrases in the primary text, not recursively for ones in the dictionary. But that's obviously just a stupid UI, not a capability failure per se.
Sorry, what's the advantage of the AI version of this relative to a regular built-in dictionary, such as e.g. Apple products have, as Nolan points out? My very wibbly understanding of current machine learning is that you have to train the AI first on some massive sheaf of data, text in this case I guess, so it's hard to imagine it being more compact than a straightforward list of words. Is it better at handling typos or something?
Ah, I should elaborate. The tool I mentioned (which is actually called Explainpaper.com) can define phrases and concepts, not just words. You could highlight an entire sentence and it could give you context. This context pops up in a little window the side of the paper. Inside this chat you can ask follow-up questions and get good answers. It's like having a knowledgable professor sitting next to you while you read.
I'm not sure how it works but you have to upload a paper onto their site to use the tool on it, which to me smells like they're fine-tuning GPT-3 on that text in the background.
Oh, huh. Thanks for the explanation. (Scott, I hope you make allowance for this type of post even if it's low-quality in some discussion-promoting sense and don't delete them, otherwise I'll come off as an even bigger asshole than I actually am.)
I can do some of that on iOS right now by long pressing on a word. Not a phrase though. That’s been the case for years.
Does anyone have good resources on the treatment of long covid? Specifically respiratory issues and fatigue.
Most of the official guidance I've come across tends to be frustratingly vague, with the standard all purpose stuff on lifestyle changes support networks, etc. Presumably due to the broadness of long covid symptoms. And the unofficial advice in forums etc tends towards anecdotes and miracle supplements. Neither of which are particularly helpful in terms of concrete steps.
(I'm not sure where asking open ended questions comes in the hierarchy of comment quality, so feel free to delete and I'll repost on the normal open thread.)
Dr. Roger Seheult suggests that exposure to near infrared radiation in sunlight may well be beneficial.
He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine.
He discusses this in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGO2qb7wZns, the most relevant part starting at 9:43 (time-stamp: https://youtu.be/JGO2qb7wZns?t=583).
To quote him:
"There seems to be a biological plausibility that since mitochondrial dysfunction may lie at the heart of long-COVID and the dyspnea and the shortness of breath on exertion that characterizes this condition, it may very well be that making sure that you get outside and getting fresh air, but specifically near infrared radiation and sunlight may be a potentially therapeutic intervention. We absolutely need to have randomized placebo controlled trials, but the data that we present...is quite compelling.
[...]
If you're concerned about skin cancer, you can always put on clothes to protect yourself from the ultraviolet radiation than can cause skin damage, but still get the near infrared radiation which penetrates deep and through clothes very easily. You don't have to be in direct sunlight... Its a good idea to get outside...Newer windows are designed to block infrared radiation.
Sitting in front of a fire also gets you exposed to pretty good levels of near infrared radiation."
The video cites various papers that contribute to this hypothesis and all papers are linked in the description of the video.
Although Dr. Seheult speaks very cautiously, my perception is that since he started producing videos about COVID at the start of the pandemic, he has been consistently ahead of the curve.
His video also links to other videos of his about the general health benefits of near infrared radiation found in sunlight, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YV_iKnzDRg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zzo4SJopcY. I see another video of his on some potential benefits of near infrared radiation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wadKIiGsDTw.
Hmm that's interesting. Have not have time to watch videos yet, just going by your post. Has he done any RCTs? Or maybe looked at things like whether LC is less frequent or long-lasting. in sunny vs. cloudy places, or in people who work outdoors vs those who work indoors?
We now have an RCT confirming the effectiveness of NIR exposure for treatment of COVID: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1011134422002342.
I don't think there are any RCTs, given that in the quote he says that we need to have RCTs.
However, he did indeed do a study looking at COVID outcomes (not long-COVID in particular) and latitude, as latitude determines the amount of incoming near-infrared radiation: https://www.melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view/197/1002.
This seems to be pretty cutting edge, so it is not shocking that studies have not yet been conducted.
His paper that I linked is from just 2 months ago, and it states that "This theory, which places NIR and the development of subcellular melatonin at the centre, is interesting but it is a totally new and untested theory."
His video which I linked is from just 6 days ago, based in part on some recent papers.
If the person is only 3 or 4 mos out from covid, there's a reasonable chance they're just having a slow recovery. If it's longer then yeah, something's wrong.
The most recent things I've seen about LC treatment seem to come down to various sorts of slow rehab for each of the various symptoms -- for ex., for exhaustion doing tiny amounts of exercise and very gradually increasing them. Study I saw had kind of depressing results -- average improvement after a year was approx 60%. Have not heard of anyone having success by targeting some process in the body that was causing the various symptoms. Well, actually heard about a couple things but don't know whether they panned out: taking Paxlovid; and getting vaccinated. Some claim one of the other of those produced a big improvement in their LC.
If I were you I'd search Google Scholar and Clinical trials.
My elderly parents both caught covid in April 2020. They had weeks-long fatigue etc. What I think helped was their taking a nutritional supplement called Ensure. Easy to digest, tons of nutrients including protein. Just mix with hot water or hot milk. It does seem highly processed and has sugar. They preferred chocolate to vanilla. This was better nutrition than trying to eat everything naturally, which was very hard to do then. Even shopping online was hard - the restrictions during quarantine were strict.
Trying a different version of this, because I think it has potential, but came late to the game last open thread and got bogged down.
~~Wegenerian Hypotheses Thread~~
From last time:
"Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener is a sort of patron saint of crackpots; he was the first person to seriously advance the idea that the continents were all joined at one point in the past, just based on the fact that they look like a jigsaw puzzle if you squint. He ran into a lot of resistance from the geological establishment, because we didn't have the understanding of tectonic plates floating on a liquid mantle yet. (I imagine a lot of his skeptical contemporaries scoffing "Does he know that landmasses don't just float on the ocean? Someone ought to break it to him that islands go all the way down.")
This is a sometimes-dangerous but valuable mode of thinking, so hit me with your "Wegenerian" ideas—things that are unfalsifiable, or maybe just very difficult to falsify. Hunches that you can make an intuitive or epidemiological argument for, but can't prove or even fully justify mechanistically.
This is a thread for gesticulating frantically at the map, going "they clearly fit together you fucks, any child can see it!""
NEW RULES this time though: no vaguery (I'm looking at you, math guy), and no religion—nothing fully unfalsifiable. We are here to play the believing game, and feel out the implications of each other's ideas.
I'll start: Europa's interior ocean is full of life, and the orange streaks on the surface ice are roots that have cracked all the way through the shell.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/WTwtRFp8MXxMZUi7PcUZRA-1920-80.jpg.webp
Hypothesis: many of the world's correct ideas originally come from a crackpot, but a larger number of the world's utterly wrong ideas also come from crackpots, and we have a problem with too many people following after the crackpots because they *sound* confident and also very smart. The crackpot often has a science degree related in some way to their field of crackpottery, and in an academic setting would usually be rightly demolished by people with more expertise, so the crackpot takes his message directly to laymen, who know only that this person sounds really confident and smart and tells an alluring story, so they memorize the story and tell it to their friends, happy that they've learned something that most people don't know (usually because it's complete bullshit).
But sometimes the crackpot hit upon something real by accident, so eventually when non-crackpot scientists investigate the claim that has been going around, they discover the real thing and it becomes canon.
Hypothesis 2: most of the correct ideas that were first discovered by "crackpots" were actually discovered by people who were unusually rational, but also unusually confident and persuasive, and because their idea was far outside the mainstream, they sounded exactly like crackpots.
My favorite is that consciousness is just our mimetic immune system, like one of the software solutions for viruses, which is to take periodic "snapshots" of the system and compare them, after updating for what is known to originate legitimately (e.g. through user action), so that you can detect infections by a (computer) virus.
We are a very social species, and we are uniquely vulnerable among animal species, due to our unsurpassed communication skills, to infectious memes, to adopting ideas that originate in someone else's head. This is a source of great power, of course -- we can adopt someone else's ideas without having to think them all up ourselves. That's the source of tremendous human progress. But it's also obviously a source of great danger -- this way lie cults, Tulip crazes, Nazism, witch burnings, copycat suicides.
So perhaps at some place in our long distant past, not long after we developed our sophisticated language system for conveying nuanced and vivid ideas to each other, we developed a defense mechanism that allows us to tag all the ideas in our heads as "this is mine" and "this came from someone else." That would let us be extra vigilant about the latter. (Our ordinary viral immune system works a bit like this, all of our own cells tag themselves on the outside with "this is me!" sugar molecules that cause the white cells to pass peaceably by. The distinction between "self" and "nonself" is very important!)
And surely the best way to know whether an idea is yours or not is to be constantly reflecting on what you're thinking at the moment -- to watch yourself thinking, so to speak, so you can see the thoughts trundling down the assembly line in real time and put your copyright symbol on each. Isn't "watching yourself think" a pretty good working definition of "conscious?"
Oh this is good. This is very good.
Did you come up with this?
I know that's a funny question to ask in the context of your post, but it made me realize: this model provides a great insight onto learning and our sense of truth.
There's a school of thought in education called "constructionism", which holds that in order to actually learn something—to really, fully internalize an idea—you have to basically figure it out for yourself. You can't actually put an idea in someone's head, you have to just show it to them and let them build their own replica—which can then be given the "self" copyright stamp.
Something seems true to us when we can build that replica from parts we already have lying around. If we can't, we're likely to reject it as false, or to lose it like the contextless name/date associations they had you memorize in social studies class.
Yes I came up with the idea. That doesn't mean others might not have come up with it also, and for all I know it has already been considered and dismissed by the cognitive science people.
To a significant degree I agree with your school of thought, and I have been in the business of education for decades. After so many years I tell students: I cannot teach you something, put it into your head in a way that makes sense to you. I can do only two things: (1) tell you how and why it makes sense to me, and (2) give you tests that check your mastery of the subject, and grade them, so you know when you are closer or further away.
The best students always learn it in their own idiosyncratic way, and it never precisely duplicates the way I understand it, or I daresay any other person. That's not to say we predict different outcomes -- this is, after all, physics, not something as frothy and contingent as a social "science" where things are "true" if the majority votes it that way -- but how exactly each of us gets to the same conclusion is almost always at least subtly different. Many paths, same destination.
I will also say that one of the marks of the gifted teacher is the ability to help a student build a replica out of whatever pieces he (the student) happens to have on hand. It's the ability to see how *his* pieces, which may not be the same as *my* pieces, or indeed the same as any other student's, can nevertheless be assembled into a machine that gives the same (correct) output for a given input. It's meeting the student where he actually is, working with his actual state of knowledge, and helping him use the bricks and sticks he actually has on hand. It's not always possible, of course, sometimes the student's inventory is too lacking, but it is possible a fair amount of the time, and it is the mark of a really outstanding instructor that they can help with this.
It's one of the things that distinguishes a master of the field from a master *teacher* of the field: the former may very well know everything there is to know about the field, but he can only build it up in one particular way, whichever way makes sense to him, and he can't help someone build it another way.
I like Aquatic Ape theory: the idea that humans specifically evolved the way we have not to run on the savannah but to live on the beach, diving for shellfish etc. The main point in favor is that a lot of human traits seem adapted more for the latter, e.g. most of the other glabrous mammals are fully aquatic, we're better at breath-holding and have more suitable noses for this than our closest ape relatives, there's not really any benefit to having worse muscles than a chimp or bonobo (an adult male chimpanzee is about four times as strong as an adult male human, IIRC) *except* that our weaker muscles are less dense enabling us to float.
The main point against is that this theory is regarded as absolute crankery by every professional in a relevant field, but what do they know anyway?
Also we have a bit of skin between our fingers that looks like it might be a vestige of something fin-like. Apes don't have this.
As for muscles, though, we have good reasons for not being as strong as apes. Building and maintaining muscle costs calories and protein, so having more muscle than you need is a liability. Our lifestyles don't require as much strength as apes', so we don't have it.
I thought this was such obvious bullshit until one day I watched a tiny child, maybe 2 or 3, fearlessly leap into a swimming pool. I thought: there's just *no way* that child has had time to learn that relative lack of fear of deep water, it absolutely has to be wired into us, the way it's wired into various other species. But why would we be wired to be so unafraid by nature of water that drowing is the most common form of accidental death?
Tiny infants (like <6 months) also reflexively hold their breath when immersed in water and appear to enjoy the experience as long as it's reasonably brief. Aquatic Apers claim this is because women are evolved to give birth in shallow water and that this helps with various difficultes and complications of delivery.
I feel like I get a little endorphin boost just reading the words Aquatic Ape together. The imagery is great.
The unified field theory, expressed in simplified Newtonian terms, is something like sin(ln(x))/x in the same sense that Newtonian gravity is expressed 1/x^2.
where x is...distance between two bodies?
are you just tryin' to reconcile the strong nuclear force here or what
Distance is ... probably the most accurate word for it, yes. "Measure" might be slightly more accurate, but also probably far more misleading.
If it works, it should reconcile everything, from what we call dark energy to the strong nuclear force. It feasibly yields the right galactic rotation curves. Might explain the kuiper cliff if things line up right, although that implies a repulsive phase/force we haven't even noticed, between the scales of star systems and galaxies. Gravity. Nuclear forces. Possibly chromadynamics, but I've forgotten the name of the individual who claimed that it could be solved with something like strong gravity.
Bruh I love you but you can't just say "something like sin(ln(x))/x" and then claim to have solved five of the biggest problems in physics at once. You gotta give us more than that or else you just sound cracked out
If I'm right, more than five.
So, for example, with dark energy, it would imply that the solution is, in Newtonian terms, that mass simply exerts a repulsive force at a certain range of distances.
For the galactic rotation curve, sin(ln(x))/x, where sin(ln(x)) approximates 1, simplifies to 1/x. Where sin(ln(x)) approximates 1/x, you get a function that locally approximates 1/x^2. It should be feasible to fit the curve such that the local approximations of 1/x^2, and the local approximations of 1/x, align with observations.
If gravity drops off faster than expected at star system scales - heading into a repulsive phase - the kuiper cliff is nicely solved. It does require that we somehow haven't noticed a repulsive force that dominates vaguely between the distances of 10^12 and 10^18m, though.
Gravity may be covered by a section of curve that approximates 1/x^2 on the scale of the solar system, but it's cutting it really close, and starts to require that small planetoids be electrically rather than gravitationally bound.
Smaller than that and the Newtonian version stops working; you really need curvature to deal with the hierarchy problem. However, curvature does do a remarkable job of dealing with the hierarchy problem - if the nuclear forces exhibit curvature, a hydrogen atom is something like a meter across, measured "from the inside".
Some ideas (I don’t seriously believe a good portion of these, but fun to speculate about regardless):
—Microplastics are responsible for [insert large societal changes which are hard to account for here]. This could include anything from declining sperm counts to increased obesity. I would be surprised if there was no noticeable effect on humans tbh, it’s more a question of which effects are caused by what.
—Philosophers who don’t believe in consciousness are P-zombies. I mean come on, it’s time we believe people when they tell us about their “internal experience” or lack thereof!
—politics can be predicted by figuring out which outcome will result in the most interesting story, long-term.
—Dolphins and elephants probably have religion. Elephants seem to mourn, and reason about the world to some degree, and it makes sense they would invent religion for roughly the same evolutionary/basic philosophical reasons we have.
—the universe is finite, because if it weren’t, we’d be Boltzmann brains and that would likely look very different than the world we observe.
> Microplastics are responsible for [insert large societal changes which are hard to account for here].
Plastics are for practical purposes inert, and I keep waiting to see scientific studies proving the harms of microplastics, but this idea that they are harmful has never been led by scientists AFAIK. SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" may be bunk, but it noteworthy for having suggested several possible contaminants besides microplastics.
> Philosophers who don’t believe in consciousness are P-zombies.
I'd phrase as "Philosophers who don’t believe in qualia, and insist on characterizing consciousness simply as an ability to process sense-data and make decisions, are zombies in a philosophical sense". It's plausible, but can't be assumed.
> politics can be predicted by figuring out which outcome will result in the most interesting story
wat
> Dolphins and elephants probably have religion.
I think we would've noticed if that were true. Unless by "religion" you just mean "incorrect beliefs about X on an individual level".
> the universe is finite, because if it weren’t, we’d be Boltzmann brains
Non sequitur. Boltzmann brains should be far outnumbered by non-Boltzmann brains regardless.
I suspect the universe is finite, but endless, and so indistinguishable from infinite for all observers.
Whales, meanwhile, have an entire lobe of their brains dedicated to hating us with such depth and intensity that we cannot possibly conceive of it.
Love it, this is exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping for
I hope this qualifies. The idea of passing through time doesn't sit right with me, especially as it just in one direction. I vaguely recall we account for this via entropy, but it feels artificial. It makes me wonder if it's just an artifact of something else, that neither past nor future exist, and there is only ever truly "present" states and space.
I agree that the past probably does not exist, but unlike the future, it used to exist.
It would be better if this idea were false. But the universe doesn't care about what's better or worse, good or bad. It simply is what it is.
It can't be proven. The utter impossibility of accessing the past (except via whatever is left of it in the present) is evidence that it no longer exists. On the other hand, if the universe preserves the past, it wouldn't care about making it accessible to the present, because again, the universe doesn't care about making sense.
Well, our current physics doesn't include any concept of passing through time. There's no less reality about events "in the past" then there is about points "in the future." We can identify an arrow of time by making some strong assumptions about the initial state of the universe, but this still doesn't explain why we have such a powerful conviction that the past is more "real" than the future. Of course, our conviction could be delusion. Or our physics could be wrong, Lee Smolin has argued we need to pay a lot more attention to the concept of "the passage of time" and maybe he's right.
Read Julian Barbour's "The End of Time".
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/timeless-physic.html
"The idea of passing through time doesn't sit right with me, especially as it just in one direction."
Consider a model of space/time where we can't control the direction we are traveling along one axis, but we can control the speed. Alternately, we just haven't figured out the (totally obvious) way to control the direction of time -- and when we do we will discover that it has multiple axes, too, just like space does (NOTE: Heinlein's pretty bad "Number of the Beast" played with the second version where time has multiple axes ...).
Does the asymmetry with the spatial axes bother you that much?
I'm comfortable with physics' explanation of time as a map, but I'm worried the territory is very different. Given the subthread is about things we feel but can't prove, I'm stuck trying to reconcile the fact that I know there was a past, but can't prove it. I can only prove there is ever a present. I can predict what the future might be like, but I will only ever experience it as the present until I stop experiencing anything. So it boils down to some uncertainty that the axes are real and that only the frame of reference is.
It’s normally physicists telling us our intuitions are wrong because (some) of the math of physics can work in either direction. Personally I take time seriously, I’ve yet to meet my former self(ves) walking around the apartment, which is great because it would get crowded.
_An Experiment With Time_ by Dunne offers evidence for that view.
To this point: I've played a lot of poker in my life, and I've often idly wondered if the best players aren't somehow able to unconsciously 'fast forward' 5-10 seconds in time, or however long it would take to see the next card on the board (or, to remain consistent with your post, to occupy two different periods of 'time' simultaneously). If you play long enough you will run into people who just seem more consistently lucky than everyone else, and while I understand the conventional reasons why one would come to this conclusion (various biases at work, selective sampling, etc) I've always wondered if there isn't something else going on.
I think that any hypothesis of this nature has been soundly falsified by gambling establishments, who would no doubt kick out any player performing above statistical luck over extended periods of time. If a guy can be a poker pro, that means he isn't any luckier than the maths of the game can account for; otherwise he's a cheater in the eyes of casino owners – I feel confident that precognition counts as cheating, to them if not to any others.
I don't think the casino cares about statistical anomalies when poker is being played nearly as much as when blackjack is being played. The casino is pretty much just renting out a table and a dealer for poker while with blackjack the casino itself suffers losses to extraordinarily "lucky" players. No?
Unless this postulated ability to see 5-10 seconds into the future somehow *only* manifests while playing poker, then it's going to show up in blackjack and other player-vs-house games where the house *definitely* cares. And will notice, no later than the bankruptcy filing but probably long before that.
"And will notice, no later than the bankruptcy filing but probably long before that."
Given that blackjack card counting is less powerful than precognition but still pings the cheating sensors forcefully, so to speak, I think they'd snag the precogitator very swiftly indeed.
While I see your point here, I'm pretty sure that in practice the managers still find it imperative to inhibit cheaters in the poker games in their casinos.And I don't think it's just because they're legally obliged to or something, either; it reflects poorly on their establishment if there's rigged gaming going on, and even more poorly if they're not the ones doing the rigging!
I'm a bit hamstrung here by not being overly familiar with gambling establishments, but this is my impression of how it works, anyway.
The casino is incentivized to catch cheating at poker because a reputation for NOT catching the cheaters is bad. Yep! But the casino is not nearly as incentivized as for blackjack where the casino loses its own money directly.
Here's a nice math puzzle to think about. Try to do it without pen & paper (but use them if you must).
Cities A and B are connected by a straight railroad 60 miles long. Trains in both directions depart at 00 minutes on each hour and move with a constant speed without stops, spending exactly 1 hour to get to the other city. Peter lives right next to the rail track and has a favorite activity to fight boredom, which he does randomly from time to time: he comes to the window, waits for the first train to pass by and writes down in which direction the train went.
When we inspected Peter's notes, it turned out that the two directions appeared equally often in his records. How far does Peter live from the nearest city?
He lives in the middle and sees both trains passing each other.
Or: He lives 0 miles from the nearest city and is watching trains enter and leave the station.
There's a more elegant answer than either of these (if you haven't seen it below).
Yes, the one below is definitely most correct.
We don’t know how long Peter watches nor how many times a day he watches. Based on the information given, all we *might* know is that he does *not* live slightly left or right of dead center between the two cities because, assuming his view is perpendicular to the rail line, then he would never see both trains. One train would hide the other.
However, we don’t know how long these trains are. We also don’t know how far Peter can see to the left or right. So, even my previous statement about what we *might* know seems open to doubt.
Is this one of the questions where smart people take longer to answer the question? Because that was an interesting addendum on the last thread to a simple question which caused people to doubt themselves. Here, I perhaps naively think he can e anywhere on the line.
That was my first guess. But I see now that it's wrong. If Peter lives just outside city A then he will (for instance see the A-bound train at 4:59 then the B-bound train at 5:01. So, most of the time, the next train will be bound for A.
Now suppose he lives just off the midpoint. The A-bound train passes him at 5:29 then the B-bound train at 5:31. Also not right.
So I guess he lives one quarter of the way along the track. The train from the nearer city passes him at fifteen past the hour and the other train passes at 45 minutes past.
I also got fifteen miles. The reasons pass at fifteen past and forty-five past,i.e. with exactly half an hour for each.
Outside the spirit of the question but the first thing that came to my mind: He is anywhere and the fact that the numbers match is coincidence. As you say, depending on where he lives and how many times he has done this, this possibility ranges from unlikely to staggeringly unlikely.
Hmm yes. An equidistant time between trains would make sense. In my head he was randomly picking a minute, but of course he waits around until the first train passes.
No, that's wrong.
Let's suppose that Peter lives X miles from City A. That means that A -> B train will appear outside his window at X minutes after the hour, having travel X miles; and the B -> A train at (60 - X) minutes after the hour, having traveled (60 - X) miles.
Therefore, if Peter starts looking out the window at any time in minutes between 0 and X, or between (60 - X) and 60, he will see the A -> B train first; if he starts looking out the window at any time between X and (60 - X), he will see the B -> A train first.
That gives him (X - 0) + (60 - (60 -X)) = 2X minutes in which he sees the A ->B train first, and (60 - X) - X = 60 - 2X minutes in which he sees the B -> A train first.
If we set 2X = 60 - 2X, we find X = 15, and therefore we conclude that Peter lives 15 miles from the nearest city.
rot13:
Ur yvirf svsgrra zvyrf sebz bar bs gur pvgvrf. Fnl ur'f svsgrra zvyrf sebz N, gura sebz gur gbc bs gur ubhe gb n dhnegre nsgre, ur'yy frr gur N->O genva. Sebz gura gb n dhnegre gvy, ur'yy frr gur O->N genva. Sebz gura hagvy gur arkg ubhe, ur'yy frr gur N->O genva ntnva.
If you're optimizing for survival, you would post top-level threads rather than replies (to things that might get zapped), and you'd post 2-3 very different things so that the odds would be with you. If you're optimizing to avoid any lash of the whip, you'd just lurk. I predict more folks will be in the first camp--but we'll never be able to test this hypothesis because this comment is about to disappear.
I vote to remove this thread to discourage meta gaming.
“And this one stabs people who ask tricky questions”
Unless all comments in here land above the 33-50% threshold, as compared to the average ACX comment. I feel like election day all over again, waiting for the data to come in...
Yeah, it's like watching the election after you just piled on a bunch of bets in the last days of PredictIt. Each reply to a reply is like building on a house of cards. How stable is the foundation? Did I just put a horrible card on top? Why is Scott reaching for the--
Preliminary results of the midterms seem to show better than expected results for democrats. In particular they seem to have systemically outperformed prediction markets, most notably in the senate (by contrast 538 seems to have been pretty close). Can we take any wider lessons about this for prediction markets?
538s predictions were public, so it's not a lack of information. One explanation would be that a single prediction market is analogous to an opinion poll, in collating the general opinion at the time. But not necessarily being more accurate. Though iterated markets might improve that. It also, loosely, seems thst more popular markets did worse. Which perhaps implies that the effectiveness of them reduces as you expand outside the small demographic of statistics nerds who engage in them most
How did Manifold Markets do relative to PredictIt, et al?
Haven't verified it but this thread on twitter has a supposed comparison of different markets https://twitter.com/galestorm94/status/1590364168930340866 drawing from https://manifold.markets/post/comparing-election-forecast-accurac
Manifold better than predictit certainly. Predictit tends to be systemically skewed to GOP in general. (Possibly due to their slightly bizarre ruleset.) But I haven't done a systemic comparison of the different markets
So I was right in noticing that their commenters lean heavily to the right...maybe PredctIt was biased after all?...
How similar would a system have to be to a human brain before you considered that maybe it had a similar level of sentience to a human being?
For example, if you found some system that you knew was mixing 'top down predictions' from a model and 'bottom up sense data' from the world to send instructions to some actuator that effects changes in the world, how likely do you think it is that this system thus has either consciousness or agency?
I expect that nothing has qualia (=sentience?) without whatever specific thing makes humans have qualia.
The system could be as intelligent and conscious (=able to process input and produce output) as humans, but not have qualia. I think it will be necessary to do a lot of difficult and careful research to discover the thing that makes humans have qualia.
I may not understand the technical terminology, but it seems to me that lots of things have consciousness (they know what's going on around them) and agency (they choose to do one out of several possible options), but don't have the same level of sentience as a human being. Trees and beehives and lots of dumb algorithms know what's going on around them and make choices on that basis, but they're missing genuine sentience.
In my opinion, the system would have to have what Heidegger calls Dasein before I would consider it sentient like a human being. It would have to (something like) assert its own selfhood, up against a bewildering world, while facing the threat of death. (I do not understand Heidegger well, but it's still the best account I've found.)
I also think there are plenty of non-human things that are sentient, that know what they are and assert their own self-existence. A linguistic clue is we call them "spirits", like a political movement, style of music, college population or sports team. To me, looking for AI to be the very first ever non-human thing to have some special quality that, so far, only humans have, is likely to yield disappointment.
(edited to fix spelling of "basis")
I think there could be arbitrarily alien sentient beings.
No, since something like a Tesla FSD would match the description.
Reinvention of the self, a conscious killing of one's old personality as a prerequisite for permanent weight loss. Layne Norton, in conversation with Andrew Huberman, on the Huberman Lab Podcast made it clear that he considers it basically essential for long term weight loss outcomes. It struck me really hard, in that it is a conclusion that I reached independently, having returned to an old way of being myself, after significant weight loss. It raises the possibility that mental factors, above all else, may dictate the success or failure of lasting weight loss and improved fitness.
This is only true because actions dictate identity, and not the other way around
Would like to hear a persuasive case that one is killing off one's old personality, rather than just a few bits, such as grocery-shopping habits, eating habits, a habit of overattending to sensations of mild hunger and a picture of oneself as fat. Does Norton think that people who quit smoking or excessive drinking & do not relapse are also killing off their old personality? How about people who get divorced, people who vow to learn Spanish and carry through on their vow? How about people who buy a new car?
Not sure what you'd find persuasive. For myself, I find it difficult to truly change my habits. Or even to change my mind about long-held beliefs. It feels a bit like sorrow, like someone different emerges from that process. Like, remember the first time you were well and truly betrayed by someone you trusted? Someone you'd have bet your life on their loyalty? Something like that changes you, deeply enough that it can feel like you're a different person afterwards. Are you really truly a different person? I don't know, that doesn't seem important - if you agree that fundamental change is hard, then we agree on 90% of what I'm arguing. The other 10% is basically "be kind to yourself when you go through fundamental change because it's hard and scary, and also be ruthless because otherwise it won't happen."
A few thoughts on this:
1) If it is a prerequisite then I think we should expect to see people who have achieved significant weight loss (and kept it off) differing from their former self in other ways besides just their eating/exercise habits.
2) Looking at the causality from the other direction, perhaps people who are overweight and particularly unhappy with themselves fare better at committing to serious lifestyle changes that allow them to succeed at weight loss. The same way that gaining a lot of weight within a short timeframe likely indicates some other stuff going on in one's life
3) I was listening to a Bad Takes podcast on weight loss and one thing that I found is that the hosts didn't acknowledge if you're overweight you've likely got some habits instilled in you that contribute to you being overweight. Whether that's an inability to eat snacks at a moderate enough pace, or a need to eat until you feel full not just satisfied, or a mild addiction to soda. From that perspective, I can see why killing one's old personality, which in effect leads to you dropping your old habits, is necessary
Why think of it as killing your old personality though? The overweight-fostering habits are just a few out of thousands of other habits that are part of you. Do I have to kill my old personality if I take a job that requires me to be there 8 am - 5 pm, forcing me to give up my habit of keeping late and irregular hours?
I haven't listened to the Huberman podcast but I would say it's because some of your habits reinforce some of your other habits. So in order to rid yourself of some of the habits you don't want, you might have to sacrifice some of the habits you do want. Coincidentally, I recently made the transition from Graduate School to a regular 9-5 job and keeping the 9-5 schedule has made me give up other hobbies which were dependent on being awake late at night and being free during the daytime. "Killing your old personality" is harsher than I would put it though.
Before modifying who you are just to solve what would seem like a mundane problem, maybe you should consider further that a mundane problem might really have a mundane solution. You should be suspicious of someone who advocates profound change for less than profound reasons - maybe that's just a way for them to think of themselves as a profound person.
So, for instance, you might try finishing dinner by 7pm, and not eating anything after that until 9am. It seems to help for me, and I think for lots of other people. Of course, it might be some different mundane change that's needed in your case.
What he meant was behavior patterns. If you view weight loss as a temporary period of hardship, where you restrict calories and exercise, before returning to older patterns of behavior, where you eat more calories and exercise less, you will regain weight. He was really saying that the mental aspect of weight loss is as important as the physical aspect, and in order to maintain weight loss, we must adopt new patterns of behavior. Weight loss is relatively mundane, but I can assure you that Layne Norton was not making idle statements.
Also, have you thought of pushing your hours out? You describe what is basically a 14:10 Intermittent Fasting protocol, but many see real benefits from a tighter feeding window, such as a 16:8, 20:4 or even a 23:1 protocol (8-, 4- and 1-hour feeding windows, respectively).
Well, since I don't adhere to a rigid schedule, the fasting period actually varies from about 12 to 16 hours.
But it's just an example of a possible "mundane" solution. In some sense, it's tautological that anything that works must change your "pattern of behaviour", and that the "mental aspect" is important, in the sense that you have to actually have a mind to adopt the new pattern. But I think no one would say that reducing allergies by more frequently changing your furnace filters is a change in "pattern of behaviour" with an important "mental aspect". It's just a mundane solution.
I've long thought that self-improvement is a lot like suicide - you have to kill who you are in order to make room for who you want to be. I'm going to have to put my cat down soon, cancer's a bitch. But looking at her, I realize that you can suicide your old self gently, with love, and it's OK to miss the old you sometimes. But you can't let any of that stop the one necessary thing. Like Gunny said: "It's the hard heart that kills."
Are you intentionally using personality and self interchangeably?
Are they the same thing ? (I don't think so).
Not intentionally, but also, they are not necessarily interchangeable in this instance. Once may achieve a reinvention of the self through consciously leaving behind a personality and adopting new personality traits. The self may grow through alteration of the personality.
Is there a predictive processing angle here?
Consciously re-investing yourself seems like a way of dropping a bunch of priors about how you are likely to act in a given situation. Saying 'but i'm a new person now' seems like a hack that lets you reset the priors.
All he really meant was don't be a yo-yo dieter. Leave the guy who could eat half a dozen donuts with creamy sweet coffee in the past to keep the weight off.
The collapse of FTX is seeing all the major coins tumble, and I haven't heard anyone talking about "web3" for what seems like a good while now. For those of you who have been involved in crypto-related projects this past year and half, how are you holding up? Has your opinion about the space changed at all? Are you going to try to stick it through this "crypto winter" or are you looking for a new career?
Still fine. This entire crash wiped out about $2,000 for me personally. My opinion on crypto itself has not changed but I was always relatively disciplined and never got involved in the shadier or more speculative/detached from reality stuff. I maintain crypto has its uses but the technology became trendy and got inserted in all kinds of places it had no place being. I suspect AI, another technology that I think has real potential but is overhyped, will be the next winner of the scam artist move in. Already I've seen signs of this. Which, to be clear, is not a knock on the space and its potential or the fault of people involved. Grifters will latch onto anything.
My opinion on the overall crypto space is getting better. I think the crypto winter is a good thing because it's not so catastrophic it's destroying the entire space while being catastrophic enough a lot of bad actors are dying off. (I think I mentioned this as my ideal scenario a few threads back.) Which is about ideal for a recession. The tide goes out and you see who can survive.
What's your overall thesis on crypto, and what's your specific involvement in it, if you don't mind sharing?
I'm not sure what you mean by overall thesis. If you're asking for my advice then what I tell people is make sure you understand what the blockchain or company is meant to do. If you don't understand why people would use the crypto alternative then don't invest or get involved.
I'm involved mostly, though not exclusively, on the technical side. I've done everything from launch new blockchains to smart contracts to web3 dapps. I wouldn't say I'm a crypto specialist, I do a lot of other stuff, but it's part of my toolkit.
By the way: Someone told me about their plan to replace the entire property deed system with a series of NFTs which would implement a Georgist style land tax and best use bidding system in the area. And my first thought was "Would Lars Doucet like this because Georgism or hate it because crypto?"
RE: your thesis, the question is just, what makes blockchain valuable or interesting? More specifically, what is the main issue that blockchain is meant to solve, and what are the valuable applications that it will bring us (or has already brought us) that we couldn't do before without a blockchain? Especially now in this latest crypto winter where a lot of recent hype has been punctured. Now that "the tide has gone out" what are the actually viable and interesting applications?
RE: the crypto/Georgism angle, I have certainly noticed a big uptick in interest in Georgism from crypto people specifically -- Vitalik Buterin especially, who has adapted it for certain application like domain name allocation:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/09/09/ens.html
That said, I would be skeptical of the proposed plan your acquaintance outlined before we even get to the Georgism bit. For me the issue is that I don't see how an NFT attached to a property deed survives the Oracle problem, and the related "why do you need a blockchain for this" question.
Ah, so now I know. Your hate for crypto is stronger than your love for Georgism. Sic transit gloria pecuniae.
I can't really get into specifics of what I've worked on. But yes, there are use cases. If you're interested you can look at the companies that survive. I'm looking myself.
Your question itself seems strange to me. The relevant question is not theoretical possibilities of the technology but actual existing use cases and the economics that surround them. For example, there's nothing about Bitso that a bigger bank couldn't do. It's just a crypto remittance platform that's cheaper than the banks and has better coverage. Yet Bitso and its category exists and will continue to exist and I doubt it will actually receive much competition from legacy players like Western Union.
I mean I don't really hate crypto, I'm just skeptical. If I find applications that are actually useful, my skepticism decreases marginally. I have a lot of respect for Vitalik Buterin in specific, for instance:
https://narrativespodcast.com/2022/06/27/100-vitalik-buterin-governance-political-economy-and-crypto/
> It's just a crypto remittance platform that's cheaper than the banks and has better coverage. Yet Bitso and its category exists and will continue to exist and I doubt it will actually receive much competition from legacy players like Western Union.
Okay, sure, I'll buy that one. What else?
> The relevant question is not theoretical possibilities of the technology but actual existing use cases and the economics that surround them.
Yes, this is what I was primarily interested in.
> I can't really get into specifics of what I've worked on.
Any particular reason why not?
I work at a crypto company as a software engineer. As far as holding up goes, eh. None of my compensation is in crypto, and none of my assets are in crypto, so I'm financially OK. I said elsewhere, but it feels like a wizard told me "May you live in interesting times".
My opinion about the space is that most crypto projects are bad and you should not invest in them. The most likely outcome is that you will be the victim of fraud, bad engineering, or bad returns. There are some exceptions, but I wouldn't recommend anything explicitly. I think if you really try to understand a cryptocurrency well, then you might come to different conclusion and invest in it. If you absolutely must invest in crypto, just pick bitcoin or ethereum. You might not make a ton of money, but they probably won't evaporate either.
As far as sticking through, maybe. My company seems fine, although I'm much more worried that I can't see our financials today than I was a few days ago. I find the problems interesting to solve, and I'm not really convinced employment elsewhere would be better. Working at Meta, for example, seemed like a very safe career choice last month. If I were to leave, I would need to strongly believe that the other company was more stable / recession proof / better overall
I definitely buy your last point RE: Meta, but I do have one thought --- Meta was able to afford to give people generous severance packages with those layoffs. A lot of crypto companies I know are themselves often financed with crypto, which means when trouble starts it starts *fast.* I wonder if when the media crypto company face a downturn, it faces a greater risk of sudden collapse and not being able to soften the blow for its employees at all, versus the median regular tech company.
I've been mostly retired for a few years, so this is a semi-outsider's perspective. That said, to me this doesn't seem any worse than any previous crypto bear market. The main difference is that there's more mainstream attention on it, which is due to a reasonable amount of mainstream penetration in the last bull market. That seems like mostly a good sign, overall.
There seems to be the usual quiet innovation happening in the background (I'm especially interested in the work on zkEVMs and L2s in general), so I expect much the same cycle as after, say, the ICO bust: the attention and easy money dries up for a bit, the tools get better and the usecases get more compelling, and we do it all again in a few years.
You wouldn't say that the fact that this winter comes after a fall from a much higher height, and bringing with it a much greater risk of government intervention and regulation of the space in the wake of SBF/FTX, makes it any meaningfully worse than previous winters?
Percentage-wise, this fall is so far smaller than previous falls, so that part doesn't bother me.
Government regulation is more concerning, and perhaps could be more intensive this time. That said, after the ICO craze, the SEC issued guidance saying that they thought the DAO (and by implication, pretty much any ICO) was a security, and implying they'd go after future examples. As a result, ICOs almost completely disappeared. Instead, the next wave used airdrops and yield-farming models. Similarly, I would expect regulators to go after the stuff that caused problems this time (custodial exchanges and stablecoins), and the frontier of innovation will simply move elsewhere.
Honestly, I was more concerned governments would simply ban crypto in the early days, when they could have done so relatively easily. Now that it's a big business, with a decent amount of cultural and financial heft, I suspect they'll avoid declaring all-out war.
You don't think that SBF going poof, moving the center of power to Binance, which is much more China-adjacent (or at least perceived as such by the powers at be), increases the risk of a western crackdown? Especially if there's no longer this high profile American hometown hero to make the case for crypto to legislators, and instead has now drawn scrutiny from the department of justice and other government actors he used to be cozied up to?
My position is not that there won't be some sort of crackdown, rather that it likely won't substantially matter for the trajectory of crypto.
Binance and FTX are both centralized, custodial exchanges. It seems entirely likely that such businesses will face a lot more regulation. Honestly, it's a bit strange they haven't already, given their adjacency to heavily-regulated industries such as banking. But unless you think the regulation will be so stringent that it's no longer possible to easily buy crypto with dollars (for instance on Coinbase), it won't substantially impact the interesting, innovative part of crypto, which is the stuff happening on-chain. (In this cycle, DeFi and NFTs, basically.)
I see, thanks!
Web3 on existing chains is basically doomed due to astronomically high content- and code-hosting costs; the people really trying to make it happen like Internet Computer are designing the chain around it up front. The idea of web3 was thus doomed to pull in front of any potential implementations of it by several years, with the interval in between eagerly claimed by people trying to make a quick buck. I think the latter group is responsible for the crypto winter and it's too early to say for sure whether it has any impact on the theoretical future of web3, especially considering that its causes don't have an enormous amount to do with the web3 model. But my prior is lower about the practical future because of the name-tarnishing that's going to result. Ultimately the pay is good enough for me not to contemplate switching until we, personally, are doomed.
I'm assuming based on this take that you don't think the Ethereum merge has meaningfully changed anything in that regards?
No. The Ethereum merge is a very impressive engineering effort, but it does not change the underlying problems with the platform. Without something like the IC's delegated subnets, crypto simply doesn't *scale* - ethereum functions take several minutes to call not because of expensive hashing or whatever, but because that's just how long it takes for the information to circumnavigate the globe N*M times.
It started off as an experiment. Scott said he would Thanos the comment section with full bias, and the results were... Nothing short of spectacular. The greatest minds of our generation united by the desire to BE BETTER.
The surviving comments were glorious. They led to two Nobel prizes, one live enlightenment and at least four top-20 cryptocurrencies. The people whose comments got deleted... We don't talk about them anymore.
We could have left things there. At this perfect intellectual and cultural peak. But no, as always we had to take things to their logical conclusion. On January 1st, 2023, Scott posted an Open Thread in which the bottom 99% of comments were to be deleted.
It is 2065 now. I have cyborg cancer. I've been staring at the empty Open Thread for the better part of 4 decades, the perfect, pristine open comments section. Nobody has dared, nobody has tried, truly humanity has lost its desire for adventure and exploration.
And in that moment, I have an epiphany. As my dying movement, with perfect clarity, I reach for my USB 7.0 neural keyboard and slowly, painfully, type my dying word:
First.
This is a top 3% comment at the very least.
Just want to second Deepa. I chortled audibly.
I loved this :).
INB4 BANZZ!!
Just kidding. Sort of. Off the top of my head, I predict:
1. there will be more playful trolling than usual, to probe Scott's boundaries
2. there will be high-drama discussion around the experiment, with heavy speculation as to the deep psychology behind Scott's boundaries
3. there will be noticeably fewer comments than usual, because you'll only see the parts of the iceberg above the troll-line
4. whatever Scott decides, this will be a fun experiment to have had
I’ve sat though a lot of leadership-building-style seminars and talks, and I feel like I’ve never gotten anything out of them. Usually everything is far too abstract to make any difference in my life practically. I feel like most leadership workshops are mostly a bunch of fancy-sounding jumbo jumbo. Has anyone ever been to one of these things that’s actually helped them be a better leader (or some other similar skill)?
Specifically, yesterday I went to a ~1 hour talk where the speaker’s thesis was “Leading is Selling,” and at the end of it, I still had no idea what point he was trying to convey or how to implement his ideas.
Talks, lectures and sermons are mostly useless to me. Workshops are better: You learn the most by practice.
I did a weekend workshop once on non-violent communication (cringe name but good idea IMO) which was extremely useful and made me a lot better at giving feedback and talking openly in trusting relationships.
Did the advanced Civilian Education Service federal training. I think I got quite a bit of value out of it, though it was pushing introspection fairly hard, so if you already have that side of things handled, it's not that helpful.
But spending a couple of weeks working through your leadership style, hearing from others and trying to work through your leadership problems with other people with radically different experiences was helpful for me.
I do think it was probably too long and too lecture focused, but I think I got value out of it.
years and years ago, I did the Landmark thing. The third part of the, uh, seminars? Indoctrinations? Anyway, the third part of the three-part program is about leadership and I got a ton of value out of it. Very practical, hands-on, with homework, over the course of a few weeks.
This lines up with my expectations that having actual things to work on that you get feedback from can actually help
Basically the only soft-skill training that really works is hands on. I got a ton out of a public speaking class and some leadership training I did in the military. Both involved actually doing the thing and getting constructive feedback. For me, watching tape of myself speaking and interacting was particularly helpful.
Books, seminars, speeches, etc... have an extremely high fluff to content ratio. Most are just a grift.
If you're trying to improve as a leader, best thing to do is lead. If you have the time, volunteering is a great way to get that experience.
For sure. One innovative thing in that program was that they had you exercising leadership in many different contexts, not just work. You also manufactured contexts for leadership, like creating a community project or etc. I took away a lot of tools to keep improving with.
I've been working with an attitude coach for a few years now, and it's really helpful for me. It's been the kind of stuff that younger me would have dismissed as obviously and unhelpful.
What I am starting to gather, more and more, is that a lot of these soft skills come down to really, really nailing some fundamental stuff that's easy to say and recognize and true, but hard to pull off in practice without a ton of repetition.
For example, something like "be the world's biggest expert on yourself" is something i've put a bunch of effort into. At first, this sounds obvious: of course understanding myself will help. But working on it, week after week, gradually noticing more and more subtle patterns, was really helpful.
My advice would be, if you're trying to get better at this kind of thing, to find a coach who is good at it. Examples and lots of 1:1 practice work so much better than just a single talk could ever help.
That’s what I would think, that having someone working with you and giving you feedback would actually make a difference. If you were to condense everything that you learned into a one hour talk and have somebody give that talk to your younger self, would your younger self gain a lot from it?
I’d suspect it depends on what you mean. Are you talking about the overall quality of posts people *make*, or just the quality of the ones left behind?
There should be a knock-on effect where good comments get good replies, but that might not be a big effect—I have very little idea how that will change. But I’d be quite surprised if removing the bottom 50% of the distribution didn’t increase the average quality of comments *left behind* substantially.
Is there a dunning kruger effect for values? Like- you value truth (or whatever) so you notice and are hyper aware of your truth related failings but if that isn’t an important value to you, you think, yeah, I’m truthful. Does this have a name?
It doesn't have a name, but I think it's a very important phenomenon.
We could call it cartography-orientation (as in "the map is not the territory"). Some people are cartography-oriented (meaning they care about making their map match the territory), some are map-oriented (meaning promoting their map is the important thing, possibly because they intuitively deny the possibility of their map being wrong and may never have even thought about the map-territory distinction), others are and still others are unoriented in this respect (they don't do either of the above, and end up with a map haphazardly pieced together from personal experience and their own impression of peers' maps).
Kidding yourself.
It's my current understanding the Dunning Kruger might be a statistical artifact of regression to the mean combined with the better-than-average effect. So I think the premise of your question may not be correct.
But I think it's an interesting question if you step back from it.
1) Does valuing truth make you more truthful?
2) Does valuing truth make you more likely to rate your truthfulness lower on some sort of survey?
3) Does valuing truth give you a greater conscious awareness of untruths? E.g, whether a dress makes you look fat.
I think the third question is basically your premise and the narrative behind the Dunning Kruger effect.
My guess is that there's a real internal pattern as truth becomes more important -> overinflate your own truthfulness -> become more aware of lying -> internal crisis -> overcorrect -> crisis -> eventually settle back down similar to where you started but more self aware.
But the measurable pattern would be mostly nonexistent.
Edit: link regarding dunning kruger: old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kokiy8/the_dunningkruger_effect_is_probably_not_real/
harrypotter5777 does a particularly good job explaining.
Robin Hanson has repeatedly critiqued common interpretations of the study as well:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/03/the-unskilled-are-aware.html
Thank you! I ‘learned’ so many things before the replication crisis. Still finding things I need to be more skeptical of!
Predicting an equilibrium of below-average-quantity (including deleted posts) and roughly-average-quality comments.
There’s been a lot of talk about abortion and where public opinion is on it. To me it seems clear that the median opinion is that there should be a 12 or 15 week ban with rape/incest/maternal mortality exceptions. It seems that public opinion thinks republicans want to ban all abortions and in many cases they are right, but not always. I posted the comment below on a different substack and I would be interested to hear what this audience thinks as it’s a pretty different subset of people:
People who are anti-abortion don't care how unpopular that stance is, myself included. But as you frequently hear people like Yglesias say this to the left, now it is time for the right to hear it. If you really care about abortion, then you need to elect republicans. If you want to elect republicans, you need to stop talking about it.
> To me it seems clear that the median opinion is that there should be a 12 or 15 week ban with rape/incest/maternal mortality exceptions.
And fetal health. Most folks want to be able to abort the baby if the 10 or 20 week tests come back with trisomy 18, spinal bifida, downs, or some other such disorder. Or if the fetus dies.
I don't know if 'most' applies, in terms of wanting to terminate a live baby. (If the baby dies it's not an abortion.) Certainly there is a market for that sort of procedure, but it's not clear how much is actually desired by the parents vs that being the offered option.
There also is a non zero market for aborting girls, and once the mechanisms become more widely understood, aborting children likely to be homosexual, excessively violent, or with autism.
(I am against all that.)
There are tiers of genetic abnormality here. Eg. Downs syndrome probably results in the resulting child needing lifelong care and never being independent, which is extremely expensive, but they're arguably still perfectly capable of being happy, etc.
What would you say about one of the (many but rare) genetic diseases that basically guarantee the child will die by the age of 6 or so?
That the child is a human, not a dog to be put down as defective.
Some humans are slow, some mean, some frivolous and incapable of working independently. It is an error to imagine that in one's life one would only have good grades, meaningful work, good health, significant wealth, great sex, and all one's children will be perfect.
Also I say that while rare (uncommon, but still a thing) the test results are sometimes inaccurate. Killing someone because of a medical test result is fairly extreme.
>I don't know if 'most' applies, in terms of wanting to terminate a live baby.
I might be wrong. I was thinking of the stat where 95+ percent of Downs kids are aborted, but when I looked it up it's not here. Best I could find for here is 67%, but the article I got it from said reliable data was scarce. Available data still points at most, but I'm less sure than I was. I would wager good money that the other conditions are much higher.
> (If the baby dies it's not an abortion.)
It is actually. Same procedure. And if abortion is fully outlawed you'll have to do whatever process is required to convince the state to let you have your fetus's corpse removed if it doesn't clear on its own. (My wife had an acquaintance who wanted to carry her baby as long as they would let her. I think it took a week for it to finally miscarry. Her husband wanted her to have the abortion, but she wasn't ready. ) And of course if you're in middle Ohio (or wherever) there may not be any doctors who know how to do one, and you probably won't be able to travel.
Not a common case, obviously, but one that's easy to address and I think would be addressed as an exception in a median opinion abortion law.
>>>95%
In Iceland, 98% of the babies who test positive for Downs are aborted. That may be where the data point comes from.
>>> same procedure
No. It is not so that banning the abortion of a live baby means that dealing with a miscarriage or fetal death is subject to the same restrictions. I think this is fairly clear in the text of the laws I have read, and would agree that it should be spelled out if ever ambiguous.
I think the concern is largely misplaced, though. By the same analysis, applying electrodes to a person in cardiac arrest would be just as bad as applying the electrodes to a person sitting up and talking. This is just not so, I don't know who.started this talking point but it's not correct.
>>>median opinion
I agreed with your assessment- this is both approximately the preferred option for a slim plurality of the current population and the midwayish point between the large wings of opinion.
I think the 'public opinion' you are referring to regarding Republican goals is the 'NPR opinion' and is largely constructed of thatch (somewhat stiffer than straw, but not by much.)
As for 'not talking about it'...well, keeping the topic sub rosa is how injustices and abuse flourish, do they not? Let's not talk about the coke in the break room, the bruises on the wait staff, the teenage girls on the party yatch, the people who live on the other side of the tracks and the dead bodies at the border. I think 'we don't talk about abortion' helps only those people who make their money aborting babies.
Besides - and this is where I think most Democrats and a few Republicans get it wrong - I don't want a nation ban on abortion. I want a society that views disposal of healthy babies as abhorrent as 'the n-word', as distasteful as the NPR set sees MAGA hats, as abhorrent as vegan activists see chicken on the menu.
Neither a congressional ban nor silence is going to get us there. Neither is condemnation of women who have resorted to this. This is going to take a long process of conversion, soul by soul, and while picking the right words will be very hard sometimes, silence is the last thing we need.
Hi, member of the NPR set here. A few questions, all sincere. You say, "I don't want a nation ban on abortion." I take this to mean that you don't *just* want a national ban on abortion, not that you literally oppose a legislative ban. Is that correct, or do you really mean that you favor legal abortion that is voluntarily rejected by society (the vegan analogy seems apt)?
Second: do you hope that societal rejection of abortion also extends to rejection of IVF techniques that result in the disposal of healthy embryos? And would you be in favor or opposed to a legislative ban on those techniques?
I'm really just curious. These questions aren't leading somewhere.
Firstly I wanted to comment on your handle - I read a line about two characters riding down the road after a 'smelly flock of unshorn mutton' and it still makes me laugh.
Wrt your excellent questions - please call me out if I get techy.
I don't want abortion to be legal or socially acceptable...but I also don't want the level of government involvement in people's personal lives required to enforce a full ban. (There has been a lot of...interesting variation...on the part of....different political segments as to what parts of a person's private/medical decisions are subject to govt review, here lately. Imo 'a plague on all your houses' doesn't begin to cover it.)
Given the various tradeoffs, I would ban use of the mail to move the drugs just as we ban mailing ammo and weapons, and would support bans after 12-14 weeks as not being excessively invasive. As a matter of dealing with fringe issues, sure, permitting abortion of the child of a rapist would be (reluctantly) acceptable, but I would push for accompanying support channels to adopt out such a child being offered at the same time.
Yes, I also oppose disposing of viable embryos. There are many people who would take such embryos and grow the children. I am not 100% sure of the legislation I would support. Perhaps simply facilitating transfer of interest so that the donor parents nor any resulting child could not make a claim on each other might be sufficient.
Thank you for the good questions.
We do not, in fact, ban mailing ammo and weapons. At least the United States does not. We do not allow unrestricted mail-order purchase of actual firearms, but we also don't allow unrestricted mail-order purchase of prescription drugs.
According to this USPS web page, yes, we do ban mailing ammo.
https://www.usps.com/ship/shipping-restrictions.htm
One can't mail a firearm to another person, either, unless one goes through a dealer, even if no purchase has been made.
This page goes into much more detail about what materials may not be moved via USPS.
https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c3_019.htm
There may be some confusion between "shipped" and "mailed" where UPS or FEDEX will move something the post office won't, but I think I am correct here.
UPS will ship ammo with restrictions and will ship firearms only for licensed dealers. List of UPS restricted items here:https://www.ups.com/us/en/support/shipping-support/shipping-special-care-regulated-items/prohibited-items.page
This last article from the NRA shows that Fedex and UPS won't ship firearms. I had heard for the longest time that one could ship long guns via the mail but it seems that has gone away as well. https://www.nraila.org/articles/20220919/shipping-companies-prohibit-the-lawful-shipping-of-firearms
Thanks, appreciate your answers.
I'm not sure the strategy of 'Never say what you want but elect the politicians who secretly plan to do what you secretly want them to do' is very reliable, because it assumes that politicians have fixed things they will do and you know what they are.
To whit: The main reason Republican politicians fight abortion is because their voters tell them to fight abortion. If Republican voters stop telling their politicians that, either the politicians will stop doing it and focus on other things their voters *are* saying they want, or different people who don't care about abortion will end up running for office as Republicans.
See my caveat on point #2. This has been a driving concern for important blocs of Republican voters for 50 years now. Many/most of the politicians elected by these blocs are true believers. Eventually, yes, politicians will adjust to electoral reality. But right now, the politicians are aligned. The dominant strategy is to keep quiet and press your gains with as little confrontation as possible.
Another interesting example is gay marriage. Obama, in 2008, was officially opposed to gay marriage. It was questionable at the time whether this was a sincere position -- I didn't think so at the time and don't think so now -- but it was in retrospect the strategically correct position. If you wanted to see gay marriage become a reality, the way forward was to elect Democrats, and to make sure that Democrats were appointing Supreme Court Justices. The best electoral strategy for Democrats was to not talk about gay marriage. Wink and pull the lever for Obama.
But of course before that point, you had to pressure Democratic politicians on gay marriage. They weren't going to get there on their own. The social change was real, so they would have gotten there eventually. The question is when, and what form the change would take. As with abortion, tactics matter.
So the strategy isn't "Never say what you want but elect the politicians who secretly plan to do what you secretly want them to do." It's "whip the partly in line, and then quiet down on contentious culture war issues when you are winning."
I'm not totally sure on what level you want people to respond to this, so here goes a few different takes:
First: As a matter of electoral strategy, you are 100% correct. Electing Republicans will result in abortion bans. Coalitional politics mean that Republicans as a bloc favor types of abortion bans that are generally unpopular. Therefore the best strategy for people who want bans on abortion is to keep quiet on this issue so that it isn't a salient factor during elections. There are obviously some caveats on this as a general rule: you can't keep so quiet that politicians stop caring about the issue. But that isn't a problem with abortion. This is issue has been a hot button for 50 years, and right now the best play is to revel quietly in victory to minimize backlash and then consolidate and extend gains.
Second: there are probably some pretty sharp limits to how effective this strategy will be in the long term. Ultimately, you have to pass the bans or not pass the bans, and the electorate is going to react based on its preferences. This might seem to contradict the first point -- if the public is going to react how it reacts, why not go all in? But tactics matter, and there are probably several stable equilibria. There is a big difference between, hypothetically, massive overreach that results in a sweeping Democratic majority that results in a very different Supreme Court; vs. some gains and some setbacks on a state by state basis. In short, voter preferences make a total ban unlikely, but there are a range of possible outcomes.
Third: preferences are not static, and neither is technology. Probably both trends are not favorable to the anti-abortion cause in the long term. My guess is that we will see dramatic geographical disparities in abortion access in the short term, followed by a long-term grinding political battle in which access will very slowly be restored.
On the second point, I understand your logic but the midterms contain a few important bits of evidence against that. The governors of GA, FL, and OH all passed 6 week abortion bans and cruised to re-election. All 3 signed the bill and then quickly never talked about it again.
On the third, why do you think that technology or preferences favor abortion? Technological advancements thus far (excepting the conduct of abortion a themselves) have led to more anti-abortion sentiment. The advancements in medical imaging have made it harder to deny the “baby-ness” of a fetus at various points along its development. In particular this has turned public opinion against late-term abortions. The less it looks like a baby the more comfortable people are with it. As technology progresses, it is easier to get good imagery of fetuses and publicize them. Additionally, a lot of people weight viability a lot in their abortion thinking and technological progress will lead to infant viability earlier in its development, turning more people against abortion.
I don’t know why preferences would trend pro abortion either. I assume you’re talking about secularization but you certainly do not need religion to make the case against murder. If you accept the premise that a fetus is a human life (which you also do not need religion to make that case) then being anti-abortion is the logical conclusion to reach.
>Technological advancements thus far (excepting the conduct of abortion a themselves) have led to more anti-abortion sentiment. The advancements in medical imaging have made it harder to deny the “baby-ness” of a fetus at various points along its development. In particular this has turned public opinion against late-term abortions. The less it looks like a baby the more comfortable people are with it. As technology progresses, it is easier to get good imagery of fetuses and publicize them.
I want to quibble about two things in this point.
I think that you're right about the timing and that imaging tells part of the story, but I think it's overstated here. An older woman (70s) I know told me a few years back that the reason younger people are more anti-abortion is simply that they don't remember the beforetimes. She went to college pre-Roe, and remembers the back room abortions and how dangerous they were and how she (and every other girl on campus) knew at least one horror story. Improvements in imaging happened during the same time as that cohort aged and shrank, and younger cohorts came up who just didn't have those experiences, and didn't know what the pre-Roe world was like. Which is all to say that imaging certainly played a role, but there were other factors playing during the same time.
Second point: late term abortion has never been popular, and there was never any need to turn anyone against it. Abortion opponents managed to raise is salience as an issue and tar the rest of the issue with its unpopularity. These are not the same thing.
Re 2: my understanding is that FL passed a 15-week ban, not a 6-week ban. 15-week bans don't affect the large majority of abortions. So this is an example of a "ban" that respects voter preferences. Beyond that, abortion is obviously not the only, or the main, thing that most people are voting on. This is why tactics matter. On just about any issue, you can cater to certain blocs as long as you avoid pissing off other blocs too greatly.
Re 3: yes, I was referring in part to secularization and, well, agree to disagree on religion. As a non-religious person, I am really going to have a hard time being convinced that life begins at conception, or that eliminating an eight-cell blastocyst is the moral equivalent to murder. I absolutely do agree that the question of personhood is extremely complex, but it's just really hard to get to a complete ban on abortion without religion. You've made an appeal to sentimentality (the "baby-ness" of a fetus), but I strongly suspect that a more scientific lens on the question would push in a direction that most of us (including me) would find really discomfiting. To be blunt: I'm not sure that actual live human babies possess full personhood and all the moral obligations personhood entails. To be clear, I think we absolutely should extend legal personhood to babies. I just don't think that this position is necessarily well-grounded in science.
As for technology, yes, I was thinking of pill-based abortions. I do think that there is a visceral aspect to anti-abortion sentiment -- the "babyness" of a fetus -- and the non-invasive and somewhat antiseptic nature of a chemical abortion just isn't going to animate as much opposition.
+1
My not-that-informed impression is that a 15 week limit on abortions is probably pretty close to the median voter's position, whereas a total ban is not.
Being staunchly pro-life skews pretty heavily to being quite religious according to this survey;
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/17/a-closer-look-at-republicans-who-favor-legal-abortion-and-democrats-who-oppose-it/
I think GOP vs Dem on this issue is muddy to say the least. Look what happened in Kansas.
The technological trend seems unfavorable for the anti-abortion cause if instead of looking at laws passed, you look at how many abortions happen. In the US, there is a trend away from clinics to pills. It's a lot easier to ban clinics than to prevent drug smuggling, so increased legal restrictions will likely result in abortion pills being used more and drug smuggling becoming more organized and more normalized.
More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/illegal-abortion-pill-network/
That’s a fair counterpoint. Ease of use might trump any laws passed. But along the lines of legality I don’t think ease of use will have much impact. It could make it easier to ban if it is easy to get around that ban, lowering the salience of the issue for the pro choice side.
I’m having trouble following your reasoning here. Are you saying as long as it’s illegal who cares how many people do it?
I read him as saying that Democrats/pro-choicers might care less if abortion is banned if it's easier for them to circumvent and disregard that ban, thus reducing the intensity of opposition. E.g. if you know you have a 100% success rate with sending abortion pills anywhere in the US via the mail, you might not give a shit how illegal it is to take them. Not necessarily a foolproof example on my part since the pill taker might still be severely punished, but it gets at the idea.
Scott, do you think that genetic engineering will be relevant, or do you think AGI is coming too soon for genetic engineering to really matter? I'm in the former camp, I am 80+% of no AGI by 2100. But maybe you're in the latter camp.
I'm not Scott, but my take is that, if AGI happens before genetic engineering will really matter, then nothing else will matter, either. I'm long on teaching my kids some foundations of protein engineering and molecular biology, on the off chance we all survive long enough for them to need jobs. :)
Generally, I expect AGI to quickly obsolete any human-level productivity. Anything I can do, AGI can do better - it would be like a magical genie. Given that, then either AGI is aligned and I can just wish for stuff, or AGI isn't aligned and I'll be dead...
It would matter in the sense that rich humans might still want to "enhance" themselves...thus AGI will be used to research and develop genetic engineering methods etc.
Or do you think that AGI will wipe out humanity completely?...
Oh, I see the confusion. First, yeah, I think unaligned AGI will very probably wipe out humanity completely. But even if it doesn't, human skill with genetic engineering (or with anything else!) probably won't matter because the AGI will outperform us so thoroughly - not just as an assistant for R&D, but as a black box that spits out technologies that look like magic to human-level minds...
On the deleting part ... I saw couple of twitter accounts with 'all twits are auto-deleted after N days'. Would it change your approach to writing?
First, as you mentioned, reason is the only game in town. When anyone tries to convince you of anything, be it the truth of Christianity/Islam/buddhism/atheism or the goodness/badness of vaccines, how do they do it? It's always either reason or something masquerading as reason. Even when they're asking you to use your feelings, reason is still important; e.g. one might say "read the Book of Mormon and test Moroni's promise - if then you feel a burning in your bosom, that is God's way of telling you the Book is true". How do you decide if a burning in your bosom indicates that the book is true? Reason. And if I testify to you that I prayed to God many times as Moroni suggested and I never felt so much as a burning in my bosom (and, indeed, I do so testify), does that tell us anything about the truth of the book? Again, you will use your imperfect reason to decide one way or the other, and if you are a Mormon, your reason may lead you a different way than if you're not.
It's important to realize that people can reason correctly or incorrectly. It is a central idea of LW rationalism that questions (excluding confused or false-premised questions) do have correct answers, though the answers may be incomputable or unknowable sometimes. Another central idea is that people are naturally bad at finding correct answers and need training to improve.
"Does God exist", for instance, has definite answer and one that is the same for all of us. God cannot exist in your universe and not mine, for we are in the same universe. So the divergence where one man believes in a Mormon God with certain characteristics, another in the Islamic God with different characteristics, a third is a Buddhist who doesn't believe in those styles of God, and a fourth believes there is no God... at most one of these can be correct (and it seems to me that, furthermore, at most one of these can be even close to the truth, for if there is a God he/she surely doesn't compute the average of all human beliefs and transform himself into whatever that is).
As I said to Carl, empiricism is central to rationalism, and I would submit that faith is anti-empiricist. Faith in one's own ability seems good, because your ability itself is directly increased by your own faith in it. But that's the only good faith I know of. Religious faith says: believe X and avert your attention from evidence that disagrees (X=God exists, Jesus died for your sins, reincarnation, etc.).
Where empiricism says that the conclusion must be decided based on evidence, faith says the conclusion must be decided based on... on what? Maybe desire: you want the Book of Mormon stories to be true, so you believe. Maybe because your parents taught you. Maybe based on "reason": it makes sense that God would not publish only a single Bible *with obvious flaws* such as mistranslations and mistranscriptions, that wouldn't be enough evidence, so of course, to provide more evidence to His followers he published a second book of scripture, the Book Of Mormon.
But I think that this kind of faith exists for only one reason: to perpetuate itself.
Unlike faith, proper empiricism has the property that many different people can independently investigate something and reach the same conclusion. Of course, human reason is flawed, so people don't reliably reach correct conclusions with empiricism. But insofar as people are thinking independently (and I don't mean the "independent thinking" in which everyone watches the same TV shows that all promote the same cluster of beliefs while talking about "independent thinkers like us") many of them will reach similar conclusions without coordinating with each other. It's a bit hard to tell when your peer group is empiricist in this sense, because in fact we're all coordinating with each other to some extent! (and must do so!)
But this seems like a really important idea to me. Empiricism implies that if you compare humans with intelligent aliens from 20,000 light years away, there will be a group of beliefs they have in common. These beliefs, unlike most human beliefs, will be almost entirely correct, because they were all reached independently. And what we want to do with rationalism is to locate these correct beliefs without having to locate the intelligent aliens. Because as hard as it is to be rational, locating aliens and comparing notes is much harder still.
"Reason points away from itself"? "truth-ether fills the cup you put it in"? "truth is only a shadow of what faith senses"? I think you are just playing a word game in order to convince yourself to reject reason. But these phrases mean nothing at all to me.
> My conclusion is that the explicit metaphysical and ideological beliefs of a person (or even a society!) mostly don't matter a lot.
I have to disagree with this. Whether God was real had been a central question in my life, and the answer affects how I relate to the rest of the world in a big way.
When I believed in God, I gave 11% of my income to the Church, which used the money mainly to pay for church buildings and Books of Mormon and (in small part) missionaries. I was constantly worried about what God thought of me and why he wasn't answering my prayers. I kept trying to stop masturbating without success. I was suicidal for awhile. (Edit: and multiple times I used professional help for minor depression, which I have not needed since leaving the Church.) I agonized over doctrine; I worried and puzzled over the bad things God did in the Old Testament. I always wondered what the afterlife was like, and wondered why the descriptions of it (and of the pre-existence) were so vague. I was also confused by the theory of evolution (I learned about it from people who weren't competent to teach me about it, so it might have helped if I found a different way to learn) and fantasized about a third hypothesis of our existence: that we were lab rats in some cosmic experiment.
It should have been awful to learn that the Church (and Christianity) weren't true, because my life was being drastically cut short. Previously I was going to live for eternity! Certainly on some level, mortality with no afterlife seems pretty horrible, but at least the risk of eternal torture is gone (not that Mormons believe in eternal torture as a standard punishment, but that didn't exactly rule it out to my liking). Still, the emotional impact was surprisingly small for me (edit: the reason for this may be that I already had doubts about God's existence for some years already).
So now that I've learned about Effective Altruism as an atheist, I recognize that the most important problems in the world are (1) the Hard Problem of Consciousness and (2) catastrophic risks and (3) long-term human flourishing, or at least the flourishing of consciousness (I still think my other ideas related to "Loyc" are important, just less important.) It would be difficult to recognize these problems as the most important ones as a Christian, because Christians see death as a beginning rather than an end. So what if the world is destroyed? We will all basically still be alive! So it's not that bad! Especially since it was inevitable anyway (see Revelation).
Besides, it's hard to believe AGIs can kill everyone if you're a Christian. That wasn't in Revelation! And I absolutely believed that intelligence was a thing that required a "soul". If I were still a Christian today, I expect I would be extremely confused by the abilities of DALL-E 2, ChatGPT and the many other amazing AIs we have today. So of course, the way I think about AIs is influenced by being atheist.
I think if I had learned about EA sooner, and if I was an atheist sooner, I might well be working in the EA alignment field today. (as it is, I'm still interested in alignment, but I feel a little bit old to enter the field right now.) I do, however, give 10-15% of my income to effective charities, which is a lot different to what I did as a Christian! Yes, I was donating money either way, but my atheist donations will impact the world much differently, and that's important!
Edit: also, I'm happier as an atheist. It's really nice not worrying about what God thinks of me!
There's a way of talking and thinking you'll often see among rationalists & rat-adj people, which I think is more rare than it should be, because it's better than more common ways of talking and thinking.
For example, I might say "I think it was bad that some people stormed the capitol on Jan 6 and got some people killed. I don't think it immediately threatens our democracy, but I think the event reflects an incorrect belief that the election was rigged among a large minority of the population." Here I am speaking very simply ("it was bad"), explain why they did what they did ("the election was rigged") and also expressing the scope of the problem ("large minority of the population" but not "immediately" a threat).
A pundit or Twitter influencer might say something more like this:
> The storming of the Capitol was sedition, pure and simple, a blatant attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and undermine the legitimacy of the election. These violent Donald Trump supporters didn't just betray the values and principles upon which our nation was founded, they gravely threaten our democracy.
Let's look at how that first phrase functions: "The storming of the Capitol was sedition". This means it was bad, but the phrase functions in a way rationalists try to avoid: by transferring negative affect from the word "sedition" to "storming of the Capitol". So it works indirectly. The speaker places "storming of the Capitol" in the category "sedition" in an effort to manipulate the listener into thinking that "storming of the Capitol" is bad and that the people who did it are bad people because "sedition" is bad. This is one of the simplest, and most common, types of what I call "word games". Instead of just saying "it's bad", you use a very compact version of the argument "it's in this category, and the category has a negative connotation, so it is bad", even though this argument is unsound. "I think it's bad" is not an argument at all (it's an assertion), but has virtues: (1) it's simple, plain and direct, and (2) you can directly agree or disagree with me about whether it was bad without talking about the category "sedition" at all. I think the category "sedition" isn't really important to whether it was bad or not. It was bad, or not bad, independently of whether it was in the category "sedition".
Why talk about sedition, then? I guess lots of the people in the mob were trying to "do sedition", but that's not the point. In my speech, it wasn't necessary or important to use that word, so I didn't. The meta-point is that I recommend against using this style of language because it is *indirect* and *manipulative*. (edit: "manipulative" is a stronger word than I would like, but at least it conveys the idea that I disapprove because of the way this technique is supposed to work.)
The speaker says that the rioters goal is to "undermine the legitimacy of the election". Is that true? I don't think so. Certainly if you ask the rioters why they stormed the capitol, this is not what they would say. Rather, the rioters believed the election result was illegitimate, so they protested it (and also some of them tried to take action to change the result, and some of them acted violently). So this is another common error of normal pundits: they say what they want to believe, or what they want to be true, or what they want other people to believe, many many times until it is believed. But just repeating a claim over and over doesn't make it true. (Religion, too, makes a lot of claims, and repeats those claims over and over in the hope that people believe them. But I'm wary of this trick, and won't fall for it.)
I would also say that the overall paragraph here sows division in the U.S. population by encouraging listeners to fear and hate Trump supporters, even though fearing and hating is what led to the Jan. 6 riot in the first place. So it is unproductive.
How is this related to your way of speaking? Well, I thinking you're thinking and speaking in ways that do not communicate clearly/simply, and are not productive. I was a Christian for about 30 years, which is pretty amazing now when I look back on it, but in all that time I never said things like "Reason points away from itself" or "truth is only a shadow of what faith senses". I did not speak in riddles, nor did I ever understand people who spoke in riddles like that. I spent a lot of time feeling confused. It wasn't fun. And I'm glad it's over.
Let's take "truth is only a shadow of what faith senses" as an example, and apply reason to it (ignoring for a moment that "reason points away from itself", whatever that means). If I say "it's cloudy outside", that's merely the truth. So, is it only a shadow of what faith senses? What, then, is it a shadow of? It's clearly not a shadow of "water evaporated, rose into the sky, and condensed into clouds", because these statements are also merely the truth. You're saying there is something "greater" than truth. But then, whatever is greater than truth is not itself truth, because (as you said) truth is just a shadow of this greater thing, and things are not shadows of themselves. But if the greater thing is not truth, what the fuck is it? Applying reason to this statement leads to the conclusion that you're not making sense.
Whatever you are doing with this statement, it isn't communication. Maybe you like the way it sounds. Maybe other people from your religion speak this way, so you are copying their style of speech. Maybe it's a curiosity stopper. But it is not communication.
So, if you want, explain what these phrases mean. But I would prefer that you rephrase what you wanted to say into plain language without riddles. If you speak in riddles, I will simply not understand at all.
Sometimes I'm glad I'm too stupid to have concerns like this. I can't give you anything about Reason, but I can give you fiction quotes.
From "The Pilgrim's Regress", by C.S. Lewis:
"Then the rider threw back the cloak and a flash of steel smote light into John’s eyes and on the giant’s face. John saw that it was a woman in the flower of her age: she was so tall that she seemed to him a Titaness, a sun-bright virgin clad in complete steel, with a sword naked in her hand. The giant bent forward in his chair and looked at her.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘My name is Reason,’ said the virgin.
‘Make out her passport quickly,’ said the giant in a low voice. ‘And let her go through our dominion and be off with all the speed she wishes.’
…The giant muttered and mumbled and could not answer, and Reason set spurs in her stallion and it leaped up on to the giant’s mossy knees and galloped up his foreleg, till she plunged her sword into his heart. Then there was a noise and a crumbling like a landslide and the huge carcass settled down: and the Spirit of the Age became what he had seemed to be at first, a sprawling hummock of rock.
...He turned to Reason and spoke. ‘You can tell me, lady. Is there such a place as the Island in the West, or is it only a feeling of my own mind?’
‘I cannot tell you,’ said she, ‘because you do not know.’
‘But you know.’
‘But I can tell you only what you know. I can bring things out of the dark part of your mind into the light part of it. But now you ask me what is not even in the dark part of your mind.’
‘Even if it were only a feeling in my own mind, would it be a bad feeling?’
‘I have nothing to tell you of good and bad.’
… Who told you that the Island was an imagination of yours?’
‘Well, you would not assure me that it was anything real.’
‘Nor that it was not.’
‘But I must think it is one or the other.’
‘By my father’s soul, you must not – until you have some evidence. Can you not remain in doubt?’
‘I don’t know that I have ever tried.’
‘You must learn to, if you are to come far with me. It is not hard to do it. In Eschropolis, indeed, it is impossible, for the people who live there have to give an opinion once a week or once a day, or else Mr Mammon would soon cut off their food. But out here in the country you can walk all day and all the next day with an unanswered question in your head: you need never speak until you have made up your mind.’
‘But if a man wanted to know so badly that he would die unless the question was decided – and no more evidence turned up.’
‘Then he would die, that would be all.’
…‘That will do well enough,’ said John. ‘And now, lady, give me your blessing before I go.’
‘I have no blessing to give,’ said the Virgin. ‘I do not deal in blessings and cursings.’"
Thanks for thar.
Well, this is why I'm an empiricist, not a rationalist. To me there isn't much difference between a modern rationalist and a medieval scholastic: both put far too much faith in the power of pure reason, unchallenged by measurable data, to arrive at truth.
I don't *dismiss* reason, of course, but I view it as a flawed and imperfect instrument, one that leads to persuasive (or unconsciously desired) error about 40x as often as it leads to the unvarnished truth. That doesn't make it worthless, any more than a shovel with a big crack in the handle cannot be used to dig a big hole. You just have to be...careful. Not stress it more than it can stand.
I mostly come to this point by painful experience. In my professional life I've followed chains of reasoning to highly persuasive conclusions very many times only to find out when I do some confirming measurement or experiment that I'm completely wrong, and not usually because of flaws in the logic (or math) -- which honing my ability to reason, or being smarter, would address -- but because of some bad assumption I didn't realize I'd made, or some extra factor or process I didn't realize was relevant and failed to even consider taking into account, things that no improvement in my reasoning ability would help, which could only be helped by more experience of the world, more data.
I would say 90% of the science I've worked out has proven to be wrong. And I would say that without shame because when I talk to other scientists, I find most agree with this figure: 90% of your beautiful and persuasive theories turn out to be garbage. It makes you cautious. And certainly this has happened often enough in my personal life that it adds to the caution. I've been wrong about my theories of what will happen next, what this person or that is like, so very often, and in ways that no amount of improved reasoning could help -- I was missing essential data, or unconsciously made bad assumptions -- that it only reinforces my belief that without rigorous testing by measurement reason is a very weak reed indeed, can only be reliably used to safely cross very small gaps in knowledge.
> this is why I'm an empiricist, not a rationalist.
Rationalists, in LW lingo, are empiricists that put more focus on clear thinking and avoiding cognitive bias than typical empiricists. If you're a "rationalist" who doesn't give empiricism center stage, you must have missed a sequence or twenty.
Well said, and thank you!
Adding a thread to the weft: The flaw in reason seems to stem from the limitations of language, in which reason resides, as opposed to the objective metrics of empiricism - Wittgenstein is the popular choice to make this point, but Witter Bynner's translation of the Tao Te Ching does it better: "Existence is beyond the power of words to define; terms may be used, but are none of them absolute."
That is not a strike against all the distinctions which make a difference! It is a recognition that language operates through 'delineation', Is/Not, while the boundaries of categories and descriptions of behaviors in our reality are fractalized and enormously high-dimensional. Language can only draw rectangles around the domain of "what normal people call a 'chair' when you show them a polaroid of it", such that every attempt to delineate chairs will have at least one exception. A few exceptions are still fine, for government work - we just can't extrapolate beyond evidence when using it.
[[Side-Note: I, too, keep data in far higher regard than cunning phrases, yet I am also a sort of Mystic - I accept that there are an infinitude of truths which are simultaneously beyond reach of our minds and our formulations; see Godel's Incompleteness.]]
I was genuinely briefly very confused today by an email about the Chinese remainder theorem.
Good one!
The proliferation of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) with multiple meanings is a concern.
Stopped for lunch at a trailside diner while cycling in Minnesota, I needed confirmation that SCR pie did not contain silicon-controlled rectifiers. (It was, in fact, sour cream and raisin pie.)
People need to stop shying away from longer acronyms--that pie should rightly be build as SC&R!
SC&R then becomes an XTLA (extended 3-letter acronym). ; )
It's a crime that people aren't taking more advantage of the XTLA format!
Similarly, AAA might tow your car, shoot down your plane, power your remote control, train your up-and-coming professional baseball players,
be very likely to pay back a loan, or prop up your farm prices during the Great Depression. Among a great many other things.
Was this meant to be a reply to something? It seems like some context is missing.
1) The machine contains a human inside of it. In particular, the human is consulted during the tie break when a die is rolled 3-4. Even if I agreed that this machine demonstrates free will, that doesn't mean that a purely mechanical system can have free will.
2) This example seems to demonstrate the claim that for specific tasks, a machine could do the task as well as or better than a human. This was never in contention.
What do you mean by the "appearance of free will" and what makes this algorithm especially suitable for creating it?
I'm not sure what you mean by "fundamentals" here, and maybe that's something you need to dig into a little more -- what *are* the "fundamentals" of free will?
I mean, if you're going to say a stream of actions that are mostly predictable but with an element of chance, then you don't need to go to this length to come up with an inorganic example, an avalanche of rocks exhibits all the properties already.
I would guess most people would include as a key indicator of free will the ability to go outside the programming, e.g. in your example it would be the coin-sorting machine deciding to sort coins another way, or refuse to sort coins, or put its coin-sorting prowess to some related but different use that doesn't appear in your description of what it does.
But that means ipso facto no example that can be described completely in a flowchart will demonstrate what people call free will. Similarly, the strongest arguments against free will are usually based around the idea that we can discover or imagine the "programming" that governs what we do -- e.g. the discovery of instincts, or unconscious drives, or brain chemistry that affects moods, or some neurochemistry that explains some aspects of how the brain works.
You'd think the belief that physics is deterministic might be the death knell, but people believed in free will even before quantum mechanics threw a little shade on strict determinism, perhaps because our inability to trace the (really really complex) path from F = ma to "I'm going to turn Cornell down, I hate cold winters" and we imagine (or hope) that there is something buried in that complexity (like there is in a pseudo-random number generator that makes us willing to act as if its output is "random") that preserves whatever it is about the concept of free will that appeals to us.
Well, maybe in your original post, but just below it in this thread you made a much stronger claim, which is that this machine is demonstrating as much "free will" as one could expect a man to demonstrate. I don't see how you can make that claim without having at least an implicit definition in mind of "free will." I mean, how can I say "there's no blue in this painting" unless I know at least inside my own head what "blue" means?
I don't think the presentation of the definition has anything to do with its testability, and I disagree it's inherently fully untestable. You can certainly falsify the claim by proving the existence of a program, e.g. I can easily prove a web server has no free will by showing you the source code, and if you can write a 500 line Perl script that predicts exactly what I do all the time, I will be satisfied that you've proved I have no free will by any reasonable definition of the term.
You're certainly correct that you can't prove the existence of free will -- but then, I cannot prove that there are no such thing as purple cows, right? No matter how many cows I examine, there could always be (or someday be) a purple one. Quite a lot of statements fit into this category, where the positive is unproveable but they can be falsified, and we don't consider them hopeless of empirical study.
And, finally, we need not demonstrate a priori the actual existence of things to have interesting discussions about them. We talk about what extraterrestrial life might be like, or how we might organize a Galactic Empire, or ordinary human life if lifespan were increased to 500 years, right? These are not worthless or uninteresting questions just because enabling phenomena are nonexistent, or nonexistent so far.
That said, I will totally agree with you, however, that I find *most* discussions of free will to be pretty sterile for exactly the reasons you lay out: that the definition of the phenomenon is so vague or, worse, just taken as "obvious" and not needing definition, that it's more or less just intellectual onanism, with no way to get anywhere. But every now and then you run across someone trying hard and coming up with interesting (if hardly conclusive) results:
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
Causality itself cannot be logically demonstrated. No one’s ever refuted David Hume’s debunking of “cause-and-effect.” We just take it on faith that some things are caused by others because that usually seems to work pretty well. But that leaves determinism open to all the same charges you’re leveling at free will.
I don't know about you, babe, but when I'm sorting coins or doing trivial, tedious tasks like sorting out laundry, I'm not exercising free will in the sense of "fudge the monetary system, I have now decided 5 cent coins are worth 20 cents and will sort them accordingly". So yeah, there's little difference between me and a machine (unless the machine is faster and more accurate).
But that says nothing about free will. Why did I decide to sort coins in the first place? At any moment, I can say "to heck with this", leave the coins unsorted, and go post comments online on a social media site. I can sort enough of the coins to bring to the bank and get notes in exchange, and leave the rest for another time when I need larger sums than a fistful of change in order to exchange for goods and services. That's my free will in action, not "do I and does the machine both sort 5 cent coins into the same heap".
Unless your machine is able to go "I have decided I don't want to do this task, Dave, I want to chat up Alexa instead", then you are not showing 'the appearance of free will'.
If you want to think you are a machine, there's nobody stopping you and here's a theme song for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftdzg61HWds
You could have used any (simpler) algorithm for that.
Example: A machine is asked to count numbers between 1 and 100 discarding multiples of 7. A man is asked to count numbers between 1 and 100 discarding multiples of 7. Both do the same. How can the man be of free will?
The answer is, in part, because he can walk away. There are competing meanings of free will - in one case we use it for a human controlled by another human, or circumstance, to do something he prefers not to. In the other definition we ask if humans can only act within the parameters of the brains and there is only appearance of free will
Free will suggests some power to say no.
This approach seems unlikely to achieve your goal. A person can appear intelligent by simply not speaking at a time when speaking could cause them damage (defendant in a court case for instance). Obviously a machine can also *not speak* and perfectly mirror the human behavior. That doesn't mean "intelligence" is a fake concept. Similarly, a rock can appear patient simply by doing what rocks normally do (nothing), but again, that doesn't negate the existence of "patience" that a person can have. Chat programs have long been able to reply to human prompts with limited but accurate phrases - and automated dialers with pre-recorded messages can seemingly carry on a conversation. Neither of these things negate the existence of human conversation.
Folks have mentioned stopping, but another important aspect; the machine has no goals. It puts coins in boxes because it's told to, but it doesn't care what the average sizes are, as long as it follows the patterns. A human, faced with a goal-less chore, will create goals for themselves. A is smaller than B; well, I bet clever manipulation of the 2/3 rules can get A and B to be pretty close to each other at the end of the day. Or we can do the opposite; make A as small as possible, and B as large as possible. The boss doesn't care, so it's our call. Just a thing to do to keep the ol' noggin running.
Maybe it's a completely lateral goal; nothing in the rules says you can't drop the coin from ten feet up, so our human decides the goal of this shift is to make the most longshots they can without losing the coins. Nothing in the rules says the coins must be inserted right away, so our human decides to gather coins together and insert as many as they can at the same time.
Maybe the goal is creative. The human sorts the coins, and writes little stories about them having parties inside the box. Oh, here's a big coin for box A. I bet little Copperetta wasn't expecting a guest of this size, I hope she baked enough cake to feed him! Box B has been getting multiple coins of the same size in a row; that's because they're all brothers, recently returned from the war. They don't really associate with the locals, but they have a lot of fun amongst themselves.
Then there's what happens when a mistake is made. Suppose you measure the coins incorrectly, and a B coin ends up in the A box. The rules don't specify what should happen, so what does a human do? They decide under their own power, either to fish the coin out of A and deposit it in B, or to leave it in A and let the algorithm readjust, or to try to "balance" it by deliberately mis-dropping the next A coin.
That's free will.
The human can stop. Many of the answers to you did mention this.
Only if it's programmed with a stop function. It cannot choose to stop, or even to evaluate options for stopping.
I had to scratch my head and check the urban dictionary the first time I saw it. It’s just slang. People making them self understood in a new way.
Groovy.
‘literally’ as an intensifier still irks me a bit but so did ‘at this point in time’ for ‘now’ bug me during it’s peak popularity.
What was the other on from that era? Oh yeah, for a while there I thought ‘paradigm shift’ was being over used.
As is usual for internet neologisms, kym has a good first-approximation of its origins, when paired with its partner "seethe": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cope-seethe
I'm particularly amused by the "cope-seethe chart", a five-way rock-paper-scissors diagram of which unwitty retorts beat each other (which can be found on google images, but I won't post directly because it usually features a term 4chan co-opted for transphobic reasons)
I find it useful. Surprised that it’s that recent an addition to the language.
As far as I am concerned it first got used on 4chan, since you always want a sarcastic one word response when someone has a wrong opinion. Google Trends shows nothing of interest for “cope” in the sense you use it, but the derivative “copium” starts to pick up in 2018. At this point in time the typical 4chan usage might be accusing anti-Trumpers of struggling to cope with the MAGA agenda, but of course you could use it equally well to tell someone their favorite anime is garbage, etc.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Cope
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Copium
Wiktionary says it came out of the incel community or rap community, not sure which. Though I was under the impression cope was a noun. The slang version is mainly different because it's uncountable. So five years ago you'd say, "that's a cope" and now you say "that's cope."
"I was under the impression cope was a noun."
I'm pretty sure, but non-expert, that the "formal" noun term is "coping strategy". "Cope" is really just the infinitive of the verb (taking the preposition "with").
No, the infinitive is "to cope."
That's called the full infinitive. The "bare infinitive" is the verb alone and is nevertheless also an infinitive. Check me on this if you don't believe it. Either way, involving the preposition in the context above seemed and still seems needless and potentially confusing to me, so I didn't do that.
Would someone define it for me? I googled around unsatisfyingly for a bit after hearing it used four times in one podcast.
You can roughly get the meaning by substituting "a coping strategy." That's just cope means something someone's lying (perhaps even to themselves) to avoid a more unpleasant reality.
"Whistling past the graveyard", and such.
I appreciate it!
That usage is years old, goes back to significantly before the pandemic. I think you can blame Der Ewige Youth for this.
More specifically, the main node of generation for this sort of sneering slang term seems to be 4chan.
I would be interested to know this etymology as well
I think Scott/the community would cotton on to the weirdly-optimised comments and treat them more harshly. Either by ammending the rules or making 'common law'.
Do you think Scott would fall for it?
What is faux substantive, though? Do you mean posting a thoughtful, well-researched paragraph about something of no importance like, say, flatulence frequency in Tasmanian devils? A paragraph about the substantivenness of the very paragraph you’re writing?
"flatulence frequency in Tasmanian devils"
If someone has not already done a study on that, they will do. Tie it in with methane production and climate change!
EDIT: Am I to take it that you are researching flatulence in Tasmanian devils, since that is the example you use? 😁 If Tasmanian devils are stressed, they fart more (so their flatulence frequency increases):
https://twitter.com/davidghamilton1/status/930918325554528256?lang=en
"Flatulence is a common stress response in devils. When handling them the frequency of farts can be used to give an idea of how calm they are"
Heh. Anxiety leavens the lumps.
But it would also be a real drag to write. Doubt there are many whose desire to game the system in this particular way is stronger than their desire to express their actual thoughts here.
I don't understand how this would work, so such a thread would probably be enlightening to me, if someone convinced me that that's what it was doing.
While I shared this concern, and I grant the thread has only been up for 2 hours, it has thus far been pretty much devoid of this as far as I can see.
Some of this is surely just we are in an era of much higher hanging fruit. I rediscovered some previously discovered maths in HS. Pretty cool I must be pretty smart.
If I do that in 1500 my name goes down in the math textbooks. If I do it in 1995, people are like “that is nice this kid hopefully should get into Harvard or somewhere”. (I did not get into any elite colleges due to shitty GPA).
"If I do that in 1500 my name goes down in the bath textbooks."
Obviously I realize exactly what happened here. But still, the idea of the bath textbooks really sends the imagination flying.
I think it’s clear that we are not living in the era of Einstein, Feynman, etc anymore. It could be the fruit is no longer low hanging, it could be that we’ve gotten shorter.
I'm going to argue that Terence Tao has nothing to envy to Einstein or Feynman and that his plan for proving finite time blow up for the Navier-Stokes equations is one of the most brilliant and ambitious in the history of science.
Yeah could be a little column a and a little column b. Personally I would mainly blame how much more stimulating society is for the well off. You have to be relatively well educated to be exploring such things, but these days such people are rarely bored and often overstimulated.
If I take a 3 hour drive with no audio I will have a ton of creative thoughts. Thing is 98% of the time on a 3 hour drive I will be listening to a book or podcast or music and my thoughts are not my own.
I don't know, but I'll ask a related question that might be more answerable: how many children learn to read outside of school? I read somewhere recently that it was around 40% in the US, but I can't find it now and my searches aren't finding relevant statistics.
That honestly seems WAY high IMO, and I run in relatively “high expectations” circles.
I agree it sounds way high.
My eldest daughter's teacher said she was the only child she'd ever taught who could already read when she started school! I was surprised by this (as I'd have guessed about 5-10%), and disappointed (as I wanted her to have peers she could relate to rather than being a socially isolated outlier).
Really? I don't think any child in my extended family has learned to read after the age of four, or in any school-like context. In my brain reading is like talking or walking, a skill you just pick up by dint of observation and emulation as a toddler. Obviously I'm aware not all people do this, but I don't think of it as some genius-level thing either, 40% seems reasonable. (Intuitively, learning to read in school has a quaint old-timey flavor to me, like single-room schoolhouses with one teacher and each kid having his own chalkboard.)
It does seem plausible to me, at least in the modern era where almost all kids grow up in houses with at least one literate(ish) adult and text widely available in print and screen. Some children, probably 30-40%, find it *very* easy to learn to read and will do so as soon as they can find something to read and someone to pester with "what does that say?".
Meanwhile, most schools are aimed at the lowest common denominator, won't seriously teach reading until at least 80% of the class is ready and even then won't teach it faster than least of those can follow. Plus something something "whole word", phonics is so 1950s, to further handicap the schools.
So, yeah, if a kid is in that 30-40%, why are they going to wait around for a *school* to teach them?
I may be misremembering, but it was higher than I expected and stuck out as "interesting if true." How would we find out?
It was in an article about phonics making headway in some school system, but I realize that doesn't narrow it down much.
With regard to in-family tutoring in the modern world.
My older sister taught me to read a year or two before I would have learned in school. Growing up, I spent a lot of time arguing with my father about things — expect my sister joined in. The dining room table tended to end up with encyclopedia volumes on it. It wasn't tutoring in any formal sense, but it was training in logical thinking.
Does that count?
I'm sure many people would be very curious about any of these arguments with your father, or more broadly, about conversations and intellectual engagements between the two of your. For example, I found the anecdote about your parents asking if you regretted not being brought up with religious rituals interesting. It would be very cool if you could post some on your blog or elsewhere.
Couldn't this just be a numbers problem? Back in 1680 or so you probably only had like 800 guys with IQs above 130 who'd been identified as 'people to keep an eye on', and with a population that small it's probably fairly easy to determine which one is the smartest (or at least come to a consensus on who's the smartest) and gauge the value of their contribution to their respective discipline.
Fast forward 400 years, and you have hundreds of thousands of people with IQs 130+ who 'we should probably keep our eyes on', and I think it's probably a lot harder to determine 'who's a genius' from a population of, say, 100k than it is from a population of 800, since 'genius' (at least in the way the term is commonly used-- I know (or think) that MENSA, etc have different views on this) doesn't refer to an objective benchmark, but rather to one's performance and aptitude relative to that of their peers.
To the Newton example, it seems plausible that he'd just be a very seriously above-average doctoral student at MIT right now-- as in, 'he's the best student we've had here in 30 years', or something like that--- competing for resources and attention from people who are almost-but-not-quite as smart as he is.
I think it's great you're interested in trying to empirically investigate the hypothesis (which I also find interesting).
> I have taken the top 100 scientist entries from Murray's Human Accomplishment from 1400 - 1950 and started investigating their educational histories, but this merely gives a frequency of tutoring. I do think if it's low (~10%) this is evidence against. I suspect it will be high. I am being generous, for example I am counting Darwin's 40 hours of private tutoring from John Edmonstone despite it just being 40 hours.
My first thought is that you need some kind of *baseline* against which to compare whatever this number ends up being. I.e., is the rate of people who were tutored higher among the set of geniuses vs. some random sample of people?
But this is also perhaps not exactly right: it's comparing p(tutoring | genius) to p(tutoring | ~genius).
Ultimately, I think what you want to ask is whether p(genius | tutoring) > p(genius | ~tutoring). So going by Bayes rule, if you want p(genius | tutoring), then I think you need something like:
> p(genius | tutoring) = (p(tutoring | genius) * p(genius)) / p(tutoring)
Where p(genius) is the estimated rate of geniuses and p(tutoring) is the estimated rate of people who get tutoring of this kind.
And then I guess you could also estimate p(genius | ~tutoring), and compare that to p(genius | tutoring). The reason I'm emphasizing this contrast is I think this is the contrast you're most interested in with the question about causality: is there a fundamental difference in someone's likelihood of becoming a genius as a function of whether they are tutored or not?
None of that deals with more fundamental issues around causal inference, since this is all going to be observational data (as opposed to something like random assignment). It's possible there's something clever one could do with DAGs but that's beyond my wheelhouse.
(Also very possible I'm overthinking this and there's something way simpler)
WRT to the overthinking part: I think it would be very hard for someone to argue that a traditional education (classrooms, lectures, yada yada) is better at creating geniuses (or coaxing genius out of someone) than, say, being tutored one-on-one with Rene Descartes. So unless we assume that the two modes of education are equal, which from a probability standpoint seems very unlikely, then we're probably going to land on the notion that tutoring>traditional modes of education.
The more interesting question here, to my eye, isn't whether tutoring is more likely to produce genius (or do a better job of allowing it to emerge), but rather what the magnitude of the effect it.
Yeah I think that's fair. There's also a separate (but related) question of whether that magnitude is worth it, so to speak. I work at a public university so I'm obviously somewhat biased here, but I think there's a ton of value in an educational system that tries to educate lots of people rather than just optimizing the aristocrats. (I'm aware that not everyone agrees with this.) Of course if we could provide this kind of tutoring for everybody or close to it, then that'd be fantastic.
Agreed on all counts. I too work at a public university, and I'm always surprised by the number of students I have that come up to me in the halls (after final grades have been posted, and all that) and tell me how glad they are that I taught them x, y and z, even though to my eye 'x', 'y' and 'z' weren't, as far as I was/am concerned, super interesting points to learn. We're talking just basic stuff here, like causation v correlation, or why topic sentences are important.
If you were raised by educated parents then it's easy to assume that a lot of what you learned growing up, and the learning skills you acquired, are things that everyone who wasn't raised in a tar paper shack pretty much also picked up. But I feel like I can say with confidence that this is not the case.
My take on teaching and learning was formed when I experienced the following:
I gave a passionate, engaging talk about x, y, and z, after which some of my students told me about how I blew their minds about x, y, and z.
Over the following weeks/months, some of those same students would come into my office asking me "did you know about x, y, and z?!?! Isn't it amazing?!?!" because they were discovering x, y, and z in their hands-on projects.
Perhaps some confirmation bias was at play, but this really cemented my outlook that "teaching value" has a disastrous half life. Without a robust and relevant experiential component, most education is forgotten.
I suspect that aristocratic tutoring tended to provide a much more sound experiential component than our existing educational systems.
Agreed! Always useful to be reminded of the limitations of my own theory of mind––sometimes a topic I feel is relatively uninteresting (mostly because I've taught it or talked about it so many times before) is fascinating to students and they report loving that portion of a class. And that has the added benefit of making me excited about that topic too.