The SBA dollar was the same size as the successful Canadian loonie. But they should have made it more distinguishable by making the color and edge different from the quarter the way Canada did.
My recollection is that early images showed the SBA dollar was planned to be polygonal. If so, I wonder why they dropped it for the quarter-like milled edge. (Itself a vestgial artifact of precious metal coins, where it was a guard against clipping.)
More recently, they made gold-colored dollar coins with smooth edges. But those didn't catch on either. The key to the loonie's success was that Canada got rid of paper dollars.
Just because I tend to miss "the the" in your writings doesn't mean I miss it in other people's writings. Have you considered controlling for the writer in your duplication tests?
A couple years back, I was having a discussion in a travel forum about moving overseas, and to my surprise an Italian joined the conversation and made the argument that immigrating from one highly developed country to another on a whim is morally wrong. He argued that refugees coming to Europe from war-torn regions is fine when their homelands are inhospitable, but if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way, almost blind to/removed from the culture and nation that inhabits it.
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you'd say, "If it were America of 20 years ago I would agree, but with the way things are going lately..." - you get the idea. Anyway, it kind of shocked me and it's an idea I still haven't reconciled. Like lots of Americans, now and then I get those thoughts of various European countries I'd love to live in, and many of us actually do make that move. Still, when I think over my criteria for -what- country I'd like to live in, I run out of material pretty quickly. Why France? "Well, they have amazing food, the best creamy cheeses, killer wine, great labor laws, the country is beautiful...". Why Netherlands? "Great infrastructure, high HDI, they all speak English...". Across thousands of miles of ocean, you too can enjoy a life that's 10-15% better than life at home. Something about it begins to feel trivial. Now - this is not some rebuke against those who wish to immigrate. I'm still meditating on my true feelings over this, because perhaps he had a point.
The argument seems to assume that immigration is basically free (for all parties involved) and indistinguishable with respect to the immigrant (meaning the host country can't distinguish between an American and someone from a war-torn country).
If we grant that, then yes, your Italian has a very good point. People who have no country or a very broken country should be prioritized over people who already have tolerable countries. I will note that this argument is ignored a lot by all people all the time, in matters both related to immigration and not. (for example, this argument would seem to imply that streets and other public spaces should be prioritized to homeless people, since they don't have any homes unlike the many people who have homes and still go to fill those spaces). But, it's still a basically good argument that should be followed if its premises hold.
The trouble is, its premise is huge. Immigration is not free, the African from a war-torn country is already 80%\90% will not succeed. The 10%\20% who will succeed can be comfortably hosted *in addition to* the Americans who want to live in Italy. Even then, the state governing Italy will probably huff and puff and make a big noise about "those damn poor africans degrading our infrastructure", and while this is immoral, it has *some* elements of truth and reasonableness and - regardless of anything - will result in the country being significantly more tolerant of Americans than Africans. So the host country itself wants some people and not others, and if wanted people refrain from immigration then this will not increase the likelihood of unwanted people.
I also disagree with :
>if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way
This seems to play a lot on the trope of the "Businessman American" who does everything for money and by the books. I see absolutely no reason why Americans, a pool of 300+ million people, should be subjected to this stereotype. I see no reason why some Americans can't learn the native language and be emotionally and passionately involved in the country and culture they immigrated to. Because this is how humans work usually, they get attached to the land that welcomes them. (even more so if a previous land exiled or repulsed them)
Meanwhile, I can equally well say that :
>if say an African from a war-torn country were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their survival-chance per location in a kind of detached analytic way
And it would be no more false than the original claim. If this claim sounds racist or unacceptable to someone but the original doesn't, then this is an indication that there are serious problems with this someone's racism intutions, they are biased against a huge pool of humanity. To me, they are both racist and unacceptable, at least without overwhelmingly strong evidence.
Immigration is a hard moral problem, and the more general problem of "Being somewhat rich or at least well-off in a world where people can't find food or basic shelter" is even harder and depressing, and it torments me every waking hour to think of all the things I have but others don't for no reason but raw brute chance. But the way your Italian approached this doesn't impress me in the slightest, it's a very shallow and cherry-picked viewpoint that demeans an entire continent-worth of people while elevating another continent-worth of people to the status of cultural angels who will never make troubles or have integration difficulties with the host country that accepts them.
I think your vision is getting clouded by the inclusion of nationality here. Any stereotype about Americans is irrelevant here - if we accept the Italian's viewpoint, Europeans would be more culpable anyway since there's 3x more Europeans in America than the other way around. Essentially it's a screed against superficial migration, be it economic or cultural. Superficial economic migration is motivated by a desire to gain a slight edge on your income, in such a way that it will not critically affect your quality of life (e.g. only boost your power to consume or something). Superficial cultural migration is motivated by a desire to become a member of another country's culture without real ties to it. By contrast, the "authentic" forms of migration would be (a) leaving your country because it's impossible to maintain a basic livelihood, or (b) leaving because you have a genuine connection (e.g. your mother is a native and you want to experience it). There is no assumption here that the "authentic" migrants would integrate better, of course, and there is also no judgment passed on the quality of people from any country that would produce "shallow" migrants. The point is that unnecessary or trivial migration itself is a shallow activity, and (implicitly) any migration with no real purpose behind it is vain. Anyway, I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's still interesting. No one ever brings it up.
I don't see why that argument wouldn't apply equally to moving between cities in the same state.
I'm in favor of people moving around a lot; the more places you go, the more cultures you run into, the more your culture rubs off on them and theirs on you. If you want to avoid cultural blindness, you need people travelling abroad and spreading the cultures, otherwise people are stuck with the local stereotypes as their only reference.
Is it okay to store physical US fiat coins inside of my physical leather wallet*?
I got into an argument over this with my dad earlier this week. My dad argued that the coins could damage the surface of the wallet since the coins have sharp edges. However, I argued that the wallet is probably strong enough, and that storing my coins elsewhere would make it much harder for me to find them/mark them as mine. After looking this matter up on my dad's command (and filtering out the content relating to the other kind of coins and wallets), the only relevant result I found was a guide for coin collectors (https://www.preservationequipment.com/Blog/Blog-Posts/How-to-store-coins-full-guide ) which suggested that whatever I put my coins into should be acid-free.
*I deliberately added the extra words to make it clear that I am not discussing the other type of coins and wallets.
American custom, as I understand it, is to keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket. When you get home, put the change in some kind of container on your dresser; periodically convert this to paper money or deposit it at the bank.
> keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket
Interesting; I might try this. However, I am in the habit of showering after I come home and so I tend to throw my clothes into the laundry basket oblivious to their contents (they usually don’t have any). I might have lost money this way.
Huh? I don't even understand the question. Where *else* would you possibly store the coins? There should be a part of the wallet that is designed to contain coins, and if something is designed to contain coins, I would assume that it is in general safe to store coins there.
Before reading the rest of your comment I honestly thought that the question was a parody on questions about cryptocurrencies, or something like that.
Perhaps it is a cultural difference and the American wallets do not have a part to store their sharp-edged dollar-shurikens? Or do the kids these days only use credit cards and cryptos, and the coin is something they only see at a museum? I feel quite stupid now, because I must be missing something obvious.
Checked my wallet: it currently contains 30 coins with total value €11.42, plus a few banknotes, an id card, debit card, medical insurance card, and driving license. It is perhaps bigger than it would need to be, but it's winter and I have large pockets on my coat, so it's okay.
My current wallet doesn't have a place to store coins. You can put them in with the bills, but they tend to fall out. I haven't looked closely my friends' wallets, but I don't think any of them had coin pockets either.
It’s at least partially a cultural thing. Like the game the rest of world calls football and the metric system, for some reason dollar coins never gained traction in the US. No looneys or twonies for us, thank you.
I’m not sure exactly why.
For years I’ve been in the habit of carrying coins loose in my pocket till I get home when I put them in a can on my dresser. When the can gets full I bring it to the coin counter at a bank and exchange it for folding money.
The story I've heard (but haven't seen an international survey to confirm) is that countries with successful higher value coins discontinued the equivalent bills, while we never did the same with the $1 bill when initiating the Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea, or Presidential dollar coins.
Since inertia and established infrastructure favored the bills (e.g., more vending machines take bills than dollar coins, and there was no feedback mechanism to speed retrofitting) bills remained standard and the coins were relegated to curiosities.
(We do seem to have unusual inertia re currency, given our loyalty to minting pennies as their value dwindles into nothingness.)
Anecdotally, the one place dollar coins reliably showed up was as change at Post Office vending machines, I assume due to some mandate.
I suspect another factor is that a transition from bills to coins for the major currency unit (dollar or similar) faces a lot less pushback if it happens when existing coins have enough purchasing power that people are still in the habit of carrying around a significant number of coins rather than just dumping them on the dresser at the end of the day. This makes a big difference because without this, introducing a coin big enough to be worth carrying around routinely would cause an annoying inconvenience at first and require a change of cash-carrying habits to accommodate.
The US has long since missed this window, although a new window might be coming up as inflation erodes the value of a dollar to the point where the coin would just get dumped on the dresser anyway and the bill would be increasingly seen as annoying wallet-clutter. And as more and more people abandon cash entirely in favor of cards and direct electronic payments.
The Susan B Anthony dollar was early enough that it should have been able to hit the first window, but it was a particularly bad design, being too similar in size and appearance to a quarter. It would likely have been better accepted had it been either a bit bigger like the contemporary Kennedy half dollar (the slightly earlier Eisenhower dollar had failed to circulate because it was too big, and because it was desirable as a minor collectable), or at least a different color like modern dollar coins.
A wallet can't hold more than a trivial number of coins anyway, and US coins have a maximum value of 25 cents, meaning that you're making your wallet uncomfortably bulgy to hold an extra few bucks at the most.
I remember that Hamilton (the musical) got some interest in the SSC comment field back in the days. So if you have missed it, let me tell you about "Scamilton". A Texas church put up their own Hamilton production. It's surprisingly ambitious, unauthorized and totally illegal. The cast is not-great, they cut out some songs (for brevity I assume), censor all the bad words and add a new little segment about Hamilton finding Jesus. And the post-show sermon offers help to those struggling with homosexuality. Ergo, it's a glorious trainwreck. Plenty of youtubers have been on it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GLBEBCwqp4
Wow! These things belong to the genre "so bad that it is actually quite fascinating to watch", although I suspect that watching the entire plays would get boring again... unless you watched them while stoned.
They can't be made anywhere near as small or as fast as electronic transistors, they leak, they have very little in the way of compensating advantages and there are few if any applications where those dubious advantages would make them the preferred option. If there are a few, it's not enough to pay for the research, development, and manufacturing base to support them.
They're nifty and clever and cool, yes, but so were Zeppelins.
Fine-Grained feedback on online comments and its challenges.
At some point in internet history, probably beginning with Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), some genius figured out the idea of self-curating online communities. That is, give every user the ability to "vote" for a comment, post, reply,etc..., and by the magic of "Wisdom of the Crowd" and other such dynamics you can obtain useful signals about the quality of those things. Basically, make the entire userbase an auxiliary network of moderators\curators operating in parallel without communication.
This is a good idea in the abstract, any idea that treats humans as dumb cells\units\components in a big network that is much smarter than the sum of its constituent humans has an intuitive appeal to me, I see it as a good approximation of reality and it has pleasing parallels to computer science and biology that I love.
The idea is sometimes criticized, however, as too crude. To take the 2 online communities with upvote-downvote systems I'm most familiar with, Reddit and HackerNews, a heavily downvoted comment can mean that the content of the comment is any of lots of things. Some are, ranked from most-deserving of downvoting to least-deserving according to my subjective view, :
1- Spam and obvious off-topic nonsense ("Come chat with hot single girls at scam.sexxxx.totally.not.a.scam", or "GO TRUMP 2024" in a non-politics thread)
2- Trolling (saying something while meaning something entirely different or opposite or not meaning anything at all, for the sole purpose of deceiving and upsetting people) and obvious bad-faith takes
3- Incorrect claims presented as facts
4- Mainstream opinions or facts phrased aggresively and\or personal insults
5- Controversial opinions (whether in general or just relative to the subreddit\thread it's posted in)
6- Comments that indicate the commenter hasn't read the article\video\etc posted
7- Jokes (on reddit, the overused ones, on HackerNews, nearly all)
And possibly more. It's obviously suboptimal to imply that all those things are the same and treat them uniformly, but that's exactly what upvote/downvote does. Suggestions to reform the system can be classified into 2 categories :
A- [Often Suggested] Fine-Grain the feedback. Instead of a generic yes/no counter, or even 2 yes/no counters (as in old youtube), make the feedback much more varied and high-dimensional. A button for spam, a button for overused jokes, etc... Optionally offer various filtering algorithms and other user-modifiable configuration that punish those things differently or not at all. Optionally offer buttons for positive things as well as negative things ("funny", "factual", ....). Basically, move the simplistic up/down mentality to a rich tag system with all its associated paraphernalia.
B. [Original To Me, as far as I know] Fine-Grain the *applicability* of the feedback. Instead of upvoting or downvoting **a comment**, you should really only upvote or downvote **a selection of text inside the comment**. In an ordinary politics thread, "GO TRUMP 2024" shouldn't really be a punishable thing to say (or, in an A-system, should only be tagged with the "Obnoxiously Capitalized" or "Trump Fanboyism" tag). It's probably the "TRUMP WON 2020 !!!" part before it that should be downvoted (or tagged "Non-Factual" in an A-System, along with the obligatory reference to the legal machinery that rejected the claim). This also opens the door to "vote-restoring edits" (or tag-revoking edits in the A-system generalization) : If you delete the non-factual trump claim, all the downvotes due to that claim instantly disappears, or at least decrease in effect. If feedback is tied to the content of the comment, then it makes sense that deleting content invalidates or dilutes the feedback.
Systems A and B are orthogonal as far as I can see, and they are very customizable and full of degrees of freedom. You can mix and match tons of unique cocktails from them as basic ingredients. They potentially offer massive improvments in the quality of signals on online comments.
The difficulties facing those systems, however, are legion:
1- [Applies to A and B] People won't use them correctly, Anti-Trump users will see "TRUMP 2024" and mash all the negative buttons without thinking, people will see spam and downvote as many selection of text as humanly possible thinking that will make it disappear faster. (and probably they would be right if there is a "master" ranking algorithm that averages all the downvotes\tags over a single comment, but they are still corrupting the signal)
2- [Applies to A and B] It's exhausting to use them correctly. This is a subtly different point from (1), but it reinforces its effect. It's not fair to ask people to consider all 5-10-20 tag we came up with (system A), or all possible selections of text in a comment (system B), or every possible combinations of both (hybrid). People will just focus on the most popular 3 or 4 tags, and the most eye-catching selection of text in a comment, and ignore all the rest, making it useless or worse. Even if different people focus on different things, this differential "sparse" feedback feels wrong somehow, like if 50% of people only ever press on "unfunny" when applicable and 50% of people only ever press on "non-factual" then some non-factual comments won't be labeled as such and some non-funny comments won't be labeled as such and..., so heckin complex. And what if the percentages of people who care about each tag is different as well ?
3- [Applies To B] What is the granularity of "claims" ? I handwaved this away with "Selections of Text" but this is clearly nonsense, it will allow some mad anti-trump users with too much free time to downvote "T", "TR","TRU","TRUM","TRUMP","TRUMP W",etc... in a "TRUMP WON 2020" comment. The issue comes back in the "revoking" feature too : if the pro-trump user deleted "TRUMP WON 2020" and instead wrote "THE DONALD TRIUMPHED IN TWENTY-TWENTY", should that revoke or decrease the effect of the downvotes or "non-factual" tags ? should it notify the users who downvoted to consider un-downvoting instead of doing it automatically ? (and how many would care and actually go back and read again? and is that fair for them even if they do?) how similar should two snippets of text be to be considered the same (and what if the original claim was at the top of the comment but the new claim is now at the bottom instead?) how.... oh holy heck this looks like it's AGI-complete.
1,2 and 3 are complete deal breakers that significantly nullify the possible benefits of the 2 systems or any hybrid of them, and - worse - they all look like extremly gnarly "people's problems" that require Politics-Heavy or AGI-complete machinery to solve.
My intuition is this would be too burdensome. Facebook did expand to some amount of emojis beyond the thumbs up and down. I notice Discord and Google Chat allow for this too. Yelp has a wider selection of tags. Perhaps with Yelp and Facebook they serve some sort of algorithmic sorting function. You might start by adding one or two symbols at a time ('M' for Misleading, 'laugh emoji' for Funny) and build up to your complex vocabulary of tags over time. Starting with a complex menu is a recipe for choice paralysis.
Set up an economy instead, so you don't have to program all the subtlety of human judgment. Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like. So people who make comments readers value, for any and all reasons, complex or subtle, will earn more tokens, which they can then use to post additional comments.
The reason to insist on readers needing to pay their own tokens to reward a comment they like is to avoid the piling on, either positively or negatively, that happens when there is no cost to the reader to upvote or downvote. If you allow readers to award a varying number of their own tokens, people who feel really strongly can have more influence (at a higher cost, of course), which means a comment that affects a few people strongly can "sell" for as much as a comment that affects a lot more people but kind of meh. Writers can choose to specialize in high-volume low-innovation but popular comments, or in low-volume high-innovation comments that strongly appeal to a smaller, more discerning crowd -- be either Hyundai or Bentley.
You could also vary the price for posting a comment, make it so that unusually long comments, or comments that contain swear words, or which have/dont have assorted keywords matched up to the topic subject cost more/less.
You could also avoid free-riding by allowing writers, if they are sufficiently confident, to charge a certain price for seeing their comment at all -- meaning, the reader has to pay a certain price to even see the comment in the first place. You better have an awesome reputation as a writer to try this, but some people could pull it off no doubt.
Over time, some writers will become "rich" through making comments that are sell well, and others will become "poor" through making Edsel comments. Then we can set up a taxing authority that will redistribute wealth on the basis of assorted social justice nostrums, leading to class warfare, bitter recriminations, revolution, all the rich tapestery of human society.
I did not suggest tokens had any meaning or life outside of a given account, meaning if Carl Pham is impoverished in tokens that have meening in the ACTX ecosystem I didn't suggest any method by which ol' Carl could be given tokens by his cousin Enoch Root who has tons.
But I'm curious: let's say that's possible by some mechanism, tokens can be freely traded back and forth between writers. How does this incentivize the creation of multiple "writer personalities?" And if people created multiple personalities under this economy, would that be bad?
"Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like"
This requires an account to have tokens before it posts, which means new accounts are going to have to start with some, or possibly accumulate them over time. So people will make several accounts to generate extra tokens to fund their posts so they don't have to worry about running out.
I am curious of how many physicists are present in the rationalist movement (compared to other studies)?
I ask because when I was an high schooler i was attracted to transhumanism and rationalism and i assumed that studying physics i would have found more people interested in it. However, some years later, i know noone in my institute that knows what rationalism, effective altruism or ssc are.
(Personally, studying physics made me grow skeptic of some of the "accepted wisdom" (coff drexler coff) so maybe this has some selection effect)
Here is a rough answer. Take the petition asking the NYT not to doxx Scott Alexander (https://www.dontdoxscottalexander.com/signatures). Look at the full list of signatures. Ctrl+F+Physics. 93 out of 7500 signatories are physicists. Of course, some (many) may simply be fans of Scott's writing without considering themselves `rationalists' (and there may be others who do consider themselves rationalists but were too chicken to sign the petition).
Few physicists I know really give a rat's ass about the structure of human society beyond some vague wish that it not be too intrusive or too shocking to inhabit, and even fewer are strongly interested in subtle issues of the philosophy of justice and equity -- if you loved that stuff, you'd go into the liberal arts instead and revel in it.
That includes me. If I feel like I should spend part of my dough helping others, I might be willing to spend 20 minutes listening to an argument about why I should give it to Charity A versus NGO B, but not much more. And chances are I'll just use it to help out a person I already know anyway. So subtle questions about how to best distribute charitable giving are not very interesting to me, certainly not enough to participate in an organized movement.
None of the other formal paraphernalia of the movement seem that interesting, either. As an empiricist I find most attempts at predicting Black Swan (low probablity high impact) events, like AIs becoming intelligent and evil, to be functionally sterile -- I just don't believe the chances of the predictions being accurate are sufficiently greater than zero to be worth any action in particular, and even the discussion seems a bit angels on the head of a pinnish. I'm also not that interested in promoting broad "rational" public discourse, on account of (1) people aren't really like that, so it's ultimately futile, and (2) "rational" discourse can easily fall into a Wikipedia style where mindless rules ("a citation, however lame or unrelated, always improves the argument") substitute for quality of logic, and (3) its not obvious that rational beats emotional all the time anyway. A lot of what we need to communicate with each other as human beans is actually emotional, or gets across better if colored that way, so I'm dubious of the broad social value of making communication more colorless and suffused with syllogisms.
The only reason I would interact with rationalism movement folks is because, on the whole, they tend to be smarter, with a greater variety of experience, express themselves better, and are more tolerant of intellectual diversity -- all of which means they're more interesting to talk to. As a parallel, I find it interesting to talk to seriously religious people, even if I don't share their faith, because they have thought more deeply about subtle existential issues than people who have no religion (other than standard-issue default-mode weak hedonism-materialism-sentimentality).
I don't have an answer, but I would warn against taking a probe of this blog as a general indicator of rationalism or EA, I expect it's much more diverse owing to the larger variety of topics.
Does pregnancy mess with your immune system in any direction? I have a kid and am pregnant with the second, and my subjective impression is: I was healthy before the kid (including through first pregnancy); I caught a lot of whatever the kid caught as he started going to daycare, including the wave of catch-up infections as people came out of COVID quarantines; I seem to have dodged the last two infections that the kid brought home from school. As an isolated observation, it could have a number of causes, including random luck or the kid recently bringing home kids' diseases that don't jump to adults as much. Or it could be pregnancy ramping up the immune system (if that's true, I'd expect a lot of women to complain of allergies during pregnancy). Or it could be lifestyle choices -- I might be sleeping more, and I'm dutifully taking multivitamins which I normally don't do -- and if that's what's going on, I'd like to know so that I can keep doing it! Statistics probably can't help me disentangle "luck" vs. "I normally run a mild vitamin deficiency," but it might be able to weigh in on whether pregnant women have better immune systems?
The coolest thing that I found with my second was how different they turned out to be from the first. Not necessarily in looks, but in temperament, interests and behaviour.
"A long time ago in the 50s it was suggested that maybe in pregnancy a woman's immune system would be weakened to help her to tolerate the fetus...but actually we now know that really the immune system doesn't get suppressed during pregnancy but it does get changed in some ways. So some people with certain kinds of autoimmune diseases that are really dependent on antibodies will find that their diseases get worse during pregnancy, so you're getting a stronger antibody response. But people who have autoimmune diseases that rely on things more like T-cells, might find that their disease gets better during pregnancy. And similarly we see that pregnant women are more susceptible to some infectious diseases and for some infectious diseases it makes no difference. And for some infectious diseases, actually they seem to do a little bit better."
I found this interesting treatise about magical fantasy settings -> http://jbr.me.uk/mytho.html (especially parts 5-6), describing how a world that was created ex novo -- without needing to arise from natural/evolutionary processes, or to imitate one -- might look; extremely different from what we are familiar with, in which life is shaped by natural selection, geography by plate tectonics, and so on. (It also contains some IMO less-than-perfectly-fair criticism of traditional fantasy and Tolkien in particular that might rub people here the wrong way; I hope they will not turn you off from the rest.)
Some choice quotes:
"After all, there's no reason to imagine the first appearance of the “gene for magic” would be in a sapient species. [...] So feel free to go and visit some biosphere where the wildlife has developed thaumaturgical powers, but don't come back. If you arrive early enough to find it ruled by parasitic para‐wasps that can turn you into a willing host for their larvae, you're relatively lucky, because all the non‐magical parts of that insect are vestigial. Give it another million years and the place will be a witch's cauldron of cell cultures whose sole purpose is to pump out clouds of retroviral hex‐chromosomes."
"Earth's flora and fauna naturally fall into families sharing large sets of characteristics (toothy, furry, viviparous mammals versus beaky, feathery, oviparous birds) just because all the members of a given family share a common ancestral bodyplan. A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way. [...] Folkloric secondary worlds do often seem to nod in this direction by having furry/feathery hybrids like griffins and owlbears and whatnot, but there shouldn't be any coherent taxonomic groupings to hybridise – the things that look something like lions and something like eagles are liable to turn out to reproduce via acorns."
"... we should anticipate that the creatures tailor‐made for domestication by a beneficent providence would resemble perambulatory mushrooms rather than geese or goats. [...] If predators and parasites and prey aren't all locked in an eternal genetic red‐queen's‐race, there's no point leveraging chromosomal variability with a fancy diploid reproductive mechanism. In other words, there's no practical need for sex [...] Elves themselves [...] aren't going to have any evolutionary vestiges like tailbones or wisdom teeth; everything's there because it's biologically or aesthetically appropriate. [...] Their hands aren't feet that have been put through a minor redesign to make them work better as manipulatory appendages, they're organs designed purely for their current role. And similarly, while we upstart monkeys do our talking with repurposed masticatory organs [...] they have articulatory organs that were designed with that function in mind all along."
"In such a cosmos, living things are special because they're full of élan vital; caterpillars turn into butterflies because they're attracted to the right Platonic form by morphic resonance; and magic works because the meaning of your incantation is a thing in its own right that can have a direct impact on whatever it refers to. [...] If organisms are animated not by adenosine triphosphate but by a ghostly vital essence, having a cerebral cortex as well as a soul is redundant – look at ents, which are remarkably nimble thinkers when you consider that their heads are made of solid wood. [...] that the simplest and most obvious way for messages to get from one mind to another is for them to hop across psionically without ever going near the material plane. That sounds as if it would work much better, but it would mean a setting with no need for conlangs."
I remember reading a fantasy setting that had this as a bit of backstory flavor. The first magic users were single-celled organisms that assembled teeny-tiny ritual circles out of proteins, which became the ancestors of all life on Earth.
For the most part this didn't have a lot of impact on evolution (only humans are smart enough to *consciously* use magic, so all the powerful spells are human-only), but it means that you can do cool "biological magic" like altering your body's cells to secrete magic potions.
> A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way.
Nonsense. It would be organized however the Creator wants it to be organized. It might have no coherent taxonomy, it might have extremely coherent taxonomy, or anything in between.
Likewise, from the quote about the magic, it looks like this writing is making a lot of assumptions about how magic would "really" work and then crapping on fantasy authors for not following those assumptions.
Sure, but that would only happen if the Creator was deliberately trying to hide the fact that it was designed intelligently (i.e., the "Satan put dinosaur bones in the soil to test your faith" model of creationism). It's the sort of fact about the Creator that cries out for an explanation, and ideally we'd have a better one than "Because the Author wanted an Earth-like world with a cool creation story, and Last Thursdayism is the only way to reconcile that conflict."
The article does bring up the possibilities you suggested for a Creator in a fantasy setting, but the whole thing is really just a digression. The author's main point is that trying to theorize about how the Elvish language evolved over time is in some sense completely pointless, because it will inevitably raise even bigger questions about about how *anything* in a high fantasy setting is supposed to have evolved over time.
Similarly, the part about magic is saying that you can't solve this problem by removing the Supreme Creator and going "it's a normal evolved world like ours, but with magic" because a world where magic exists isn't going to evolve the same sort of life that Earth did without it.
The bestiary is divided into categories because that means your spells can target the categories and not just be one-enemy-specific garbage. "Effective against flying creatures" is a lot more fun to play with than "effective against bald eagles". And then you can overlap them. Look at Pokemon's mass of intersecting enemy strengths and weaknesses.
And the complaint about creation not allowing the ecosystem is silly, because fantasy stories don't have the big ecosystems with lots of overlap, they have very unique creatures with unique skills and stats. Even in videogames where you have strict palette-swap upgrades of previous creatures, they're unique because they have different stats.
Nothing needs to evolve in a fantasy setting with gods. It's the way it is because the gods knock things into proper orbit whenever it tries to go off-track.
If you are optimizing for that sort of thing you'd probably make categories that are orthogonal to each other with as many combinations as possible, not the tree-like hierarchy produced by evolution. (You make a good point, though: this *is* closer to what fantasy games have than the essay's author suggests.)
Having read that, my conclusion is that the author doesn't really like fantasy and would be much happier with a nice, tidy, hard-science SF doorstopper based on proper physics with plenty of equations peppered throughout, rather than all the icky magic.
To which I will recommend a SF story the author would probably hate:
This person seems to have little to no tolerance for *myths* in world-building, which is rich coming from someone insisting on a naturalistic approach based on how things went in our world. Creating myths *is* how things went in our world and nobody much cares about "so how did the dragon fit in the cave, then?" because it's all about the archetypes, innit?
As to the conclusion:
"How would languages work in fantasy fiction if they followed the conventions of European folklore the way the rest of the genre does, which means without overthinking the logic of it all and in particular with no anachronistic linguistics? It seems to me the answer is that things would look something like this:
...Alfese/Angelic: some otherworldly entities communicate via inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter. Fortunately when they want to talk to you they can probably do it in Everyday Speech (but that doesn't mean they're going to be regaling you with thousands of years' worth of Chronicles of the Golden Age Before You Lot Turned Up, because they don't need any of that backplot)."
*Somebody* hasn't read as deeply as they claim to have done! 😁
From "The War of the Jewels", 'Quendi and Eldar', Note on 'the language of the Valar':
"Pengolodh cites a ‘Saying’ of Rúmil: ‘The Eldar took few words from the Valar, for they were rich in words and ready in invention at need. But though the honour which they gave to the Valar might have caused them to take words from their speech, whether needed or not, few words of Valarin could be fitted to Elvish speech without great change or diminution. For the tongues and voices of the Valar are great and stern, and yet also swift and subtle in movement, making sounds that we find hard to counterfeit; and their words are mostly long and rapid, like the glitter of swords, like the rush of leaves in a great wind or the fall of stones in the mountains.’
Pengolodh comments: ‘Plainly the effect of Valarin upon Elvish ears was not pleasing.’ It was, he adds, as may be seen or guessed from what survives, filled with many consonants unfamiliar to the Eldar and alien to the system of their speech."
So Tolkien is ahead of you there, Mr. Ray, on 'inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter.'
I suppose all the references to Tolkien are because he really is the 800lb gorilla of invented fantasy languages, and can't be dismissed as just another author pulling it out of the air because he was a philologist, so Mr. Ray's disagreement really comes down to "Well *I* wouldn't have done it that way". But if he's sniffy about Middle-earth, I'd love to dump E.R. Eddings' "Zimiavian Chronicles" on top of him and see how he feels!
Maybe. I'm unpersuaded, because I think the author has entirely failed to consider the quite considerable problems of logical self-consistency. For example, it's just not logically consistent to imagine an ecosystem made of perfect predators and hapless prey, the former will just eat all the latter and then starve to death. It's not logically consistent to imagine a world with infinitely puissant and wise benevolent Elves and also hobbits that struggle with assorted economic, existential, or practical problems, because the latter would just apply to the former for help and not have any problems any more -- there *has* to be some reason why the Elves can't or won't solve all the problems, e.g. they're assholes, they don't get it, there's some karmic reason why it's bad.
Coming up with a fully self-consistent and very complex ecosystem is very, very hard. (And indeed many story-telling failures are rooted in implausible levels of logical inconsistency.) This is probably why most people tend to hew pretty close to reality, which has the virtue of being ipso facto logically self-consistent.
More interestingly, it is possible that improving self-consistency remorselessly drives you to something that ends up looking more and more like objective reality. We don't actually know whether a form of existence that is radically different from the one we see around each other is even possible. For all we know, what we see around us is the way it is because it is ultimately not possible for any fully self-consistent system to be nontrivially different.
Poor Tolkien! He suffers from having been the forerunner or influence on a lot of fannish material since his time, so his use of a term like "common speech" got turned into D&D "Common Tongue/Common Speech/Common" and so people are a little led astray by that.
To quote at random from the letters where he briefly discusses language:
"What I have, in fact done, is to equate the Westron or wide-spread Common Speech of the Third Age with English; and translate everything, including names such as The Shire, that was in the Westron into English terms, with some differentiation of style to represent dialectal differences.
Languages, however, that were related to the Westron presented a special problem. I turned them into forms of speech related to English. Since the Rohirrim are represented as recent comers out of the North, and users of an archaic Mannish language relatively untouched by the influence of Eldarin, I have turned their names into forms like (but not identical with) Old English. The language of Dale and the Long Lake would, if it appeared, be represented as more or less Scandinavian in character; but it is only represented by a few names, especially those of the Dwarves that came from that region. These are all Old Norse Dwarf-names.
...The Westron or C.S. is supposed to be derived from the Mannish Adunaic language of the Númenóreans, spreading from the Númenórean Kingdoms in the days of the Kings, and especially from Gondor, where it remains spoken in nobler and rather more antique style (a style also usually adopted by the Elves when they use this language). But all the names in Gondor, except for a few of supposedly prehistoric origin, are of Elvish form, since the Númenórean nobility still used an Elvish language, or could. This was because they had been allies of the Elves in the First Age, and had for that reason been granted the Atlantis isle of Númenor."
"In Gondor the generally used language was 'Westron', a lang. about as mixed as mod. English, but basically derived from the native lang. of the Númenóreans ; but Sindarin was an acquired polite language and used by those of more pure N[úmenórean] descent, esp. in Minas Tirith, if they wished to be polite."
"That the Hobbits actually spoke an ancient language of their own is of course a pseudo-historical assertion made necessary by the nature of the narrative. I could provide or invent the original Hobbit language form of all the names that appear in English, like Baggins or Shire, but this would be quite pointless."
So people speak Westron mainly because it *is* a lingua franca like English, due to the influence of Gondor and Arnor in their heydays. The Rohirrim speak their own tongue, but also Westron, because they are allies of Gondor. The Gondorians speak Westron but also Sindarin, at least the more educated and the noble families still do.
The Hobbits speak Westron because (1) they are a branch of Men and (2) they picked up the languages of Men as they migrated westwards and adopted them for their own use. In Bree, Men and Hobbits mingle, so they keep with the 'common tongue' everyone speaks. 'Ancient' Hobbitish is going to be a language equivalent to Old English, see how the word "Hobbit" in Westron was derived from Rohirric "Holbytla".
Mr. Rye seems to be confusing Tolkien's plan of linguistic spread with the SF fandom trope of a Common Speech everyone uses, so since he knows this is a contrivance of convenience, he imagines Tolkien did the same to have a tidy set-up. Since Tolkien was writing stories in English for English-speaking readers, he naturally used English and had the Hobbits speaking English and everyone else speaking English instead of putting in everyone speaking in their own native tongue and needing to be translated. For in-world purposes of explaining 'how does everyone speak the same language, or at least a language everyone understands?', hence Westron.
I've just realized the very obvious kabalistic/punny connotations of "Bangkok", after being in the city twice, and I can't help but be surprised at how long it took or how well it fits.
So it's that time of year when I wonder whether it was really such a great idea for mankind to migrate past 40° N.
Personally, I want this for the circadian effects rather than SAD. For this reason, I'd consider it useful to be able to fade on the light shortly before I need to wake up.
People around here have been DIYing 10klm SAD lamps, capable of irradiating a 1m^2 area as brightly as daylight (not direct sun) on a clear day for a long time. But LED technology has come far since then so I don't think the traditional LessWrong solution of spamming two dozen domestic lightbulbs is necessarily optimal. So what is the current state-of-the-art?
This preprint promotes the moar dakka approach, cranking the brightness up to 100klm.
One of the big challenges seems to be thermal management. By volume, these things are 90% heat sink. Assuming a luminous efficacy of 100lm/W (this is kind of worst-case nowadays) and a brightness of 10klm, we need to dissipate around 100W of heat. The LEDs don't want to go much above 80°C so we have a ΔT of around 60K to play with. Apparently that's close enough to what CPUs need nowadays that you can use heat sinks designed for them. The other, crazier idea I just had was to get a small radiator (either one meant to be on a wall filled with water or a freestanding oil radiator) and dump heat into there, as they are often designed to output a few hundered watts of heat. This could be done either by attaching the heat source directly or using it as the reservoir for a liquid-cooled system.
I'm not sure how best to orient the lighting. I want to make sure a lot of light reaches my eyes but not to dazzle me. Perhaps uplighting would work. I also have plans involving fresnel lenses.
Colour Rendering Index may or may not be important. I'll be buying cheapo LEDs for now but they could be easily retrofitted with ones that produce a more realsitic sunlight effect.
N.B. Links broken to make this post look less spammy. Products are random ones I saw. Not necessarily the best or even good.
So does anybody here have experience with stupidly bright LEDs and/or SAD lamps?
Most of humanity's great achievements happened north of that parallel. I grew up at 59° N (Stockholm) and later migrated to 36° N (Malta), and the move does appear to have had a strong positive effect on my mood, but it might also have made me more inclined to enjoying a drink by sea as opposed to spending time on some nerdier pursuit more likely to benefit humanity.
A nice benefit of the Euro Zone. For humanity’s sake you should really go back to the cold and dark and put the finishing touches on safe cheap cold fusion though. jk
I'm at 47.5° N too. I've used the SunUp dawn simulator for years - it's basically a programmable dimmer with a 400W receptacle, into which I currently plug a 150W halogen. The only problem is that they aren't being made any more, but I hear that you can get them on eBay sometimes. (There's also a lesser version called the SunRizr, which isn't as programmable.)
For interior lighting, I have track lighting, and I've gone in the direction of lots and lots of fixtures, rather than single super-bright lights. It's a 2-track setup, so for one track I have 5000K temperature bulbs, and on the other I have dimmable 2700K bulbs. And the great part about LEDs is that I can add *even more* to the tracks. In the day I turn on the daylight bulbs, and maybe the yellow ones as well, and as it gets dark, I turn off the daylight bulbs, and then dim the yellow ones. The bulbs can be a bit bright for naked eyes, so when possible I shade them, or bounce the light off a wall or ceiling.
After doing some research, I've been going for Philips LED bulbs, especially the 2175 lumen BR40s. They seem to last long, have 90+CRI, dim smoothly and without flickering, and are widely available. From what I can tell, the limiting factor in LED bulb lifetime is not the LEDs themselves, but the circuitry in the bulbs, which is damaged by the heat. So no matter how good a particular light-emitting diode is, if the company that assembled the circuitry doesn't have experience, the bulbs will die faster. Also, the brighter they are, the faster they die. And the more complicated the electronics inside, the faster they die. From what I've heard, anyway.
I grew up at 47.5 but relocated to a noticeably warmer area at 45. I get a bit down when the sun sets before 5 PM but it never turned into anything like SAD.
Yeah the difference between northern Minnesota and the Twin Cities is most noticeable at the beginning and end of winter. Generally being a couple degrees North of where I live means the first snow is a couple weeks earlier and true spring is a couple weeks later. The lilacs bloom in mid may in Mpls and in late May to early June in ‘Frostbite Falls’ territory.
I’m talking about climate in this case not weather. As Red Skeleton used to joke “Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.”
I didn't really get any SAD symptoms until I lived around 47.5° N for a couple years. That was a while back, before LED bulbs were available as more than an expensive novelty. I did get marginal improvement by swapping all of the dim CFL bulbs the landlord had installed in my apartment for 100W equivalent halogens.
I currently live at about 37° N, which isn't far north at all: only half a degree north of the Missouri Compromise line. I do have some super-bright LEDs, though, since I like my workspaces nice and bright. For general illumination in existing light fixtures, the search term is "corn bulb": these have standard Edison socket attached to a big, honking heat sink with lots of LED chips mounted all around its surface. It's a quick, easy, and relatively cheap way to retrofit a fixture designed for incandescents or halogens with something considerably brighter. I've got a two-bulb wall sconce in my office loaded with a pair of 200W-equivalent (6000 Lumens total) corn bulbs.
I'm constrained by the size of my fixture, but without that constraint you can get corn bulbs in the 15-20 klm range. Since these have the heat sinks built in, you shouldn't need to rig up custom cooling as long as there's relatively free air flow around the bulbs.
If you do want to play around with computer heat sinks, Noctua's generally considered the top brand for air coolers. NH-D15 is their top-of-the-line model, consisting of two big bricks of cooling fins with a pair of 140mm fans forcing air through them. It's designed with an overclocked top-of-the-line consumer desktop CPU in mind, so it should handily deal with 200W or so of heat. It's a little on the spendy side, though (about $US100), and you'll need to rig up a power supply (12V DC) for the fans somehow.
Noctua also makes a passive cooler, the NH-P1, which relies on convection only with no fans. It's pretty big, though, and can't deal with quite as much wattage as the fan-driven air coolers.
I’m at about 45 degrees N. I’ve found that if I get together with my friends on December 21 and bang on pots and pans real loud, the sun will start to come back. It’s worked so far anyway.
Any recommendations for what could be called a "recreational chemistry" nonfiction book or blog? Basically, I feel like I have a huge hole in my knowledge of chemistry, and that bothers me since chemistry underlies so much technology. I don't have the will to self-study chemistry textbooks, so I was wondering if there are any "fun" books that could also improve my chemistry literacy. In case it matters, I'm good with math and physics, so not afraid of seeing equations in the text.
"Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" is written in a very casual-friendly and entertaining style, but will teach you plenty about the chemistry of various things that go 'boom' 'foom' or various other entertaining noises. and you can get a pdf version for free legally here:
Theo Gray's books might be good. I haven't read them myself, but they sell very well, he knows his chemistry decently -- he went as far as a few years into a chem PhD at Berkeley -- and the books are heavily and creatively illustrated. Lots of big-name endorsement, too:
If you want to wander around a webite that was assembled over many years, starting back in the dark ages of HTML v2.0 or so, probably once had a <blink> tag or two, which digs into all kinds of odd little corners, Jim Clark's website is fascinating and does not patronize, the way far too many pop-science resources do:
I ran across this article: There is No Liberal West (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/there-is-no-liberal-west). I suppose I always thought freedom of speech for example was seriously under attack, but seeing it all laid out like this is rather striking:
> Of course Yousaf and his comrades argue they have no intention to chill freedom of expression, but few can take this seriously, given how many people in Scotland have already been arrested for speech and thought crimes – people like Marion Millar, a feminist who faced prosecution this April for the “transphobic” act of tweeting a photo of a suffragette ribbon and “#WomenWontWheesht” (women won’t shut up). Already, between 2008 and 2018 there were 7,618 convictions for speech under the existing Communications Act of 2003, which the new legislation seeks to significantly strengthen. In Scotland, even filming your pug doing tricks can lead to the police showing up at your door. Maybe we should head south.
> But it would of course be untenable for England – home of John Locke and John Stewart Mill – to be left behind by the Scots, so the rest of Britain is rushing to catch up. Britain now launches manhunts for 12-year-olds who allegedly send racist messages on social media, convicts teenagers of hate crimes for quoting rap lyrics in general circulation (fitting them with ankle monitoring bracelets for extra public safety), and jails people for offensive jokes. But the real innovation of the nation of George Orwell has been the invention of the “Non-Crime Hate Incident” – a brilliant category encompassing anything the police deem to potentially be offensive to someone, somewhere. That was the lesson learned by the unfortunate Harry Miller, whose 2019 tweets about gender were reported anonymously to police, who then quickly stormed into his workplace to “check his thinking.” Some 25,000 such incidents are now investigated by UK police each year, with each case filed in a permanent record that shows up in employment background checks even if no crime is ever prosecuted.
So what can be done about the massive homeless encampments in America? My brother recently went to Denver and was quite shocked by them. He also commented that they seemed to be populated by the mentally ill (unlike in Puerto Rico, where there are no encampments but the homeless seem to be mainly drug addicts, sometimes falling apart with disease), which jives with what I saw in Portland. I once heard that this happened because the big state psychiatric hospitals were forced to shut down, so maybe the homeless do need to forcibly interned?
I am somewhat skeptical about the provide housing solution. I happened to have a neighbor who both went insane and became a drug addict and he completely trashed his house (which was paid for and maintained by his dad) and became homeless all the same.
It would, however, shed some light on why there are all these encampments. Or maybe where. They're renowned in LA, SF, and NY. Are they rampant elsewhere? Were the people in tent cities today on scattered park benches previously? And did they all gather to LA/SF/NY from somewhere else? Did Somewhere Else's homeless count drop -way- down in the past few years as a consequence?
Indications from my city are that a lot of them come from elsewhere, but mostly regionally connected. Like rain in a watershed basin, all flowing into the same river that goes by the same port city. Probably people in this situation gravitate toward the closest big city that offers social services and low enforcement of drug laws. Mild winters are a plus.
I kinda suspect that there's a ongoing crisis in America of people slipping into homelessness and drug addiction, but that it isn't very visible where it's happening. Instead it looks to an observer like major blue cities are having an eruption of homelessness., but that's just because that's where they all end up.
Melvin hits an interesting point. I used to live in Denver, a long time ago, and it had no such problems. But then they legalized weed and got flexible on drugs in general, and shazam parts of Denver have turned into weird little Red Lectroid nests. I don't know, maybe assuming absolutely everybody over 12 is fully competent to deal with mind-altering chemicals isn't the best public policy, even though it makes the life of suburban middle-class recreational stoners much easier, but I think we're all a little baffled by what would be provably better.
I'm by no means an expert, but my vague impression is that the bulk of the chronically homeless are some combination of drug addicted and mentally ill, and nothing will ever change until those twin scourges are dealt with in less of an ad hoc or fitful manner.
I'd suggest that causation might work slightly differently - if a city legalizes weed, that makes existing homeless people more likely to go there. I can tell that this is thing where I live, because there have been complaints about it, and the pushback has quoted statistics about 90-some-% being local, and then a bit later it came out that living here for 6 months is enough to count as a "long-time resident".
Yeah that makes sense. I'm sure it's a fiendishly complex problem, with many intersecting lines of causation, 'cause it involves people, which are complex creatures.
No, I don’t think it was the weed. Homeless encampments started to spring up in the Twin Cities about the same time that Colorado legalized pot. Minnesota just made THC gummies legal in July if this year.
Well, I'm willing to believe Minneapolis/St. Paul is in its own special category of urban crisis, like Portland and Detroit. Seems unusually dysfunctional these days for a Midwestern city surrounded by Ole and Lena types. Maybe SAD has finally unhinged everybody, or it's something in the venison.
Also I think the argument would be stronger if it went "Minneapolis legalized pot at the same time as Denver and did not turn into a dump." I'm pretty willing to believe there are additional reasons for visible Skid Rows, beyond a more relaxed social attitude towards drug use and easier access to drugs. In LA you can sleep outside year round with just a tarp and a blanket, so that probably has something to with it having a much more visible street person population than, say, Dawson Creek.
Anyway, the key proposition to test is: if you considerably reduced drug abuse, and got schizophrenics into treatment and/or homes, would you significantly reduce the population on the streets? If it's the case that Singapore lacks a big homeless population -- I wouldn't know, never been there -- and Singapore notoriously has the strictest drug laws in the world, vigorously enforced, then that's some formidable evidence right there.
Ah yes, we just need to fight the War on Drugs harder, that should work. Just need to throw another *trillion*[1] dollars of taxpayer money at the problem, it'll definitely work this time.
I would give a list of sources on why the economics on that really, really don't work out (and have been thoroughly demonstrated not to), but thankfully others have done that for me: https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/chapter/economics
For one thing Singapore is more or less an island, and pretty densely populated. I imagine smuggling the stuff in is a lot harder. And their government is far more efficient, so I’d imagine their war on drugs is more competently prosecuted
Singapore has about 1,000 homeless in a population of 5.5 million, which is about 70-300x lower than Denver's homelessness rate. However, in addition to differences in drug laws, Singapore also has an aggressive program of building cheap public housing, as well as having a border so it can have its own immigration policy.
Do you have an infallible omniscient list of drug traffickers we are supposed to shoot, or is it just anyone who looks like they're probably a drug trafficker, or who is carrying a lot of cash, or whatever?
And, if four college girls pool their money so that one of them can go buy some weed for their party, do we shoot that one girl for being a trafficker? Because one of those girls grew up to be a friend of mine, and a good mother and a skilled coder.
Putting drug dealers in jail for years at a time would be enough if we could do it quickly and reliably to all of them, but we can't do that because we'd get too many innocent bystanders at the same time. Shooting drug dealers *won't* work if it only comes at the end of a lengthy trial and usually not even then because the juries will nullify in this scenario, but we really do have to have the trials.
The only people we're allowed to gun down on sight, are the ones who go around the streets shooting unarmed or otherwise generally peaceable citizens on sight.
I mean, there's a lot of evidence it *did not* result in a more functional society. We have higher rates of teen and adult drug abuse, and obscenely higher rates of incarceration, than almost any first world nation. Yes, some of that is due to geographic distribution of drug production, but at least *some* of the blame has to fall on the policy we've had for 40 years not being effective.
You and I have very different perceptions of the world (as seems typical for our discussions) if you think the "current approach" is not still following the line of the war on drugs. (Those enforcement numbers keep going up, after all)
It's still very clearly focused on judicial and carceral solutions. I'd like the orders of magnitudes to actually be switched between that and "treatment and harm reduction" (maybe along with a touch of the housing model from Singapore, as another comment pointed out) and then see whether an *actually* different strategy pays off.
Maybe even try something truly wild - build a bunch of low/virtually-no cost dorm-style housing in the central valley, and legalize all drugs (even opiates), there, with harm reduction in place, ship druggies there for free if they want to work.
If you trace that back to the actual source[1], where they give a more detailed accounting, ~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*) and for "Criminal Justice System" costs, which are going have a huge overlap with that $40 billion above (otherwise ~$50b to persecute 1b of property crime doesn't seem like great ROI).
The only things which aren't an indirect cost of enforcement are the non-incarcerated labor costs, which they estimate at ~$30b, and health.
Although I'm skeptical of the "lost productivity" numbers, and you should also be more so, since "they would be perfectly productive member of society if they weren't on drugs" seems like a pretty leftist position.
(Maybe they go more into this in the methodology section, but I don't have time to comb through it. I'd love to see Scott do a more detailed analysis of this at some point, actually.)
"~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*)"
I somehow doubt that every single person convicted for drug possession/dealing would be a hard-working citizen instead. Some certainly would, but that would be *after* they get clean. Maintaining a drug habit *and* steady working is difficult, at least for working/lower middle-class level.
People who abuse drugs don't always, or even usually in my experience, go to jail because of the drugs per se. Prosesecuting low-level drug-only crimes is not high on any DAs list of priorities. People end up in jail because they commit crimes to support a drug habit, or because they do something bad while drunk or high.
So imagining that legalizing drugs across the board would magically prevent drunk driving deaths, or people stealing shit or committing fraud to afford a $1000/day coke habit, or murdering each other over drug turf wars, or for that matter make any significant desirable change in work absenteeism, failures in school or life because you're fucked up, or the implosion of marriages and famlies, is either naive or the result of being in the firm grip of ideology.
I know the mayor of Austin TX appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast a few months ago, talking about this exact problem. I *think* they got on top of it, and the lesson there was "early treatment" - they got on it before it got as bad as SF or LA. But I don't remember exactly what they did.
I'm sure it's addressable later; just more expensive per person. How many cities are at the level of "we need to drop everything else"? Or just "this is the #1 issue for enough voters for it to matter in an election"?
Hmm, I found this article about it: https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/austin-mayor-tells-joe-rogan-what-he-wouldve-done-differently-to-tackle-homelessness, it doesn't seem they've gotten on top of it. But he does say there's "there’s a 90-95% success rate that the person can reintegrate back into society and sustain themselves in a positive way. " if they're housed. But I don't get it, how does that work with drug addiction and mental illness (even if the person developed the mental illness as a result of homelessness)?
War in Ukraine and ACX on death in winter: "The Economist" has a long article about both topics:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2022/11/26/high-fuel-prices-could-kill-more-europeans-than-fighting-in-ukraine-has
The SBA dollar was the same size as the successful Canadian loonie. But they should have made it more distinguishable by making the color and edge different from the quarter the way Canada did.
My recollection is that early images showed the SBA dollar was planned to be polygonal. If so, I wonder why they dropped it for the quarter-like milled edge. (Itself a vestgial artifact of precious metal coins, where it was a guard against clipping.)
More recently, they made gold-colored dollar coins with smooth edges. But those didn't catch on either. The key to the loonie's success was that Canada got rid of paper dollars.
@Scott
Just because I tend to miss "the the" in your writings doesn't mean I miss it in other people's writings. Have you considered controlling for the writer in your duplication tests?
A couple years back, I was having a discussion in a travel forum about moving overseas, and to my surprise an Italian joined the conversation and made the argument that immigrating from one highly developed country to another on a whim is morally wrong. He argued that refugees coming to Europe from war-torn regions is fine when their homelands are inhospitable, but if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way, almost blind to/removed from the culture and nation that inhabits it.
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you'd say, "If it were America of 20 years ago I would agree, but with the way things are going lately..." - you get the idea. Anyway, it kind of shocked me and it's an idea I still haven't reconciled. Like lots of Americans, now and then I get those thoughts of various European countries I'd love to live in, and many of us actually do make that move. Still, when I think over my criteria for -what- country I'd like to live in, I run out of material pretty quickly. Why France? "Well, they have amazing food, the best creamy cheeses, killer wine, great labor laws, the country is beautiful...". Why Netherlands? "Great infrastructure, high HDI, they all speak English...". Across thousands of miles of ocean, you too can enjoy a life that's 10-15% better than life at home. Something about it begins to feel trivial. Now - this is not some rebuke against those who wish to immigrate. I'm still meditating on my true feelings over this, because perhaps he had a point.
The argument seems to assume that immigration is basically free (for all parties involved) and indistinguishable with respect to the immigrant (meaning the host country can't distinguish between an American and someone from a war-torn country).
If we grant that, then yes, your Italian has a very good point. People who have no country or a very broken country should be prioritized over people who already have tolerable countries. I will note that this argument is ignored a lot by all people all the time, in matters both related to immigration and not. (for example, this argument would seem to imply that streets and other public spaces should be prioritized to homeless people, since they don't have any homes unlike the many people who have homes and still go to fill those spaces). But, it's still a basically good argument that should be followed if its premises hold.
The trouble is, its premise is huge. Immigration is not free, the African from a war-torn country is already 80%\90% will not succeed. The 10%\20% who will succeed can be comfortably hosted *in addition to* the Americans who want to live in Italy. Even then, the state governing Italy will probably huff and puff and make a big noise about "those damn poor africans degrading our infrastructure", and while this is immoral, it has *some* elements of truth and reasonableness and - regardless of anything - will result in the country being significantly more tolerant of Americans than Africans. So the host country itself wants some people and not others, and if wanted people refrain from immigration then this will not increase the likelihood of unwanted people.
I also disagree with :
>if say an American were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their quality-of-life per location in a kind of detached analytic way
This seems to play a lot on the trope of the "Businessman American" who does everything for money and by the books. I see absolutely no reason why Americans, a pool of 300+ million people, should be subjected to this stereotype. I see no reason why some Americans can't learn the native language and be emotionally and passionately involved in the country and culture they immigrated to. Because this is how humans work usually, they get attached to the land that welcomes them. (even more so if a previous land exiled or repulsed them)
Meanwhile, I can equally well say that :
>if say an African from a war-torn country were to immigrate to Europe, it would be shallow and spiritually vain since they're just chasing some economic edge, or looking to maximize their survival-chance per location in a kind of detached analytic way
And it would be no more false than the original claim. If this claim sounds racist or unacceptable to someone but the original doesn't, then this is an indication that there are serious problems with this someone's racism intutions, they are biased against a huge pool of humanity. To me, they are both racist and unacceptable, at least without overwhelmingly strong evidence.
Immigration is a hard moral problem, and the more general problem of "Being somewhat rich or at least well-off in a world where people can't find food or basic shelter" is even harder and depressing, and it torments me every waking hour to think of all the things I have but others don't for no reason but raw brute chance. But the way your Italian approached this doesn't impress me in the slightest, it's a very shallow and cherry-picked viewpoint that demeans an entire continent-worth of people while elevating another continent-worth of people to the status of cultural angels who will never make troubles or have integration difficulties with the host country that accepts them.
I think your vision is getting clouded by the inclusion of nationality here. Any stereotype about Americans is irrelevant here - if we accept the Italian's viewpoint, Europeans would be more culpable anyway since there's 3x more Europeans in America than the other way around. Essentially it's a screed against superficial migration, be it economic or cultural. Superficial economic migration is motivated by a desire to gain a slight edge on your income, in such a way that it will not critically affect your quality of life (e.g. only boost your power to consume or something). Superficial cultural migration is motivated by a desire to become a member of another country's culture without real ties to it. By contrast, the "authentic" forms of migration would be (a) leaving your country because it's impossible to maintain a basic livelihood, or (b) leaving because you have a genuine connection (e.g. your mother is a native and you want to experience it). There is no assumption here that the "authentic" migrants would integrate better, of course, and there is also no judgment passed on the quality of people from any country that would produce "shallow" migrants. The point is that unnecessary or trivial migration itself is a shallow activity, and (implicitly) any migration with no real purpose behind it is vain. Anyway, I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's still interesting. No one ever brings it up.
I don't see why that argument wouldn't apply equally to moving between cities in the same state.
I'm in favor of people moving around a lot; the more places you go, the more cultures you run into, the more your culture rubs off on them and theirs on you. If you want to avoid cultural blindness, you need people travelling abroad and spreading the cultures, otherwise people are stuck with the local stereotypes as their only reference.
Is it okay to store physical US fiat coins inside of my physical leather wallet*?
I got into an argument over this with my dad earlier this week. My dad argued that the coins could damage the surface of the wallet since the coins have sharp edges. However, I argued that the wallet is probably strong enough, and that storing my coins elsewhere would make it much harder for me to find them/mark them as mine. After looking this matter up on my dad's command (and filtering out the content relating to the other kind of coins and wallets), the only relevant result I found was a guide for coin collectors (https://www.preservationequipment.com/Blog/Blog-Posts/How-to-store-coins-full-guide ) which suggested that whatever I put my coins into should be acid-free.
*I deliberately added the extra words to make it clear that I am not discussing the other type of coins and wallets.
EDIT: remove unbalanced parenthesis
There's also this sort of thing:
https://www.amazon.com/Leather-Squeeze-Pouch-Purse-Marshal/dp/B00K315LYG/
Which is ever-so-slightly less nerdy than the plastic type that Gunflint mentioned. And also slightly less good at keeping the coins inside. :-)
American custom, as I understand it, is to keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket. When you get home, put the change in some kind of container on your dresser; periodically convert this to paper money or deposit it at the bank.
> keep cards and paper money in your wallet, and any coins ("change") in your pants pocket
Interesting; I might try this. However, I am in the habit of showering after I come home and so I tend to throw my clothes into the laundry basket oblivious to their contents (they usually don’t have any). I might have lost money this way.
Huh? I don't even understand the question. Where *else* would you possibly store the coins? There should be a part of the wallet that is designed to contain coins, and if something is designed to contain coins, I would assume that it is in general safe to store coins there.
Before reading the rest of your comment I honestly thought that the question was a parody on questions about cryptocurrencies, or something like that.
Perhaps it is a cultural difference and the American wallets do not have a part to store their sharp-edged dollar-shurikens? Or do the kids these days only use credit cards and cryptos, and the coin is something they only see at a museum? I feel quite stupid now, because I must be missing something obvious.
Checked my wallet: it currently contains 30 coins with total value €11.42, plus a few banknotes, an id card, debit card, medical insurance card, and driving license. It is perhaps bigger than it would need to be, but it's winter and I have large pockets on my coat, so it's okay.
My current wallet doesn't have a place to store coins. You can put them in with the bills, but they tend to fall out. I haven't looked closely my friends' wallets, but I don't think any of them had coin pockets either.
It’s at least partially a cultural thing. Like the game the rest of world calls football and the metric system, for some reason dollar coins never gained traction in the US. No looneys or twonies for us, thank you.
I’m not sure exactly why.
For years I’ve been in the habit of carrying coins loose in my pocket till I get home when I put them in a can on my dresser. When the can gets full I bring it to the coin counter at a bank and exchange it for folding money.
Some people are just afraid of change.
(Ba Dum Ching! Not my quip, alas, but I love it so.)
The story I've heard (but haven't seen an international survey to confirm) is that countries with successful higher value coins discontinued the equivalent bills, while we never did the same with the $1 bill when initiating the Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea, or Presidential dollar coins.
Since inertia and established infrastructure favored the bills (e.g., more vending machines take bills than dollar coins, and there was no feedback mechanism to speed retrofitting) bills remained standard and the coins were relegated to curiosities.
(We do seem to have unusual inertia re currency, given our loyalty to minting pennies as their value dwindles into nothingness.)
Anecdotally, the one place dollar coins reliably showed up was as change at Post Office vending machines, I assume due to some mandate.
I suspect another factor is that a transition from bills to coins for the major currency unit (dollar or similar) faces a lot less pushback if it happens when existing coins have enough purchasing power that people are still in the habit of carrying around a significant number of coins rather than just dumping them on the dresser at the end of the day. This makes a big difference because without this, introducing a coin big enough to be worth carrying around routinely would cause an annoying inconvenience at first and require a change of cash-carrying habits to accommodate.
The US has long since missed this window, although a new window might be coming up as inflation erodes the value of a dollar to the point where the coin would just get dumped on the dresser anyway and the bill would be increasingly seen as annoying wallet-clutter. And as more and more people abandon cash entirely in favor of cards and direct electronic payments.
The Susan B Anthony dollar was early enough that it should have been able to hit the first window, but it was a particularly bad design, being too similar in size and appearance to a quarter. It would likely have been better accepted had it been either a bit bigger like the contemporary Kennedy half dollar (the slightly earlier Eisenhower dollar had failed to circulate because it was too big, and because it was desirable as a minor collectable), or at least a different color like modern dollar coins.
These things used to be pretty common. Using them marked you as kind of nerdy though. Up there with plastic pocket protectors.
If you are going for an Apollo project engineer look, one of these would be perfect.
https://www.amazon.com/Made-Oval-Squeeze-Coin-Purse/dp/B0037NM8UC/ref=asc_df_B0037NM8UC/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=198077048526&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=7422091239460915550&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019538&hvtargid=pla-348225386822&psc=1
A wallet can't hold more than a trivial number of coins anyway, and US coins have a maximum value of 25 cents, meaning that you're making your wallet uncomfortably bulgy to hold an extra few bucks at the most.
Will you be bringing back challenge mode open thread?
I remember that Hamilton (the musical) got some interest in the SSC comment field back in the days. So if you have missed it, let me tell you about "Scamilton". A Texas church put up their own Hamilton production. It's surprisingly ambitious, unauthorized and totally illegal. The cast is not-great, they cut out some songs (for brevity I assume), censor all the bad words and add a new little segment about Hamilton finding Jesus. And the post-show sermon offers help to those struggling with homosexuality. Ergo, it's a glorious trainwreck. Plenty of youtubers have been on it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GLBEBCwqp4
For more in the same genre, I highly enjoyed Jenny Nicholsons video on church plays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4gM7RC1M0
> Jenny Nicholsons video on church plays
Wow! These things belong to the genre "so bad that it is actually quite fascinating to watch", although I suspect that watching the entire plays would get boring again... unless you watched them while stoned.
Whatever happened to fluidic devices like fluidic transistors?
They can't be made anywhere near as small or as fast as electronic transistors, they leak, they have very little in the way of compensating advantages and there are few if any applications where those dubious advantages would make them the preferred option. If there are a few, it's not enough to pay for the research, development, and manufacturing base to support them.
They're nifty and clever and cool, yes, but so were Zeppelins.
Fine-Grained feedback on online comments and its challenges.
At some point in internet history, probably beginning with Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), some genius figured out the idea of self-curating online communities. That is, give every user the ability to "vote" for a comment, post, reply,etc..., and by the magic of "Wisdom of the Crowd" and other such dynamics you can obtain useful signals about the quality of those things. Basically, make the entire userbase an auxiliary network of moderators\curators operating in parallel without communication.
This is a good idea in the abstract, any idea that treats humans as dumb cells\units\components in a big network that is much smarter than the sum of its constituent humans has an intuitive appeal to me, I see it as a good approximation of reality and it has pleasing parallels to computer science and biology that I love.
The idea is sometimes criticized, however, as too crude. To take the 2 online communities with upvote-downvote systems I'm most familiar with, Reddit and HackerNews, a heavily downvoted comment can mean that the content of the comment is any of lots of things. Some are, ranked from most-deserving of downvoting to least-deserving according to my subjective view, :
1- Spam and obvious off-topic nonsense ("Come chat with hot single girls at scam.sexxxx.totally.not.a.scam", or "GO TRUMP 2024" in a non-politics thread)
2- Trolling (saying something while meaning something entirely different or opposite or not meaning anything at all, for the sole purpose of deceiving and upsetting people) and obvious bad-faith takes
3- Incorrect claims presented as facts
4- Mainstream opinions or facts phrased aggresively and\or personal insults
5- Controversial opinions (whether in general or just relative to the subreddit\thread it's posted in)
6- Comments that indicate the commenter hasn't read the article\video\etc posted
7- Jokes (on reddit, the overused ones, on HackerNews, nearly all)
And possibly more. It's obviously suboptimal to imply that all those things are the same and treat them uniformly, but that's exactly what upvote/downvote does. Suggestions to reform the system can be classified into 2 categories :
A- [Often Suggested] Fine-Grain the feedback. Instead of a generic yes/no counter, or even 2 yes/no counters (as in old youtube), make the feedback much more varied and high-dimensional. A button for spam, a button for overused jokes, etc... Optionally offer various filtering algorithms and other user-modifiable configuration that punish those things differently or not at all. Optionally offer buttons for positive things as well as negative things ("funny", "factual", ....). Basically, move the simplistic up/down mentality to a rich tag system with all its associated paraphernalia.
B. [Original To Me, as far as I know] Fine-Grain the *applicability* of the feedback. Instead of upvoting or downvoting **a comment**, you should really only upvote or downvote **a selection of text inside the comment**. In an ordinary politics thread, "GO TRUMP 2024" shouldn't really be a punishable thing to say (or, in an A-system, should only be tagged with the "Obnoxiously Capitalized" or "Trump Fanboyism" tag). It's probably the "TRUMP WON 2020 !!!" part before it that should be downvoted (or tagged "Non-Factual" in an A-System, along with the obligatory reference to the legal machinery that rejected the claim). This also opens the door to "vote-restoring edits" (or tag-revoking edits in the A-system generalization) : If you delete the non-factual trump claim, all the downvotes due to that claim instantly disappears, or at least decrease in effect. If feedback is tied to the content of the comment, then it makes sense that deleting content invalidates or dilutes the feedback.
Systems A and B are orthogonal as far as I can see, and they are very customizable and full of degrees of freedom. You can mix and match tons of unique cocktails from them as basic ingredients. They potentially offer massive improvments in the quality of signals on online comments.
The difficulties facing those systems, however, are legion:
1- [Applies to A and B] People won't use them correctly, Anti-Trump users will see "TRUMP 2024" and mash all the negative buttons without thinking, people will see spam and downvote as many selection of text as humanly possible thinking that will make it disappear faster. (and probably they would be right if there is a "master" ranking algorithm that averages all the downvotes\tags over a single comment, but they are still corrupting the signal)
2- [Applies to A and B] It's exhausting to use them correctly. This is a subtly different point from (1), but it reinforces its effect. It's not fair to ask people to consider all 5-10-20 tag we came up with (system A), or all possible selections of text in a comment (system B), or every possible combinations of both (hybrid). People will just focus on the most popular 3 or 4 tags, and the most eye-catching selection of text in a comment, and ignore all the rest, making it useless or worse. Even if different people focus on different things, this differential "sparse" feedback feels wrong somehow, like if 50% of people only ever press on "unfunny" when applicable and 50% of people only ever press on "non-factual" then some non-factual comments won't be labeled as such and some non-funny comments won't be labeled as such and..., so heckin complex. And what if the percentages of people who care about each tag is different as well ?
3- [Applies To B] What is the granularity of "claims" ? I handwaved this away with "Selections of Text" but this is clearly nonsense, it will allow some mad anti-trump users with too much free time to downvote "T", "TR","TRU","TRUM","TRUMP","TRUMP W",etc... in a "TRUMP WON 2020" comment. The issue comes back in the "revoking" feature too : if the pro-trump user deleted "TRUMP WON 2020" and instead wrote "THE DONALD TRIUMPHED IN TWENTY-TWENTY", should that revoke or decrease the effect of the downvotes or "non-factual" tags ? should it notify the users who downvoted to consider un-downvoting instead of doing it automatically ? (and how many would care and actually go back and read again? and is that fair for them even if they do?) how similar should two snippets of text be to be considered the same (and what if the original claim was at the top of the comment but the new claim is now at the bottom instead?) how.... oh holy heck this looks like it's AGI-complete.
1,2 and 3 are complete deal breakers that significantly nullify the possible benefits of the 2 systems or any hybrid of them, and - worse - they all look like extremly gnarly "people's problems" that require Politics-Heavy or AGI-complete machinery to solve.
Thoughts ?
My intuition is this would be too burdensome. Facebook did expand to some amount of emojis beyond the thumbs up and down. I notice Discord and Google Chat allow for this too. Yelp has a wider selection of tags. Perhaps with Yelp and Facebook they serve some sort of algorithmic sorting function. You might start by adding one or two symbols at a time ('M' for Misleading, 'laugh emoji' for Funny) and build up to your complex vocabulary of tags over time. Starting with a complex menu is a recipe for choice paralysis.
Set up an economy instead, so you don't have to program all the subtlety of human judgment. Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like. So people who make comments readers value, for any and all reasons, complex or subtle, will earn more tokens, which they can then use to post additional comments.
The reason to insist on readers needing to pay their own tokens to reward a comment they like is to avoid the piling on, either positively or negatively, that happens when there is no cost to the reader to upvote or downvote. If you allow readers to award a varying number of their own tokens, people who feel really strongly can have more influence (at a higher cost, of course), which means a comment that affects a few people strongly can "sell" for as much as a comment that affects a lot more people but kind of meh. Writers can choose to specialize in high-volume low-innovation but popular comments, or in low-volume high-innovation comments that strongly appeal to a smaller, more discerning crowd -- be either Hyundai or Bentley.
You could also vary the price for posting a comment, make it so that unusually long comments, or comments that contain swear words, or which have/dont have assorted keywords matched up to the topic subject cost more/less.
You could also avoid free-riding by allowing writers, if they are sufficiently confident, to charge a certain price for seeing their comment at all -- meaning, the reader has to pay a certain price to even see the comment in the first place. You better have an awesome reputation as a writer to try this, but some people could pull it off no doubt.
Over time, some writers will become "rich" through making comments that are sell well, and others will become "poor" through making Edsel comments. Then we can set up a taxing authority that will redistribute wealth on the basis of assorted social justice nostrums, leading to class warfare, bitter recriminations, revolution, all the rich tapestery of human society.
That seems like it incentivizes creating multiple accounts to feed your main one tokens.
I did not suggest tokens had any meaning or life outside of a given account, meaning if Carl Pham is impoverished in tokens that have meening in the ACTX ecosystem I didn't suggest any method by which ol' Carl could be given tokens by his cousin Enoch Root who has tons.
But I'm curious: let's say that's possible by some mechanism, tokens can be freely traded back and forth between writers. How does this incentivize the creation of multiple "writer personalities?" And if people created multiple personalities under this economy, would that be bad?
Accounts, not personalities. The claim was
"Make it so it costs a writer tokens to post a comment, and readers can pay writers some of their own tokens for comments they like"
This requires an account to have tokens before it posts, which means new accounts are going to have to start with some, or possibly accumulate them over time. So people will make several accounts to generate extra tokens to fund their posts so they don't have to worry about running out.
I am curious of how many physicists are present in the rationalist movement (compared to other studies)?
I ask because when I was an high schooler i was attracted to transhumanism and rationalism and i assumed that studying physics i would have found more people interested in it. However, some years later, i know noone in my institute that knows what rationalism, effective altruism or ssc are.
(Personally, studying physics made me grow skeptic of some of the "accepted wisdom" (coff drexler coff) so maybe this has some selection effect)
3% of the respondents to the 2020 SSC survey described their profession as Physics: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/
Here is a rough answer. Take the petition asking the NYT not to doxx Scott Alexander (https://www.dontdoxscottalexander.com/signatures). Look at the full list of signatures. Ctrl+F+Physics. 93 out of 7500 signatories are physicists. Of course, some (many) may simply be fans of Scott's writing without considering themselves `rationalists' (and there may be others who do consider themselves rationalists but were too chicken to sign the petition).
Few physicists I know really give a rat's ass about the structure of human society beyond some vague wish that it not be too intrusive or too shocking to inhabit, and even fewer are strongly interested in subtle issues of the philosophy of justice and equity -- if you loved that stuff, you'd go into the liberal arts instead and revel in it.
That includes me. If I feel like I should spend part of my dough helping others, I might be willing to spend 20 minutes listening to an argument about why I should give it to Charity A versus NGO B, but not much more. And chances are I'll just use it to help out a person I already know anyway. So subtle questions about how to best distribute charitable giving are not very interesting to me, certainly not enough to participate in an organized movement.
None of the other formal paraphernalia of the movement seem that interesting, either. As an empiricist I find most attempts at predicting Black Swan (low probablity high impact) events, like AIs becoming intelligent and evil, to be functionally sterile -- I just don't believe the chances of the predictions being accurate are sufficiently greater than zero to be worth any action in particular, and even the discussion seems a bit angels on the head of a pinnish. I'm also not that interested in promoting broad "rational" public discourse, on account of (1) people aren't really like that, so it's ultimately futile, and (2) "rational" discourse can easily fall into a Wikipedia style where mindless rules ("a citation, however lame or unrelated, always improves the argument") substitute for quality of logic, and (3) its not obvious that rational beats emotional all the time anyway. A lot of what we need to communicate with each other as human beans is actually emotional, or gets across better if colored that way, so I'm dubious of the broad social value of making communication more colorless and suffused with syllogisms.
The only reason I would interact with rationalism movement folks is because, on the whole, they tend to be smarter, with a greater variety of experience, express themselves better, and are more tolerant of intellectual diversity -- all of which means they're more interesting to talk to. As a parallel, I find it interesting to talk to seriously religious people, even if I don't share their faith, because they have thought more deeply about subtle existential issues than people who have no religion (other than standard-issue default-mode weak hedonism-materialism-sentimentality).
I don't have an answer, but I would warn against taking a probe of this blog as a general indicator of rationalism or EA, I expect it's much more diverse owing to the larger variety of topics.
Physicists are too smart for this I suppose.
Does pregnancy mess with your immune system in any direction? I have a kid and am pregnant with the second, and my subjective impression is: I was healthy before the kid (including through first pregnancy); I caught a lot of whatever the kid caught as he started going to daycare, including the wave of catch-up infections as people came out of COVID quarantines; I seem to have dodged the last two infections that the kid brought home from school. As an isolated observation, it could have a number of causes, including random luck or the kid recently bringing home kids' diseases that don't jump to adults as much. Or it could be pregnancy ramping up the immune system (if that's true, I'd expect a lot of women to complain of allergies during pregnancy). Or it could be lifestyle choices -- I might be sleeping more, and I'm dutifully taking multivitamins which I normally don't do -- and if that's what's going on, I'd like to know so that I can keep doing it! Statistics probably can't help me disentangle "luck" vs. "I normally run a mild vitamin deficiency," but it might be able to weigh in on whether pregnant women have better immune systems?
Congrats on your second Elena!
Thank you!
The coolest thing that I found with my second was how different they turned out to be from the first. Not necessarily in looks, but in temperament, interests and behaviour.
Enjoy getting to know your new arrival!
From Dr. Victoria Male (lecturer in reproductive immunology at Imperial College) here https://youtu.be/fFudXb8l7H8?t=32:
"A long time ago in the 50s it was suggested that maybe in pregnancy a woman's immune system would be weakened to help her to tolerate the fetus...but actually we now know that really the immune system doesn't get suppressed during pregnancy but it does get changed in some ways. So some people with certain kinds of autoimmune diseases that are really dependent on antibodies will find that their diseases get worse during pregnancy, so you're getting a stronger antibody response. But people who have autoimmune diseases that rely on things more like T-cells, might find that their disease gets better during pregnancy. And similarly we see that pregnant women are more susceptible to some infectious diseases and for some infectious diseases it makes no difference. And for some infectious diseases, actually they seem to do a little bit better."
Thanks!
My pleasure!
I found this interesting treatise about magical fantasy settings -> http://jbr.me.uk/mytho.html (especially parts 5-6), describing how a world that was created ex novo -- without needing to arise from natural/evolutionary processes, or to imitate one -- might look; extremely different from what we are familiar with, in which life is shaped by natural selection, geography by plate tectonics, and so on. (It also contains some IMO less-than-perfectly-fair criticism of traditional fantasy and Tolkien in particular that might rub people here the wrong way; I hope they will not turn you off from the rest.)
Some choice quotes:
"After all, there's no reason to imagine the first appearance of the “gene for magic” would be in a sapient species. [...] So feel free to go and visit some biosphere where the wildlife has developed thaumaturgical powers, but don't come back. If you arrive early enough to find it ruled by parasitic para‐wasps that can turn you into a willing host for their larvae, you're relatively lucky, because all the non‐magical parts of that insect are vestigial. Give it another million years and the place will be a witch's cauldron of cell cultures whose sole purpose is to pump out clouds of retroviral hex‐chromosomes."
"Earth's flora and fauna naturally fall into families sharing large sets of characteristics (toothy, furry, viviparous mammals versus beaky, feathery, oviparous birds) just because all the members of a given family share a common ancestral bodyplan. A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way. [...] Folkloric secondary worlds do often seem to nod in this direction by having furry/feathery hybrids like griffins and owlbears and whatnot, but there shouldn't be any coherent taxonomic groupings to hybridise – the things that look something like lions and something like eagles are liable to turn out to reproduce via acorns."
"... we should anticipate that the creatures tailor‐made for domestication by a beneficent providence would resemble perambulatory mushrooms rather than geese or goats. [...] If predators and parasites and prey aren't all locked in an eternal genetic red‐queen's‐race, there's no point leveraging chromosomal variability with a fancy diploid reproductive mechanism. In other words, there's no practical need for sex [...] Elves themselves [...] aren't going to have any evolutionary vestiges like tailbones or wisdom teeth; everything's there because it's biologically or aesthetically appropriate. [...] Their hands aren't feet that have been put through a minor redesign to make them work better as manipulatory appendages, they're organs designed purely for their current role. And similarly, while we upstart monkeys do our talking with repurposed masticatory organs [...] they have articulatory organs that were designed with that function in mind all along."
"In such a cosmos, living things are special because they're full of élan vital; caterpillars turn into butterflies because they're attracted to the right Platonic form by morphic resonance; and magic works because the meaning of your incantation is a thing in its own right that can have a direct impact on whatever it refers to. [...] If organisms are animated not by adenosine triphosphate but by a ghostly vital essence, having a cerebral cortex as well as a soul is redundant – look at ents, which are remarkably nimble thinkers when you consider that their heads are made of solid wood. [...] that the simplest and most obvious way for messages to get from one mind to another is for them to hop across psionically without ever going near the material plane. That sounds as if it would work much better, but it would mean a setting with no need for conlangs."
I remember reading a fantasy setting that had this as a bit of backstory flavor. The first magic users were single-celled organisms that assembled teeny-tiny ritual circles out of proteins, which became the ancestors of all life on Earth.
For the most part this didn't have a lot of impact on evolution (only humans are smart enough to *consciously* use magic, so all the powerful spells are human-only), but it means that you can do cool "biological magic" like altering your body's cells to secrete magic potions.
> A biome that was Intelligently Designed de novo last Wednesday, with each individual creature a separate expression of its maker's artistry, is never going to end up organised this way.
Nonsense. It would be organized however the Creator wants it to be organized. It might have no coherent taxonomy, it might have extremely coherent taxonomy, or anything in between.
Likewise, from the quote about the magic, it looks like this writing is making a lot of assumptions about how magic would "really" work and then crapping on fantasy authors for not following those assumptions.
Sure, but that would only happen if the Creator was deliberately trying to hide the fact that it was designed intelligently (i.e., the "Satan put dinosaur bones in the soil to test your faith" model of creationism). It's the sort of fact about the Creator that cries out for an explanation, and ideally we'd have a better one than "Because the Author wanted an Earth-like world with a cool creation story, and Last Thursdayism is the only way to reconcile that conflict."
The article does bring up the possibilities you suggested for a Creator in a fantasy setting, but the whole thing is really just a digression. The author's main point is that trying to theorize about how the Elvish language evolved over time is in some sense completely pointless, because it will inevitably raise even bigger questions about about how *anything* in a high fantasy setting is supposed to have evolved over time.
Similarly, the part about magic is saying that you can't solve this problem by removing the Supreme Creator and going "it's a normal evolved world like ours, but with magic" because a world where magic exists isn't going to evolve the same sort of life that Earth did without it.
The bestiary is divided into categories because that means your spells can target the categories and not just be one-enemy-specific garbage. "Effective against flying creatures" is a lot more fun to play with than "effective against bald eagles". And then you can overlap them. Look at Pokemon's mass of intersecting enemy strengths and weaknesses.
And the complaint about creation not allowing the ecosystem is silly, because fantasy stories don't have the big ecosystems with lots of overlap, they have very unique creatures with unique skills and stats. Even in videogames where you have strict palette-swap upgrades of previous creatures, they're unique because they have different stats.
Nothing needs to evolve in a fantasy setting with gods. It's the way it is because the gods knock things into proper orbit whenever it tries to go off-track.
If you are optimizing for that sort of thing you'd probably make categories that are orthogonal to each other with as many combinations as possible, not the tree-like hierarchy produced by evolution. (You make a good point, though: this *is* closer to what fantasy games have than the essay's author suggests.)
Having read that, my conclusion is that the author doesn't really like fantasy and would be much happier with a nice, tidy, hard-science SF doorstopper based on proper physics with plenty of equations peppered throughout, rather than all the icky magic.
To which I will recommend a SF story the author would probably hate:
https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/a-random-world-of-delta-capricorni-aa-also-called-scheddi/
This person seems to have little to no tolerance for *myths* in world-building, which is rich coming from someone insisting on a naturalistic approach based on how things went in our world. Creating myths *is* how things went in our world and nobody much cares about "so how did the dragon fit in the cave, then?" because it's all about the archetypes, innit?
As to the conclusion:
"How would languages work in fantasy fiction if they followed the conventions of European folklore the way the rest of the genre does, which means without overthinking the logic of it all and in particular with no anachronistic linguistics? It seems to me the answer is that things would look something like this:
...Alfese/Angelic: some otherworldly entities communicate via inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter. Fortunately when they want to talk to you they can probably do it in Everyday Speech (but that doesn't mean they're going to be regaling you with thousands of years' worth of Chronicles of the Golden Age Before You Lot Turned Up, because they don't need any of that backplot)."
*Somebody* hasn't read as deeply as they claim to have done! 😁
From "The War of the Jewels", 'Quendi and Eldar', Note on 'the language of the Valar':
"Pengolodh cites a ‘Saying’ of Rúmil: ‘The Eldar took few words from the Valar, for they were rich in words and ready in invention at need. But though the honour which they gave to the Valar might have caused them to take words from their speech, whether needed or not, few words of Valarin could be fitted to Elvish speech without great change or diminution. For the tongues and voices of the Valar are great and stern, and yet also swift and subtle in movement, making sounds that we find hard to counterfeit; and their words are mostly long and rapid, like the glitter of swords, like the rush of leaves in a great wind or the fall of stones in the mountains.’
Pengolodh comments: ‘Plainly the effect of Valarin upon Elvish ears was not pleasing.’ It was, he adds, as may be seen or guessed from what survives, filled with many consonants unfamiliar to the Eldar and alien to the system of their speech."
So Tolkien is ahead of you there, Mr. Ray, on 'inhumanly beautiful musical sounds that no mortal tongue could utter.'
I suppose all the references to Tolkien are because he really is the 800lb gorilla of invented fantasy languages, and can't be dismissed as just another author pulling it out of the air because he was a philologist, so Mr. Ray's disagreement really comes down to "Well *I* wouldn't have done it that way". But if he's sniffy about Middle-earth, I'd love to dump E.R. Eddings' "Zimiavian Chronicles" on top of him and see how he feels!
Maybe. I'm unpersuaded, because I think the author has entirely failed to consider the quite considerable problems of logical self-consistency. For example, it's just not logically consistent to imagine an ecosystem made of perfect predators and hapless prey, the former will just eat all the latter and then starve to death. It's not logically consistent to imagine a world with infinitely puissant and wise benevolent Elves and also hobbits that struggle with assorted economic, existential, or practical problems, because the latter would just apply to the former for help and not have any problems any more -- there *has* to be some reason why the Elves can't or won't solve all the problems, e.g. they're assholes, they don't get it, there's some karmic reason why it's bad.
Coming up with a fully self-consistent and very complex ecosystem is very, very hard. (And indeed many story-telling failures are rooted in implausible levels of logical inconsistency.) This is probably why most people tend to hew pretty close to reality, which has the virtue of being ipso facto logically self-consistent.
More interestingly, it is possible that improving self-consistency remorselessly drives you to something that ends up looking more and more like objective reality. We don't actually know whether a form of existence that is radically different from the one we see around each other is even possible. For all we know, what we see around us is the way it is because it is ultimately not possible for any fully self-consistent system to be nontrivially different.
Nice! I nearly was going to link you to this via email before I realised you posted it. Surprised/not surprised.
I feel like your own excellent work on the worshippers is worth linking to in this context, too! https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/The-Perfect-Being-937640582
That looks like fun. I was wondering whether the Common Tongue in LOTR was actually plausible.
Poor Tolkien! He suffers from having been the forerunner or influence on a lot of fannish material since his time, so his use of a term like "common speech" got turned into D&D "Common Tongue/Common Speech/Common" and so people are a little led astray by that.
To quote at random from the letters where he briefly discusses language:
"What I have, in fact done, is to equate the Westron or wide-spread Common Speech of the Third Age with English; and translate everything, including names such as The Shire, that was in the Westron into English terms, with some differentiation of style to represent dialectal differences.
Languages, however, that were related to the Westron presented a special problem. I turned them into forms of speech related to English. Since the Rohirrim are represented as recent comers out of the North, and users of an archaic Mannish language relatively untouched by the influence of Eldarin, I have turned their names into forms like (but not identical with) Old English. The language of Dale and the Long Lake would, if it appeared, be represented as more or less Scandinavian in character; but it is only represented by a few names, especially those of the Dwarves that came from that region. These are all Old Norse Dwarf-names.
...The Westron or C.S. is supposed to be derived from the Mannish Adunaic language of the Númenóreans, spreading from the Númenórean Kingdoms in the days of the Kings, and especially from Gondor, where it remains spoken in nobler and rather more antique style (a style also usually adopted by the Elves when they use this language). But all the names in Gondor, except for a few of supposedly prehistoric origin, are of Elvish form, since the Númenórean nobility still used an Elvish language, or could. This was because they had been allies of the Elves in the First Age, and had for that reason been granted the Atlantis isle of Númenor."
"In Gondor the generally used language was 'Westron', a lang. about as mixed as mod. English, but basically derived from the native lang. of the Númenóreans ; but Sindarin was an acquired polite language and used by those of more pure N[úmenórean] descent, esp. in Minas Tirith, if they wished to be polite."
"That the Hobbits actually spoke an ancient language of their own is of course a pseudo-historical assertion made necessary by the nature of the narrative. I could provide or invent the original Hobbit language form of all the names that appear in English, like Baggins or Shire, but this would be quite pointless."
So people speak Westron mainly because it *is* a lingua franca like English, due to the influence of Gondor and Arnor in their heydays. The Rohirrim speak their own tongue, but also Westron, because they are allies of Gondor. The Gondorians speak Westron but also Sindarin, at least the more educated and the noble families still do.
The Hobbits speak Westron because (1) they are a branch of Men and (2) they picked up the languages of Men as they migrated westwards and adopted them for their own use. In Bree, Men and Hobbits mingle, so they keep with the 'common tongue' everyone speaks. 'Ancient' Hobbitish is going to be a language equivalent to Old English, see how the word "Hobbit" in Westron was derived from Rohirric "Holbytla".
Mr. Rye seems to be confusing Tolkien's plan of linguistic spread with the SF fandom trope of a Common Speech everyone uses, so since he knows this is a contrivance of convenience, he imagines Tolkien did the same to have a tidy set-up. Since Tolkien was writing stories in English for English-speaking readers, he naturally used English and had the Hobbits speaking English and everyone else speaking English instead of putting in everyone speaking in their own native tongue and needing to be translated. For in-world purposes of explaining 'how does everyone speak the same language, or at least a language everyone understands?', hence Westron.
I've just realized the very obvious kabalistic/punny connotations of "Bangkok", after being in the city twice, and I can't help but be surprised at how long it took or how well it fits.
Was it only at my summer camp that boys new to puberty, wearing boxer shorts, complained about "Bangkok Balls"?
Kind of Beavis and Buttheady though.
You said Bangkok! Heh heh, heh heh.
Also "Phuket"
So it's that time of year when I wonder whether it was really such a great idea for mankind to migrate past 40° N.
Personally, I want this for the circadian effects rather than SAD. For this reason, I'd consider it useful to be able to fade on the light shortly before I need to wake up.
People around here have been DIYing 10klm SAD lamps, capable of irradiating a 1m^2 area as brightly as daylight (not direct sun) on a clear day for a long time. But LED technology has come far since then so I don't think the traditional LessWrong solution of spamming two dozen domestic lightbulbs is necessarily optimal. So what is the current state-of-the-art?
This preprint promotes the moar dakka approach, cranking the brightness up to 100klm.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.29.21265530v1
High-bay lights like this come as a single unit that can be plugged into mains power:
amazon dot co dot uk/Blivrig-Industrial-Lighting-Waterproof-Workshop/dp/B0B6FKL2VG/
Or you can run a much smaller COB at 30V:
amazon dot co dot uk/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Components-Lighting/dp/B01DBZHUXA
This youtuber has done some high power LED builds that replicate sunlight pretty well in terms of rays being parallel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw&list=PLOJU8YJjFwGN0hMRewz2_u2IefV-vipsk
One of the big challenges seems to be thermal management. By volume, these things are 90% heat sink. Assuming a luminous efficacy of 100lm/W (this is kind of worst-case nowadays) and a brightness of 10klm, we need to dissipate around 100W of heat. The LEDs don't want to go much above 80°C so we have a ΔT of around 60K to play with. Apparently that's close enough to what CPUs need nowadays that you can use heat sinks designed for them. The other, crazier idea I just had was to get a small radiator (either one meant to be on a wall filled with water or a freestanding oil radiator) and dump heat into there, as they are often designed to output a few hundered watts of heat. This could be done either by attaching the heat source directly or using it as the reservoir for a liquid-cooled system.
I'm not sure how best to orient the lighting. I want to make sure a lot of light reaches my eyes but not to dazzle me. Perhaps uplighting would work. I also have plans involving fresnel lenses.
Colour Rendering Index may or may not be important. I'll be buying cheapo LEDs for now but they could be easily retrofitted with ones that produce a more realsitic sunlight effect.
N.B. Links broken to make this post look less spammy. Products are random ones I saw. Not necessarily the best or even good.
So does anybody here have experience with stupidly bright LEDs and/or SAD lamps?
Im 53° and fine. Make your house comfortable and get out during the sunlight.
Most of humanity's great achievements happened north of that parallel. I grew up at 59° N (Stockholm) and later migrated to 36° N (Malta), and the move does appear to have had a strong positive effect on my mood, but it might also have made me more inclined to enjoying a drink by sea as opposed to spending time on some nerdier pursuit more likely to benefit humanity.
A nice benefit of the Euro Zone. For humanity’s sake you should really go back to the cold and dark and put the finishing touches on safe cheap cold fusion though. jk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw&t=16s
Simulated sunlight, not just the color and the brightness, but also with parallel rays.
I'm at 47.5° N too. I've used the SunUp dawn simulator for years - it's basically a programmable dimmer with a 400W receptacle, into which I currently plug a 150W halogen. The only problem is that they aren't being made any more, but I hear that you can get them on eBay sometimes. (There's also a lesser version called the SunRizr, which isn't as programmable.)
For interior lighting, I have track lighting, and I've gone in the direction of lots and lots of fixtures, rather than single super-bright lights. It's a 2-track setup, so for one track I have 5000K temperature bulbs, and on the other I have dimmable 2700K bulbs. And the great part about LEDs is that I can add *even more* to the tracks. In the day I turn on the daylight bulbs, and maybe the yellow ones as well, and as it gets dark, I turn off the daylight bulbs, and then dim the yellow ones. The bulbs can be a bit bright for naked eyes, so when possible I shade them, or bounce the light off a wall or ceiling.
After doing some research, I've been going for Philips LED bulbs, especially the 2175 lumen BR40s. They seem to last long, have 90+CRI, dim smoothly and without flickering, and are widely available. From what I can tell, the limiting factor in LED bulb lifetime is not the LEDs themselves, but the circuitry in the bulbs, which is damaged by the heat. So no matter how good a particular light-emitting diode is, if the company that assembled the circuitry doesn't have experience, the bulbs will die faster. Also, the brighter they are, the faster they die. And the more complicated the electronics inside, the faster they die. From what I've heard, anyway.
I grew up at 47.5 but relocated to a noticeably warmer area at 45. I get a bit down when the sun sets before 5 PM but it never turned into anything like SAD.
I visit 45.5 fairly often, but I haven't noticed much of a difference, especially not compared to the 37ish where I grew up.
Yeah the difference between northern Minnesota and the Twin Cities is most noticeable at the beginning and end of winter. Generally being a couple degrees North of where I live means the first snow is a couple weeks earlier and true spring is a couple weeks later. The lilacs bloom in mid may in Mpls and in late May to early June in ‘Frostbite Falls’ territory.
I’m talking about climate in this case not weather. As Red Skeleton used to joke “Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.”
I didn't really get any SAD symptoms until I lived around 47.5° N for a couple years. That was a while back, before LED bulbs were available as more than an expensive novelty. I did get marginal improvement by swapping all of the dim CFL bulbs the landlord had installed in my apartment for 100W equivalent halogens.
I currently live at about 37° N, which isn't far north at all: only half a degree north of the Missouri Compromise line. I do have some super-bright LEDs, though, since I like my workspaces nice and bright. For general illumination in existing light fixtures, the search term is "corn bulb": these have standard Edison socket attached to a big, honking heat sink with lots of LED chips mounted all around its surface. It's a quick, easy, and relatively cheap way to retrofit a fixture designed for incandescents or halogens with something considerably brighter. I've got a two-bulb wall sconce in my office loaded with a pair of 200W-equivalent (6000 Lumens total) corn bulbs.
I'm constrained by the size of my fixture, but without that constraint you can get corn bulbs in the 15-20 klm range. Since these have the heat sinks built in, you shouldn't need to rig up custom cooling as long as there's relatively free air flow around the bulbs.
If you do want to play around with computer heat sinks, Noctua's generally considered the top brand for air coolers. NH-D15 is their top-of-the-line model, consisting of two big bricks of cooling fins with a pair of 140mm fans forcing air through them. It's designed with an overclocked top-of-the-line consumer desktop CPU in mind, so it should handily deal with 200W or so of heat. It's a little on the spendy side, though (about $US100), and you'll need to rig up a power supply (12V DC) for the fans somehow.
Noctua also makes a passive cooler, the NH-P1, which relies on convection only with no fans. It's pretty big, though, and can't deal with quite as much wattage as the fan-driven air coolers.
I’m at about 45 degrees N. I’ve found that if I get together with my friends on December 21 and bang on pots and pans real loud, the sun will start to come back. It’s worked so far anyway.
Any recommendations for what could be called a "recreational chemistry" nonfiction book or blog? Basically, I feel like I have a huge hole in my knowledge of chemistry, and that bothers me since chemistry underlies so much technology. I don't have the will to self-study chemistry textbooks, so I was wondering if there are any "fun" books that could also improve my chemistry literacy. In case it matters, I'm good with math and physics, so not afraid of seeing equations in the text.
"Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" is written in a very casual-friendly and entertaining style, but will teach you plenty about the chemistry of various things that go 'boom' 'foom' or various other entertaining noises. and you can get a pdf version for free legally here:
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
Ignition! has also been republished in hardcopy and Kindle formats.
https://a.co/b409d7t
Derek Lowe seems to me the obvious recommendation, so I'll make it since no one else has yet: https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline
Focus is on chemistry in the service of drug discovery, but he writes very well on that topic, if that interests you
My mind went somewhere entirely different from the phrase "recreational chemistry" :D
I was going to link to eg. https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics
Theo Gray's books might be good. I haven't read them myself, but they sell very well, he knows his chemistry decently -- he went as far as a few years into a chem PhD at Berkeley -- and the books are heavily and creatively illustrated. Lots of big-name endorsement, too:
http://home.theodoregray.com/printed-products
https://graysci.com/
The Royal Society has a nice sober blog on chemistry topics:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/
If you want to wander around a webite that was assembled over many years, starting back in the dark ages of HTML v2.0 or so, probably once had a <blink> tag or two, which digs into all kinds of odd little corners, Jim Clark's website is fascinating and does not patronize, the way far too many pop-science resources do:
https://www.chemguide.co.uk/index.html
I ran across this article: There is No Liberal West (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/there-is-no-liberal-west). I suppose I always thought freedom of speech for example was seriously under attack, but seeing it all laid out like this is rather striking:
> Of course Yousaf and his comrades argue they have no intention to chill freedom of expression, but few can take this seriously, given how many people in Scotland have already been arrested for speech and thought crimes – people like Marion Millar, a feminist who faced prosecution this April for the “transphobic” act of tweeting a photo of a suffragette ribbon and “#WomenWontWheesht” (women won’t shut up). Already, between 2008 and 2018 there were 7,618 convictions for speech under the existing Communications Act of 2003, which the new legislation seeks to significantly strengthen. In Scotland, even filming your pug doing tricks can lead to the police showing up at your door. Maybe we should head south.
> But it would of course be untenable for England – home of John Locke and John Stewart Mill – to be left behind by the Scots, so the rest of Britain is rushing to catch up. Britain now launches manhunts for 12-year-olds who allegedly send racist messages on social media, convicts teenagers of hate crimes for quoting rap lyrics in general circulation (fitting them with ankle monitoring bracelets for extra public safety), and jails people for offensive jokes. But the real innovation of the nation of George Orwell has been the invention of the “Non-Crime Hate Incident” – a brilliant category encompassing anything the police deem to potentially be offensive to someone, somewhere. That was the lesson learned by the unfortunate Harry Miller, whose 2019 tweets about gender were reported anonymously to police, who then quickly stormed into his workplace to “check his thinking.” Some 25,000 such incidents are now investigated by UK police each year, with each case filed in a permanent record that shows up in employment background checks even if no crime is ever prosecuted.
It is regrettable that Freedom of Speech is only really protected in the USA, and depressingly unpopular almost everywhere....
So what can be done about the massive homeless encampments in America? My brother recently went to Denver and was quite shocked by them. He also commented that they seemed to be populated by the mentally ill (unlike in Puerto Rico, where there are no encampments but the homeless seem to be mainly drug addicts, sometimes falling apart with disease), which jives with what I saw in Portland. I once heard that this happened because the big state psychiatric hospitals were forced to shut down, so maybe the homeless do need to forcibly interned?
I am somewhat skeptical about the provide housing solution. I happened to have a neighbor who both went insane and became a drug addict and he completely trashed his house (which was paid for and maintained by his dad) and became homeless all the same.
Its not going to change anyones opinion but it should be noted that the rate of homelessness and the raw number of homeless people is down since 2007:
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/
Though there is a good rise since 2018 particularly in unhoused individuals (but numbers are still below 2007).
It would, however, shed some light on why there are all these encampments. Or maybe where. They're renowned in LA, SF, and NY. Are they rampant elsewhere? Were the people in tent cities today on scattered park benches previously? And did they all gather to LA/SF/NY from somewhere else? Did Somewhere Else's homeless count drop -way- down in the past few years as a consequence?
Indications from my city are that a lot of them come from elsewhere, but mostly regionally connected. Like rain in a watershed basin, all flowing into the same river that goes by the same port city. Probably people in this situation gravitate toward the closest big city that offers social services and low enforcement of drug laws. Mild winters are a plus.
I kinda suspect that there's a ongoing crisis in America of people slipping into homelessness and drug addiction, but that it isn't very visible where it's happening. Instead it looks to an observer like major blue cities are having an eruption of homelessness., but that's just because that's where they all end up.
Melvin hits an interesting point. I used to live in Denver, a long time ago, and it had no such problems. But then they legalized weed and got flexible on drugs in general, and shazam parts of Denver have turned into weird little Red Lectroid nests. I don't know, maybe assuming absolutely everybody over 12 is fully competent to deal with mind-altering chemicals isn't the best public policy, even though it makes the life of suburban middle-class recreational stoners much easier, but I think we're all a little baffled by what would be provably better.
I'm by no means an expert, but my vague impression is that the bulk of the chronically homeless are some combination of drug addicted and mentally ill, and nothing will ever change until those twin scourges are dealt with in less of an ad hoc or fitful manner.
I'd suggest that causation might work slightly differently - if a city legalizes weed, that makes existing homeless people more likely to go there. I can tell that this is thing where I live, because there have been complaints about it, and the pushback has quoted statistics about 90-some-% being local, and then a bit later it came out that living here for 6 months is enough to count as a "long-time resident".
(LOL at the "Red Lectroid Nest".)
Yeah that makes sense. I'm sure it's a fiendishly complex problem, with many intersecting lines of causation, 'cause it involves people, which are complex creatures.
No, I don’t think it was the weed. Homeless encampments started to spring up in the Twin Cities about the same time that Colorado legalized pot. Minnesota just made THC gummies legal in July if this year.
Well, I'm willing to believe Minneapolis/St. Paul is in its own special category of urban crisis, like Portland and Detroit. Seems unusually dysfunctional these days for a Midwestern city surrounded by Ole and Lena types. Maybe SAD has finally unhinged everybody, or it's something in the venison.
Also I think the argument would be stronger if it went "Minneapolis legalized pot at the same time as Denver and did not turn into a dump." I'm pretty willing to believe there are additional reasons for visible Skid Rows, beyond a more relaxed social attitude towards drug use and easier access to drugs. In LA you can sleep outside year round with just a tarp and a blanket, so that probably has something to with it having a much more visible street person population than, say, Dawson Creek.
Anyway, the key proposition to test is: if you considerably reduced drug abuse, and got schizophrenics into treatment and/or homes, would you significantly reduce the population on the streets? If it's the case that Singapore lacks a big homeless population -- I wouldn't know, never been there -- and Singapore notoriously has the strictest drug laws in the world, vigorously enforced, then that's some formidable evidence right there.
Enforce drug laws.
Ah yes, we just need to fight the War on Drugs harder, that should work. Just need to throw another *trillion*[1] dollars of taxpayer money at the problem, it'll definitely work this time.
I would give a list of sources on why the economics on that really, really don't work out (and have been thoroughly demonstrated not to), but thankfully others have done that for me: https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/chapter/economics
[1] This is not an exaggeration; 2022 spending alone was almost $40 *billion*: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FY-2023-Budget-Highlights.pdf
How come it works in Singapore?
The US has never had a war on drugs. "War on Drugs" was just a slogan to cover up the half arsed approach that the US has always taken.
Good luck getting the US to take drug law enforcement seriously when the President's own son is a crackhead though.
For one thing Singapore is more or less an island, and pretty densely populated. I imagine smuggling the stuff in is a lot harder. And their government is far more efficient, so I’d imagine their war on drugs is more competently prosecuted
Singapore has about 1,000 homeless in a population of 5.5 million, which is about 70-300x lower than Denver's homelessness rate. However, in addition to differences in drug laws, Singapore also has an aggressive program of building cheap public housing, as well as having a border so it can have its own immigration policy.
The death penalty for trafficking probably helps.
Agreed. Start shooting drug traffickers.
Do you have an infallible omniscient list of drug traffickers we are supposed to shoot, or is it just anyone who looks like they're probably a drug trafficker, or who is carrying a lot of cash, or whatever?
And, if four college girls pool their money so that one of them can go buy some weed for their party, do we shoot that one girl for being a trafficker? Because one of those girls grew up to be a friend of mine, and a good mother and a skilled coder.
Putting drug dealers in jail for years at a time would be enough if we could do it quickly and reliably to all of them, but we can't do that because we'd get too many innocent bystanders at the same time. Shooting drug dealers *won't* work if it only comes at the end of a lengthy trial and usually not even then because the juries will nullify in this scenario, but we really do have to have the trials.
The only people we're allowed to gun down on sight, are the ones who go around the streets shooting unarmed or otherwise generally peaceable citizens on sight.
I mean, there's a lot of evidence it *did not* result in a more functional society. We have higher rates of teen and adult drug abuse, and obscenely higher rates of incarceration, than almost any first world nation. Yes, some of that is due to geographic distribution of drug production, but at least *some* of the blame has to fall on the policy we've had for 40 years not being effective.
You and I have very different perceptions of the world (as seems typical for our discussions) if you think the "current approach" is not still following the line of the war on drugs. (Those enforcement numbers keep going up, after all)
It's still very clearly focused on judicial and carceral solutions. I'd like the orders of magnitudes to actually be switched between that and "treatment and harm reduction" (maybe along with a touch of the housing model from Singapore, as another comment pointed out) and then see whether an *actually* different strategy pays off.
Maybe even try something truly wild - build a bunch of low/virtually-no cost dorm-style housing in the central valley, and legalize all drugs (even opiates), there, with harm reduction in place, ship druggies there for free if they want to work.
Well, even if you do, the US Surgeon General estimates the annual cost of illegal drug abuse at a cool $193 billion annually:
https://addiction.surgeongeneral.gov/executive-summary
If you trace that back to the actual source[1], where they give a more detailed accounting, ~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*) and for "Criminal Justice System" costs, which are going have a huge overlap with that $40 billion above (otherwise ~$50b to persecute 1b of property crime doesn't seem like great ROI).
The only things which aren't an indirect cost of enforcement are the non-incarcerated labor costs, which they estimate at ~$30b, and health.
Although I'm skeptical of the "lost productivity" numbers, and you should also be more so, since "they would be perfectly productive member of society if they weren't on drugs" seems like a pretty leftist position.
(Maybe they go more into this in the methodology section, but I don't have time to comb through it. I'd love to see Scott do a more detailed analysis of this at some point, actually.)
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs44/44731/44731p.pdf
"~$50b and ~$55b of that are "lost productivity due to incarceration" (i.e. people who are out of the work force *because of the war on drugs*)"
I somehow doubt that every single person convicted for drug possession/dealing would be a hard-working citizen instead. Some certainly would, but that would be *after* they get clean. Maintaining a drug habit *and* steady working is difficult, at least for working/lower middle-class level.
People who abuse drugs don't always, or even usually in my experience, go to jail because of the drugs per se. Prosesecuting low-level drug-only crimes is not high on any DAs list of priorities. People end up in jail because they commit crimes to support a drug habit, or because they do something bad while drunk or high.
So imagining that legalizing drugs across the board would magically prevent drunk driving deaths, or people stealing shit or committing fraud to afford a $1000/day coke habit, or murdering each other over drug turf wars, or for that matter make any significant desirable change in work absenteeism, failures in school or life because you're fucked up, or the implosion of marriages and famlies, is either naive or the result of being in the firm grip of ideology.
I know the mayor of Austin TX appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast a few months ago, talking about this exact problem. I *think* they got on top of it, and the lesson there was "early treatment" - they got on it before it got as bad as SF or LA. But I don't remember exactly what they did.
I'm sure it's addressable later; just more expensive per person. How many cities are at the level of "we need to drop everything else"? Or just "this is the #1 issue for enough voters for it to matter in an election"?
Hmm, I found this article about it: https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/austin-mayor-tells-joe-rogan-what-he-wouldve-done-differently-to-tackle-homelessness, it doesn't seem they've gotten on top of it. But he does say there's "there’s a 90-95% success rate that the person can reintegrate back into society and sustain themselves in a positive way. " if they're housed. But I don't get it, how does that work with drug addiction and mental illness (even if the person developed the mental illness as a result of homelessness)?