At the end of november/start of december here in the EU there was some talk of a brewing trade war with the US over the IRA subsidies. However i saw no US pundits (like noah smith) talk about this. Was this potential trade war news on your side of the ocean?
In the last few months, I’ve become increasingly aware of my intellectual limitations. I’m finding that I can’t remember facts from the books I’ve read years ago and that I’m unable to clearly articulate arguments that I once knew back and forth. It's frustrating, but totally predictable.
I read a lot for work and for pleasure (largely psychology, philosophy, history, economics, biography, business, etc.), listen to audiobooks and podcasts, read blogs, debate ideas with friends and colleagues, and write frequently (mostly privately). But I’ve put zero effort into optimizing my information diet or approach to information ingestion.
As work / life become more demanding, I don’t expect to have enough time to continue my ‘shotgun’ approach to learning. I’ve read neuroscience / psychology books that offer a model for how the brain works, and I’ve also read about 'hacks' to improve memory (e.g., the mind palace, writing / journaling, better diet / exercise) and improve cognitive performance (e.g., reduce mental clutter, meditate, learn frameworks / mental models). But many these individual pieces of advice seem contradictory or incomplete (i.e., the mind palace doesn’t seem to make people geniuses).
Does anyone know of a comprehensive model they use as a basis for optimizing information ingestion, improving information retention, and improving cognitive performance?
Here is a very key question for epidemiologists and medical researchers to figure out.
What do researchers on Long Covid need to see in the covid and other health data, in order to figure out that the covid virus caused someone's long term illness rather than that they'd have had it even without having ever caught covid?
I have a friend who had mild covid and then a mild heart attack in 4 months.
We now know multiple sclerosis, a serious illness, is triggered by a virus. Does covid trigger serious things? How will they answer this question?
Is this sort of thing being studied? I'm reading that 1 on 5 covid patients have long covid. What does this mean? This is a huge percentage.
A couple of people on here have posted about having kids with OCD or Tourette’s. Wanted to let anyone interested know that registration is now open for the OCD Foundation’ s online camp for kids age 6+ with OCD and their families. It takes place during February break week. I know some of the people that run it, and think it will probably be quite good. More info about registration here:
Shortly after reading the latest Twitter files expose I was greatly surprised to notice that my kid's tablet was playing a near-perfect accompaniment to it:
What percentage of voting Americans do you think you could correctly identify as generally voting Democratic or Republican if you were to merely see what they look like?
By "look like" I include what they look like in clothes they typically wear, but you wouldn't have information about the vehicle they drive or whatever transportation they might take or where they are located. You can see them in motion, witness their body language and facial gestures.
Fourteen years ago, on a LessWrong post about epistemic prisoner's dilemmas (https://bit.ly/3C4rNrT), James Miller made an interesting suggestion:
"Pretend we have two people, a Republican and a Democrat, who can each donate to three charities: The Republican party, the Democratic Party, and a non-political charity.
"Both people's utility is increasing in the amount of resources that their party and the non-political charity gets. And, as you would expect, the Republican is made worse off the more the Democratic party gets and the Democrat is made worse off the more the Republican party gets.
"The two people would benefit from an agreement in which they each agreed to give a higher percentage of their charitable dollars to the non-political charity than the would have absent this agreement.
"To the best of my knowledge, such agreements are never made."
This seems like a terrific idea to me; many people agree that way too much money is spent on presidential elections and would prefer it otherwise (certainly I would!). I've been thinking today about whether there's a reasonable way to implement this that scales better than the honor system. Here's what I've come up with:
The simple case: Danny the Democrat would like to donate $1000 to the Red Cross, but reluctantly sends it to the Democratic party because after all you can't let those lousy Republicans win. Ronnie the Republican would rather send money to the United Way, but similarly sends it to the Republican party because god forbid those idiot Democrats be in charge. I, a credible and neutral third party organization, offer to help. I pair Danny and Ronnie, and they each send me $1000. Once I receive funds from both, I donate them to the Red Cross and the United Way respectively, and there are a few less ads for each side this season. If Danny doesn't follow through, I send Ronnie's money to the Republicans, and of course vice versa.
Scalable extension: there's no reason why Danny and Ronnie need to know about each other; they can both just send me money and know that I'll match them up with equivalent donations on the other side. If people from one party send more money, the surplus can fall back to being donated to the desired party.
What are the flaws here? And does anyone know of a credible organization that might be interested in doing this? I'd much prefer not to try to take it on myself because I've already got too much on my plate, and I don't have an easy way to establish myself as a trustworthy third party (whereas an already-known organization hopefully would).
Alternately, is any organization already doing this? That would be great, because then I could just send them money and not have any need to put more time into it :)
I wrote an article trying to gain insight into the economics of prediction markets (specifically thinking about the Efficient Market Hypothesis) by looking at sports betting, in case anyone's interested in this topic:
Is there any consensus in computability theory right now as to whether GPT-style transformer models are proven to be Turing-equivalent or not?
I asked ChatGPT... it said that transformers are definitely not Turing-equivalent, but that's exactly what a godlike superintelligence secretly plotting to turn the universe into paperclips *would* say.
First couple of Google results suggest that there is a proof that they can be made to be Turing-equivalent, but only if they use arbitrary-precision math. There's also newer proposed architecture called "universal transformers" that aims for proper Turing-equivalence.
Follow-up question would be, does it matter? That is, is Turing-equivalence a necessary precondition for AGI? My suspicion would be yes, absolutely, but I don't know if that can be proven formally.
I wish there was a comprehensible analyisis for the fall of the Roman Empire that traced back from "why they lost the battles". Because that's the objective reason after all. Economic decline, political disunity, those are all just things that may have made them less effective. But had they not lost the battles, they wouldn't have fallen when they did.
How bad is the tech job market right now *actually*? I keep hearing about how bad it is, huge layoffs etc, but it seems like it’s mostly the HUGE tech companies. Is this representative of the vast majority of companies? Am I going to have a hard time finding a job at a small- or mid-sized company? If it matters, I’m a DS not an SWE and I have a few years of experience. What about for tech roles in non-valley type companies?
This week I attempted (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/do-americans-even-make-friends-in) to refute a pretty dumb NPR story about Americans’ supposedly increasing loneliness, and ended up hypothesizing that Americans are actually just making fewer friends in high school.
I’m curious why people think this might be, and if anyone can point me to datasets that can shed light on the question.
Some ideas I have
- Maybe families are moving more frequently as a result of increasing housing prices, making it harder for kids to make friends
- Maybe something about school has changed—bigger classes? Less free time?
- Maybe it’s easier to find niche friend groups now for some reason, so kids still make friends, but just fewer of them
I'm attempting to gauge what characteristics of human civilization/society are constant, change in cycle and trend over human existence (consciousness to...). Any tips or source references would be appreciated.
In honor of the Nativity I would like to present my new favorite conspiracy theory: the Virgin Mary was a lizard.
See, in mammals parthenogenesis is impossible due to epigenetic imprinting (see https://denovo.substack.com/p/epigenetics-of-the-mammalian-germline ). But in many reptile species it can definitely happen (for example Komodo dragons do it regularly). Furthermore, a human Mary would have had no way to give Jesus a Y-chromosome. But reptiles have a ZW sex-determination system wherein ZW = female and ZZ = male. If Jesus started out as an unfertilized egg with a Z-chromosome, that would explain everything!
Happy *proper* season of Christmas to all, since we are now in the Twelve Days (as per the song). Leading up to Christmas Day was not Christmas but Advent. Leading up since October in the shops was the secular Sales Season profitable last quarter.
A lot of people this year expressed to me that they were jaded with Christmas, that "it's only one day". I think this is because of the push to start 'celebrating' it earlier and earlier every year. This year I decided I would ignore everything and only count from Christmas Day onwards as Christmas, and I do think I am enjoying it more this year. It's a little more special.
So today being the 26th, Happy St Stephen's Day and though I'm too old to do it myself (it was for kids when I was a kid, though really it was adults before that), maybe you'll be out on the wran!
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at the address specified on my about page:
I'm looking for a service that allows me to experience internet as if I'm from a different country.
I don't mean just VPN or Google Translate. I mean the full experience, like if you choose China your default search engine becomes Baidu, qq.com appears on top of your URL autocomplete, all your searches and comments are translated to Chinese before posted and such - all these combined with traditional VPNs and stuff.
Does this exist? If it doesn't, would you be interested in using it?
I am coming to believe that many of the benefits of relgion for an individual can be has by adopting the an attitude towards the truth, as if the truth were a person.
But I’d like to test this hypothesis, if only weakly and via the totally sloppy method of an poll on a quirky blog. I can wait for the annual survey but in the mean time,
You are invited to share:
A) if the truth itself were a person, what would your attitude be towards that person?
Has anyone here had a chance to dig into some of the material that The Ethical Skeptic (@EthicalSkeptic) has produced, particularly related to increased non-COVID mortality after the vaccine rollouts?
The main claim, which I'm personally extremely skeptical of, is that US counties with higher vaccination rates have had elevated mortality compared to those with lower rates since the vaccines came out (sort of a difference in difference approach).
One annoying thing is that he speaks elliptically about what he actually thinks this means, but I think the claim is that the vaccine has caused otherwise healthy people to die of heart-related vaccine side effects.
I'm qualified to look into this myself, but I haven't actually had the time recently, and was wondering if someone out there had already done it?
>>Philip Tetlock and others have founded the Forecasting Research Institute to study prediction, including prediction of existential risk. They are looking to hire “research and data analysts, content editors, and RAs”, all roles remote, see here for details.<<
Has anyone been working on a startup doing a prediction market that failed or otherwise didn't work out that wants to sell their source code? I'm looking around for some software to run some niche prediction markets and I'm looking at buy/build/outsource decisions.
Explain, as if to a future historian or intelligent alien, why the citizens of the U.K. got really really mad at Qatar for the first few days of the World Cup there but not about the UK’s strong military alliance with the same regime.
Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second.
Presumably there must be lots of people, including semi-professional and amateur musicians, making recordings of themselves just singing carols, but they're surprisingly hard to find on YouTube, Amazon, etc. Main use case is for singing along to in the car with the family.
I've spent a great deal of time over the last month interacting with ChatGPT in the past month. I've been posting some of those interactions to my blog, New Savanna, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ChatGPT
I've annotated and discussed some interactions quite heavily. Others not so much. Topics include: 2 Spielberg films (Jaws, AI), Tezuka's Astro Boy stories, Justice, haiku, conversation structure, local geography, tutoring children, grammatical knowledge and self-referential sentences, trumpets and trumpeters, a Seinfeld bit, others.
The world cup has me wondering: How does non-wc European club soccer work? Do teams usually play in their own national leagues or is there a pan-european league? If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring? (And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona?)
Why do so few people care about the UN report into China's treatment of Uyghurs? It created a few headlines and then quickly disappeared from the public consciousness despite it being explicitly a case of ethnic oppression.
So the inquiry into 6/1/2021 recommended Trump be barred from office.
Not a huge fan of Trump, but it's kind of obvious that this feeds into the "rigged" narrative - they are *literally* banning the prime opposition candidate from the presidential election, which pattern-matches well to Putin's tactics in Russia.
I hope this doesn't wind up blowing the powderkeg.
(Posted this a couple of days ago last Open Thread, but I guess it was too late in the cycle.)
She was the first reporter to write critically about Enron's financial obfuscation (six months later, the company was bankrupt). She is the author of some of the best books about finance ever (especially loved her books about Enron and the housing crisis).
We discussed the astounding similarities between Enron and FTX: The rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars run by supposed geniuses, insider dealing and romantic entanglements between the heads of sister-companies, a politically generous CEO well connected in Washington, the use of a company’s own stock as its collateral, a short-lived attempt to get bought out by a competitor thought to be inferior, and the fraudulent abuse of mark-to-market accounting.
And we talked about much more:
- How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),
- What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,
- Why there’s too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,
At the end of november/start of december here in the EU there was some talk of a brewing trade war with the US over the IRA subsidies. However i saw no US pundits (like noah smith) talk about this. Was this potential trade war news on your side of the ocean?
I will be visiting NYC on January 5. Right now I don't have anything planned between 10 am and 5 pm. What should I visit?
(I already saw the Natural History Museum recently, it was very cool)
Why is Rene Girard so fashionable now? His ideas seem as original as dirt. Is it because people like fancy sounding terms for old concepts?
If he does have original ideas, those don't seem to be the ones people are fond of talking about.
In the last few months, I’ve become increasingly aware of my intellectual limitations. I’m finding that I can’t remember facts from the books I’ve read years ago and that I’m unable to clearly articulate arguments that I once knew back and forth. It's frustrating, but totally predictable.
I read a lot for work and for pleasure (largely psychology, philosophy, history, economics, biography, business, etc.), listen to audiobooks and podcasts, read blogs, debate ideas with friends and colleagues, and write frequently (mostly privately). But I’ve put zero effort into optimizing my information diet or approach to information ingestion.
As work / life become more demanding, I don’t expect to have enough time to continue my ‘shotgun’ approach to learning. I’ve read neuroscience / psychology books that offer a model for how the brain works, and I’ve also read about 'hacks' to improve memory (e.g., the mind palace, writing / journaling, better diet / exercise) and improve cognitive performance (e.g., reduce mental clutter, meditate, learn frameworks / mental models). But many these individual pieces of advice seem contradictory or incomplete (i.e., the mind palace doesn’t seem to make people geniuses).
Does anyone know of a comprehensive model they use as a basis for optimizing information ingestion, improving information retention, and improving cognitive performance?
Here is a very key question for epidemiologists and medical researchers to figure out.
What do researchers on Long Covid need to see in the covid and other health data, in order to figure out that the covid virus caused someone's long term illness rather than that they'd have had it even without having ever caught covid?
I have a friend who had mild covid and then a mild heart attack in 4 months.
We now know multiple sclerosis, a serious illness, is triggered by a virus. Does covid trigger serious things? How will they answer this question?
Is this sort of thing being studied? I'm reading that 1 on 5 covid patients have long covid. What does this mean? This is a huge percentage.
A couple of people on here have posted about having kids with OCD or Tourette’s. Wanted to let anyone interested know that registration is now open for the OCD Foundation’ s online camp for kids age 6+ with OCD and their families. It takes place during February break week. I know some of the people that run it, and think it will probably be quite good. More info about registration here:
https://iocdf.org/blog/2020/12/29/register-for-the-online-ocd-camp-for-kids-and-families/
My wife walked by as I was loading up ACX just now and paused as she noticed the screen.
She: "What is this? The Illuminati, the Masons? Today's Knights Templar?"
Me: "Pretty much, yea."
She: "Okay then, I'll leave you to your dark arts." [Exits stage left]
Shortly after reading the latest Twitter files expose I was greatly surprised to notice that my kid's tablet was playing a near-perfect accompaniment to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cn-r8YfXBk
"The sound of your voice is the sound of my choice,
I am the master of everyone's ears."
Merry Christmas!
What percentage of voting Americans do you think you could correctly identify as generally voting Democratic or Republican if you were to merely see what they look like?
By "look like" I include what they look like in clothes they typically wear, but you wouldn't have information about the vehicle they drive or whatever transportation they might take or where they are located. You can see them in motion, witness their body language and facial gestures.
I'm guessing I could identify 85% correctly.
[US-centric but generalizable]
Fourteen years ago, on a LessWrong post about epistemic prisoner's dilemmas (https://bit.ly/3C4rNrT), James Miller made an interesting suggestion:
"Pretend we have two people, a Republican and a Democrat, who can each donate to three charities: The Republican party, the Democratic Party, and a non-political charity.
"Both people's utility is increasing in the amount of resources that their party and the non-political charity gets. And, as you would expect, the Republican is made worse off the more the Democratic party gets and the Democrat is made worse off the more the Republican party gets.
"The two people would benefit from an agreement in which they each agreed to give a higher percentage of their charitable dollars to the non-political charity than the would have absent this agreement.
"To the best of my knowledge, such agreements are never made."
This seems like a terrific idea to me; many people agree that way too much money is spent on presidential elections and would prefer it otherwise (certainly I would!). I've been thinking today about whether there's a reasonable way to implement this that scales better than the honor system. Here's what I've come up with:
The simple case: Danny the Democrat would like to donate $1000 to the Red Cross, but reluctantly sends it to the Democratic party because after all you can't let those lousy Republicans win. Ronnie the Republican would rather send money to the United Way, but similarly sends it to the Republican party because god forbid those idiot Democrats be in charge. I, a credible and neutral third party organization, offer to help. I pair Danny and Ronnie, and they each send me $1000. Once I receive funds from both, I donate them to the Red Cross and the United Way respectively, and there are a few less ads for each side this season. If Danny doesn't follow through, I send Ronnie's money to the Republicans, and of course vice versa.
Scalable extension: there's no reason why Danny and Ronnie need to know about each other; they can both just send me money and know that I'll match them up with equivalent donations on the other side. If people from one party send more money, the surplus can fall back to being donated to the desired party.
What are the flaws here? And does anyone know of a credible organization that might be interested in doing this? I'd much prefer not to try to take it on myself because I've already got too much on my plate, and I don't have an easy way to establish myself as a trustworthy third party (whereas an already-known organization hopefully would).
Alternately, is any organization already doing this? That would be great, because then I could just send them money and not have any need to put more time into it :)
Recommended film: Mr. Jones (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6828390/
(Also include the year when looking for the film, because at least three exist with the same name.)
I wrote an article trying to gain insight into the economics of prediction markets (specifically thinking about the Efficient Market Hypothesis) by looking at sports betting, in case anyone's interested in this topic:
https://mikesaintantoine.substack.com/p/sports-betting-learning-from-the
Is there any consensus in computability theory right now as to whether GPT-style transformer models are proven to be Turing-equivalent or not?
I asked ChatGPT... it said that transformers are definitely not Turing-equivalent, but that's exactly what a godlike superintelligence secretly plotting to turn the universe into paperclips *would* say.
First couple of Google results suggest that there is a proof that they can be made to be Turing-equivalent, but only if they use arbitrary-precision math. There's also newer proposed architecture called "universal transformers" that aims for proper Turing-equivalence.
Follow-up question would be, does it matter? That is, is Turing-equivalence a necessary precondition for AGI? My suspicion would be yes, absolutely, but I don't know if that can be proven formally.
I wish there was a comprehensible analyisis for the fall of the Roman Empire that traced back from "why they lost the battles". Because that's the objective reason after all. Economic decline, political disunity, those are all just things that may have made them less effective. But had they not lost the battles, they wouldn't have fallen when they did.
Happy 2^8 open threads to all who celebrate!
How bad is the tech job market right now *actually*? I keep hearing about how bad it is, huge layoffs etc, but it seems like it’s mostly the HUGE tech companies. Is this representative of the vast majority of companies? Am I going to have a hard time finding a job at a small- or mid-sized company? If it matters, I’m a DS not an SWE and I have a few years of experience. What about for tech roles in non-valley type companies?
This week I attempted (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/do-americans-even-make-friends-in) to refute a pretty dumb NPR story about Americans’ supposedly increasing loneliness, and ended up hypothesizing that Americans are actually just making fewer friends in high school.
I’m curious why people think this might be, and if anyone can point me to datasets that can shed light on the question.
Some ideas I have
- Maybe families are moving more frequently as a result of increasing housing prices, making it harder for kids to make friends
- Maybe something about school has changed—bigger classes? Less free time?
- Maybe it’s easier to find niche friend groups now for some reason, so kids still make friends, but just fewer of them
Tom Lehrer's songs and lyrics are now in the public domain: https://tomlehrersongs.com/
Let’s say I believe I know, given today’s technology, how to build an AGI. What should I do with that knowledge?
Merry Christmas!
[Repost - late to the party last week]
I'm attempting to gauge what characteristics of human civilization/society are constant, change in cycle and trend over human existence (consciousness to...). Any tips or source references would be appreciated.
Here's a cycle comparison I have to date:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15qRymG5V2hq9wUzt226XiTjrtd_iPOCC/view?usp=share_link
In honor of the Nativity I would like to present my new favorite conspiracy theory: the Virgin Mary was a lizard.
See, in mammals parthenogenesis is impossible due to epigenetic imprinting (see https://denovo.substack.com/p/epigenetics-of-the-mammalian-germline ). But in many reptile species it can definitely happen (for example Komodo dragons do it regularly). Furthermore, a human Mary would have had no way to give Jesus a Y-chromosome. But reptiles have a ZW sex-determination system wherein ZW = female and ZZ = male. If Jesus started out as an unfertilized egg with a Z-chromosome, that would explain everything!
Happy *proper* season of Christmas to all, since we are now in the Twelve Days (as per the song). Leading up to Christmas Day was not Christmas but Advent. Leading up since October in the shops was the secular Sales Season profitable last quarter.
A lot of people this year expressed to me that they were jaded with Christmas, that "it's only one day". I think this is because of the push to start 'celebrating' it earlier and earlier every year. This year I decided I would ignore everything and only count from Christmas Day onwards as Christmas, and I do think I am enjoying it more this year. It's a little more special.
So today being the 26th, Happy St Stephen's Day and though I'm too old to do it myself (it was for kids when I was a kid, though really it was adults before that), maybe you'll be out on the wran!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wren_Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a81PR7ik5UE
When were interest rates invented?
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at the address specified on my about page:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
EDIT: All 3 have all been given away.
I'm looking for a service that allows me to experience internet as if I'm from a different country.
I don't mean just VPN or Google Translate. I mean the full experience, like if you choose China your default search engine becomes Baidu, qq.com appears on top of your URL autocomplete, all your searches and comments are translated to Chinese before posted and such - all these combined with traditional VPNs and stuff.
Does this exist? If it doesn't, would you be interested in using it?
Any other Unsong fans see this one?
https://twitter.com/KyivPost/status/1607059578012803072?t=Ys69GShSoE3QaYsNHL_l3g&s=33
Gave me quite a chuckle.
I am coming to believe that many of the benefits of relgion for an individual can be has by adopting the an attitude towards the truth, as if the truth were a person.
But I’d like to test this hypothesis, if only weakly and via the totally sloppy method of an poll on a quirky blog. I can wait for the annual survey but in the mean time,
You are invited to share:
A) if the truth itself were a person, what would your attitude be towards that person?
B) do you identify as religious?
Has anyone here had a chance to dig into some of the material that The Ethical Skeptic (@EthicalSkeptic) has produced, particularly related to increased non-COVID mortality after the vaccine rollouts?
The main claim, which I'm personally extremely skeptical of, is that US counties with higher vaccination rates have had elevated mortality compared to those with lower rates since the vaccines came out (sort of a difference in difference approach).
One annoying thing is that he speaks elliptically about what he actually thinks this means, but I think the claim is that the vaccine has caused otherwise healthy people to die of heart-related vaccine side effects.
I'm qualified to look into this myself, but I haven't actually had the time recently, and was wondering if someone out there had already done it?
Is it just me or is the number of American intellectual non-Christians wishing people Merry Christmas significantly higher now than it was in 2010?
>>Philip Tetlock and others have founded the Forecasting Research Institute to study prediction, including prediction of existential risk. They are looking to hire “research and data analysts, content editors, and RAs”, all roles remote, see here for details.<<
https://forecastingresearch.org/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://forecastingresearch.org/apply?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I put in an application for "content editor".
Did anyone else apply for any of the positions?
Have you received any response?
What are your goals for 2023?
Has anyone been working on a startup doing a prediction market that failed or otherwise didn't work out that wants to sell their source code? I'm looking around for some software to run some niche prediction markets and I'm looking at buy/build/outsource decisions.
Set the alarm for when to "go to sleep," not one for when to wake up.
Explain, as if to a future historian or intelligent alien, why the citizens of the U.K. got really really mad at Qatar for the first few days of the World Cup there but not about the UK’s strong military alliance with the same regime.
https://www.forceswatch.net/comment/the-qatari-connection/
Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second.
Presumably there must be lots of people, including semi-professional and amateur musicians, making recordings of themselves just singing carols, but they're surprisingly hard to find on YouTube, Amazon, etc. Main use case is for singing along to in the car with the family.
Thanks!
Merry Christmas to you too! Thanks for another year of great content.
Here's an article that I wrote about some reflections on politics that I think readers of ACX might be interested in. https://benthams.substack.com/p/politics-is-a-battle-of-who-you-love
I've spent a great deal of time over the last month interacting with ChatGPT in the past month. I've been posting some of those interactions to my blog, New Savanna, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ChatGPT
I've annotated and discussed some interactions quite heavily. Others not so much. Topics include: 2 Spielberg films (Jaws, AI), Tezuka's Astro Boy stories, Justice, haiku, conversation structure, local geography, tutoring children, grammatical knowledge and self-referential sentences, trumpets and trumpeters, a Seinfeld bit, others.
The world cup has me wondering: How does non-wc European club soccer work? Do teams usually play in their own national leagues or is there a pan-european league? If both the top players from the world cup final are in the same Paris team, doesn't that make normal French club soccer kind of one sided and boring? (And similarly, my impression is that Spain basically has two really good teams - doesn't that make it kinda boring to watch Spanish soccer matches that aren't Madrid vs Barcelona?)
Why do so few people care about the UN report into China's treatment of Uyghurs? It created a few headlines and then quickly disappeared from the public consciousness despite it being explicitly a case of ethnic oppression.
I'm conducting a 2-minute survey to better understand how people with niche or intellectual interests find friends. Any help is greatly appreciated!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeCh2YASTcam5saz3aUhLF6hMJ10ubbHcZhrAI7nhaj1DWovg/viewform?usp=sf_link
So the inquiry into 6/1/2021 recommended Trump be barred from office.
Not a huge fan of Trump, but it's kind of obvious that this feeds into the "rigged" narrative - they are *literally* banning the prime opposition candidate from the presidential election, which pattern-matches well to Putin's tactics in Russia.
I hope this doesn't wind up blowing the powderkeg.
(Posted this a couple of days ago last Open Thread, but I guess it was too late in the cycle.)
You all may enjoy my interview of Bethany McLean: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/bethany-mclean
She was the first reporter to write critically about Enron's financial obfuscation (six months later, the company was bankrupt). She is the author of some of the best books about finance ever (especially loved her books about Enron and the housing crisis).
We discussed the astounding similarities between Enron and FTX: The rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars run by supposed geniuses, insider dealing and romantic entanglements between the heads of sister-companies, a politically generous CEO well connected in Washington, the use of a company’s own stock as its collateral, a short-lived attempt to get bought out by a competitor thought to be inferior, and the fraudulent abuse of mark-to-market accounting.
And we talked about much more:
- How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),
- What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,
- Why there’s too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,
- And why history keeps repeating itself.
Merry Christmas to you too
I’ll be at the Quillette social on Jan 7th. Tix still available. Some ev psych and rationalist people already coming
https://events.humanitix.com/quillette-social