> The hack to beat AI at Go probably isn’t as interesting as I thought.
I still think it's interesting. Yes, the adversarial AI is winning by getting into game states where human judges, playing by standard human rules, would consider it to have lost. But the standard Go AI was trained on Tromp-Taylor rules, not normal human rules, and it is losing by Tromp-Taylor rules, and it should know it's losing because those are the rules it was trained on. It's not like they are tricking the standard AI by changing the rules. You could never beat a human this way.
"Peterson first courted controversy for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns while teaching at the University of Toronto."
Peterson has never said he refuses to use a person's preferred pronouns. He said if someone personally asks him to (e.g. a student in one his classes), he will use them. What he became famous for was his opposition to Bill C-16 which he argued would legally compel people to use a persons's "preferred" prounouns (not really a "preference" if it's legally enforced...).
Obviously false, and false in a substantial and meaningful way.
But is the journalist lying or is the journalist just badly informed?
Given how badly informed the average journalist is, you'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that he's actually lying rather than repeating some bullshit he heard somewhere else.
I'm trying to track down an article/post/book review that I believe was linked to here. I can't find it on Google. The premise was essentially that if higher education were a prescription drug, it would be illegal (i.e. its grandiose claims would not be accepted by the FDA without evidence of efficacy) and also scandalous due to the cost (as happens to some drugs).
I'm not aware of a specific article, but Bryan Caplan has studied the merit and lack thereof of higher education and written a book and numerous articles, on it.
In general, he finds that educational attainment is beneficial primarily as a signal of being superior to someone else, rather than for the actual knowledge it imparts. So it is beneficial for the individual, but society does not benefit from subsidizing education, since it just creates an "arms race" of everyone trying to be above average, creates credential inflation, rather than actual value.
Why is the comibination of "AGI will not be achieved any time soon" and "AGI has the potential to be existentially catastrophic" beliefs so rare? It seems obvious to me that AGI has a million ways to destroy us, and at the same time it seems like nothing that has been created to date resembles AGI or something that would in any remotely direct way lead to AGI.
Most people do not generate their opinions on a particular topic through detailed analysis of the facts. So most widely known or discussed topics tend to generate "camps" of belief, based on differing opinions of those who do discuss and study the topics (or various people interested in the political effects and throw out various opinions).
In this case, there are two major camps. 1) AI is scary - which tends to believe that AGI will come soon, and also is potentially catastrophic, and 2) AI is not scary - which tends to believe that AI is a non-issue either because it will not happen or will not be catastrophic.
Those who do not study AI specifically will therefore latch onto either of the headline camp's ideas (that AI either is, or isn't, scary) and build their underlying opinions based on whichever line of thought supports that. So combinations of "AI is scary" and "AI is not scary" beliefs getting combined will be rare among the general population. It's a mixed message that doesn't relay the minimal understanding that most people will hold.
This is true of lots of other (I would say most) sets of beliefs on a given topic. This topic is newer and harder to understand, so we should expect less nuance than in older topics or topics with greater societal distribution (like "is [sports player] good?").
If AGI will not be achieved any time soon, then it will probably be achieved by a relatively slow process. A slow process of developing AGI, makes it much more likely that the problems will be recognized and corrected before they become catastrophic. And most of the catastrophic AI risk scenarios, at least in the "rationalist" discussion space, seem to involve "AI Foom" which implies easy and rapid development of AGI.
Fair enough, though I don't like long timelines necessarily imply slow gradual development. I think there will be little progress made for a long time, and then things will go foom.
As a territory or a set of states? If the latter, the expansion of the Senate, from 100 to (presumably) 120 members would probably be the most significant disruption. (The Canadian population is too small to affect the House in the same way.) I don't know enough about Canadian politics to say how many new "red" and "blue" Senators we'd get, but it would definitely shift the status quo.
Presumably it would be as a set of states. How many? By population, the fair number is five or so, but that would have to be negotiated. And, yes, the transfer would shift US politics somewhat leftward, given the political views of Canadians.
No I would be strongly opposed to it for political reasons. But I would never have to worry about such a scenario because Canadians would be even more opposed to joining the US. Works out for both!
The likeliest scenario is probably not that the whole of Canada tries to join, but that the province of Alberta does so. Alberta is basically Canada's Texas: they are quite conservative, have a lot of oil money, and have resented the eastern establishment for a long time. If anyone were to break out of confederation, they would be the best bet.
Alberta is conservative by Canadian standards(which on the whole is ridiculously shifted to the left by global standards) but it isn't particularly conservative by American ones. In any case, domestic politics from the left would make it impossible for Alberta to join as well. Not to mention, taking over Canadian territory, even in a democratic fashion, wouldn't be taken too kindly by Ottawa. So I imagine the whole foreign policy establishment would be strongly opposed as well. Alberta may very well become independent but it will not be allowed to join the US.
It's established in Canadian law and political culture that a province can leave Canada through democratic process. The typical example for that is Quebec, but I see no reason that wouldn't apply to Alberta, too.
They say in the close 1995 Quebec independence referendum, the Canadian government pulled off some shenaningans to tip the scale in favor of the "no" campaign. These were within law and justifiable like ensuring as many immigrants were citizens so they could vote(non-French white immigrants overwhelmingly preferred a united Canada). But this just shows, that regardless of Canadain government's talk, if the separatists are expected to win, Ottawa will do something about it.
But even, if Ottawa's "covert" actions don't succeed, no serious government will ever give independence to a core territory just because of a vote. If Alberta or Quebec ever vote for independence, Ottawa can just claim some irregularities in voting or some legal issues and just ignore it. Unilateral secession is mostly not accepted by the international community. No one would support the Albertans or Quebecois.
Seperations of core territories occur for sure. But the costs must be really high for the central government. Generally lots of violence, with deaths in the tens of thousands at the very least and a wrecked local economy. The idea of Albertans or Quebecois violently protesting let alone actually fighting the Canadian military/law enforcement for independence is laughable on the face of it. All Ottawa has to do is call the white boomers in favor of Alberta/Quebec indepenence, "racists", and the whole movement will fizzle out.
This is also why the Scotland will never be independent.
The dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia happened without violence, so such a thing is at least possible.
Also, you may not be aware of the full history of the movement for Quebec independence. There was a part of the movement called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) which definitely took violent action for the cause, planting bombs and kidnapping people. The government clamped down hard on the FLQ, going so far as to invoke the War Measures Act, which suspended habeas corpus nation-wide and let them toss a bunch of people in jail without charge. But they did not act against the peaceful portions of the larger independence movement.
This is generally interpreted as an implicit two-part deal: violent action for separation will not be tolerated, but peaceable action through the democratic system will be accepted. It's an attempt to avoid violence, to make sure that something like the UK's Troubles doesn't happen, and it will only work if the second part is actually credible. And the government certainly seems to take the notion of peaceable partition seriously. The question of whether separation is even possible went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that yes, it is.
In that case we would have to purchase the territory like we did with Louisiana or Alaska. Prohibitively expensive, but not impossible. Or maybe not even that expensive, if it was certain they were leaving anyway; just a face-saving number for Ottawa to say they got something out of it.
I'd probably be for it as long as it was an accession under the US Constitution rather than negotiating a new governing compact.
I'm not terribly worried about the political impact, am generally "the more the merrier" on immigration and adding more cultures to the melting pot, and genuinely miss the gossamer pre 9/11 boundary. (Who ever imagined it would ever be treated like a real international border?)
But I find it really hard to imagine Canadians accepting those terms. Quebec in particular has a bunch of First Amendment dealbreakers, and isn't going to give those up after getting them from Ottawa.
Or any terms, really. So much of Canadian political and cultural identity seems to be defined specifically in contrast to the US, it's hard to see them voting in favor of Amerentry.
(I mean, renaming Kraft Dinner to Mac & Cheese alone...!)
I'm guessing we'll just have to stick with the current arrangement.
Quebec wouldn't do it. They view Louisiana as a cautionary tale. Canada doing such a thing would be preceded or immediately followed by them leaving Canada.
It would be a tremendous boon to the Democrats, so I imagine that on average Democrats would support it and Republicans oppose it. It would make America less racially diverse (at least in the short term - see above re: increased Democrat political power), though it would also dilute whatever distinctly American culture and identity that still exists here today (by much less than the majority of immigrants would, but it would happen all at once).
And I imagine that a lot of GDP-worshipping fools would say America's economy would be so much bigger, but that's an advantage only if a significant synergistic boost to canadian productivity would be acheived through annexation, because Canada's GDP per capita is much lower than America's.
Less racially diverse? Canada has a higher portion of its population composed of immigrants than the US does.
Economically speaking, I do believe the GDP per capita of (former) Canadians would rise after union. Trade between the US and Canada is quite free, but not completely free, and movement of people is not free at all, so I would expect some Canadians to be able to find more lucrative economic niches after union. But I don't think it would quite span the gap, except maybe on a generational timespan.
At first blush, your answer on Canadian GDPPC seems right. The best explanation of Canada's low productivity relative to the US that I've read is its smaller internal market and corresponding lack of economies of scale (Canadian economists have studied this question interminably for decades.) Fully integrate Canada into the US economy and you should begin to see large productivity improvements.
However, one factor that's been overlooked in this discussion: you should almost certainly anticipate a mass migration of Canadians into the lower US, due to the combination of better weather and better economic opportunities on one hand and the reduction of "Canadian distinctives," e.g. single-payer healthcare, on the other.
Compare the case of East and West Germany -- that border is still as clear as day and night by any social or economic statistic and will be for the foreseeable future, as it makes more sense for the young and ambitious to leave than to try to build businesses there (and not many are moving there from the West). Canada isn't as economically deprived as the GDR was, but unlike the GDR it has a large climate differential to contend with.
So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities: Detroit and Buffalo (though probably with less social dysfunction along the way). Western Canada probably does better, and as Washington State continues to boom, BC might actually benefit on net.
> So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities
Maybe. There would be at least a small exodus. But maybe Toronto is able to hold on as a regional center like Minneapolis or Chicago, two cities that are not known for mild weather. The Quebec-Windsor Corridor is going to be governed from somewhere, and Toronto is the likely candidate, possibly at the expense of Montreal. But it's hard to know what will happen.
The difference between Toronto and Minneapolis/Chicago is that the latter have managed to hold onto a number of megacorp HQs, and Chicago remains indispensable as a secondary financial center -- though on both those fronts Chicago's recent losses really sting. In the end, Chicago and Minneapolis overcome their crappy weather through high wages. If you have low wages and bad weather, you're Buffalo.
I have to think Canada's domestic corporations would probably lose market share as American firms with more muscle (and adapted for a more competitive environment) moved in more aggressively, and this would hurt cities in which those Canadian companies are headquartered, above all Toronto. This is what the productivity benefits of economies of scale look like. Of course the reverse will happen to some degree, with Canadian firms gaining market share in the US, but I think for the reasons I stated US firms would dominate.
But your point is valid, Toronto might shrink but it's still indispensable, and it might well be the case that mid-sized cities in Ontario would be hurt much worse by southward migration.
The problem Day 1 is going to be that unless Canadian wages adjust overnight (which doesn't seem to be how these things ever work in practice), talented Canadian college grads will look at the American wage premium and it will be hard for most of them to resist (and did I mention the weather?) And I think once that Canada-to-US pathway for talent gets started, it will have a momentum that will be hard to reverse.
Maybe the person is using 'racially diverse' as code for 'number of black people', rather than considering the very large Asian population in Canada? (both Chinese and Indian immigrants are common)
Which is fine when everyone in your country uses a similar system. In USCan, people could cruise along without coverage until something came up, then head up to the northern states for expensive care. The free rider problem would bankrupt you.
Well, yes. There would need to be some sorts of rules to deal with that sort of free-riders, just as private US insurers have rules about coverage for pre-existing conditions.
OHIP, the Ontario health plan, currently has a six-month residency requirement. That would probably be raised.
I expect Canada would try to maintain its healthcare system, and that just might be possible, assuming the feds play ball and subsidize one-for-all state level plans through tax advantages just like they subsidize employer-provided health insurance. I doubt the Canadian plans are any less efficient than the US health care bureaucracies.
But there is no doubt that the health care system in the former Canadian provinces would change. If nothing else, whatever system they went with would have to pay American rates for health care practicioners, and they are steep.
Stop using the metric system? Come on, it's easy. You buy in kilos, you sell in grams, and if anyone tries to mess with you, you handle it with your nine millimetre. You'll love it.
With three hundred shootings per day in the country, it seems like there should be plenty of data available to settle the long-running 9mm-vs-.45 feud.
I read here in the comments today and I've seen it said elsewhere that black authors are severely underrepresented in American School's literature. This does not jive with my memory so I checked my local school district's reading lists. This comes from an extremely GOP town (+20), but not in the South. And I checked only 7th and 12th grade but figured they'd be fairly representative. Of those 77 authors:
31% Female and 69% Male
15% Black, 81% White, and 4% Other.
(Also interesting, of the black authors, half were female)
So at least with my quick check of the local conservative school district, black authors are represented roughly proportional to their US total population (note that my town ~4% black).
Female authors were underrepresented. White Male authors overrepresented. And non-black-minority authors were significantly underrepresented (esp Hispanic).
This means that of all races and genders, black female/male authors are the only ones who actually are "correctly" represented in the school curriculum, where correct means roughly proportional to the total US population*. Are there parts of the country not like this where black authors are actually underrepresented? Or are people just thinking "I only read 1 or 2 black authors a year in school" and not doing the math to realize that if you read one book a month in school, 1 or 2 black authors a year is representation consistent with total population?
*Obviously, "correct" is extremely subjective. And this is likely too simplified, even if we're going for proportional racial representation as likely you'd want some type of historic weighting. E.g., in 1900 the US was something like 88% white, 12% black and less than 1% other, and since much of our literature is historic, it makes sense that white is overrepresented relative to today's population.
From surveys where this comes up periodically, I think literally something like 90% of Americans overestimate America's black percent of the population (almost no one underestimates it). A non-trivial minority thinks it's 50% or greater.
Even a lot of people with graduate degrees have never thought about this question mathematically and wouldn't know how to go about answering it.
I would guess that the average person looks at the heavy black representation in sports and entertainment and uses that as a rough heuristic for the country as a whole.
There's no reason, from a purely literary perspective, that we should expect equal representation. Black people have a very low average written literacy rate compared to whites, and whites have an extremely long, rich literary tradition that is not present amongst blacks, so it only makes sense that whites have more elite authors than blacks. If you want to say that we "need" more black authors for "representation" or something, 1) There's no evidence that "representation" improves black schooling performance, and a higher % of black kids already express a desire to go to college than white kids do! 2) Wanting this is one thing, but we should make it absolutely clear that there's no literary basis whatsoever for thinking that all races are equally skilled writers.
Nobody has a problem with the NBA being majority black due to blacks being better at basketball than everyone else, so it's crap for people to expect parity in every other area of life not presently dominated by blacks.
When it comes to the NFL and NBA being 75% black or more, the subject is completely unmentionable. Those leagues even ludicrously win awards for having such great "diversity." And instead we get complaints about a supposed underrepresentation of black Americans in baseball, despite the percentage of American players who are black being right in line with that of the general population.
Possibly an effect of people remembering their own school days. This certainly wasn't true in the 80s/early 90s in southern Missouri, for example. Sometimes we fix things but don't get the word out.
There being less black authors than their proportion of the population is not ipso facto a "problem" that needs to be "fixed". Black people's written literacy abilities are on average vastly below those of white people's, so them having fewer great authors is precisely what would ought to expect.
And the evidence that artificially boosting the prominence of black e.g. authors so that black kids will do better in school is non-existent. In my experience it merely makes them feel entitled to success and to blame "racism" when they don't achieve it.
Leaving aside the rest of your post, the OP asked why people think black authors are underrepresented when his memory indicates that their representation is approximately in line with their proportion of the population, which he then verified against at least one current curriculum. I gave a plausible reason. Feel free to substitute the verb "change" for "fix" in my OP, if it makes you feel better.
Black people's written literacy abilities being on average below those of white people's, is *itself* a problem that ipso facto desperately needs to be fixed. Which, in the process, will presumably "fix" the bit about underrepresentation in school libraries.
And the idea that front-loading the process by boosting black representation among authors showcased in school districts with a significant number of black students, that they may serve as role models, is not entirely without merit. Not automatically sound either, but worth being debated.
IMO adequate "representation" is oft demanded but rarely defined, deliberately. And fewer and fewer people realize that the US was huge majority white for most of its history, or that Europe was almost entirely white until very very recently. These things are being deliberately obfuscated.
It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
(An even stronger example of this is minimum wages, where there's less data. I think the minimum wage in the UK should be higher, because we have high poverty, high corporate profits and low unemployment, but I don't have a clue how much higher, because I don't know at what point the negative impact will balance the positive).
>It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
No, it's not. It's often claimed but this supposed relationship between school funding and results is almost entirely imaginary (at least for the levels of funding seen in the US - obviously going from $0 to $1,000 will have some effect but that's irrelevant). And that's putting aside the issue of financially quantifying the impact of better school outcomes, which is typically done in an arbitrary way so as to always support more funding).
Is there such a thing as working 20hr weeks for half the salary at a software engineering role ? I assume not since I haven’t heard of such a thing but wonder why not.
Many big tech companies (definitely Microsoft and Adobe, probably others as well because companies I've checked are two-for-two) officially support modified work schedules with prorated compensation. It requires management approval, and I get the impression that the difficulty of getting signoff is proportional to the amount of reduction you want (e.g. 80% of full time is pretty easy to get if you're reasonable senior and a good performer, but asking for 60% yields more push-back).
At both companies, benefits are binary rather than them trying to prorate somehow: more than 50% of full time gives you full benefits, but 50% or less excludes you from most benefits.
I haven't seen anyone hiring specifically for part time SWE positions. It seems to be intended as an accommodation for existing employees who can't (or don't want to) continue to work full time.
It might be easier for you to de-facto get this rather than de-jure. Like, just apply to a software engineering job and work 20hr weeks. It's quite likely that you'll advance your career less quickly (though it'll be a smaller difference than many would think), but especially in a remote role no one will really do the math. And at a good company no one would really care, unless you were providing less impact than expected for your level.
At Google/Waymo where I've got experience, no one is counting the hours you're in a desk. If you get your job done in 10 hours or 60 hours a week, that's none of my business.
Try not to get involved in a team with a difficult oncall rotation though, since that is one of the cases where you do have to be online a lot more.
quite a few allegedly full-time big-tech roles are not de facto even 40 hrs/week and are in reality very chill. GOOG and MSFT are known to be the more chill cos though it's also team-dependent.
Definitely! If you're an independent contractor, it's pretty easy to end up on contracts like that. I have two such contracts right now since I prefer 40h weeks but I could quit one of my contracts tomorrow and have exactly what you describe.
As a contractor, you generally charge a higher fee than the corresponding salary to compensate for the extra risk and (and sometimes more boring tasks) you take on. I'm a poor European so I have no insight into "big tech level salaries", but if you are working at such a company currently there are presumably contractors there you can discuss this with. You can also send feelers to a couple of brokers, they are usually quite open with how much they think they can sell you for if they want to work with you.
What are some known exceptions to the "unbearable accuracy of stereotypes"?
I recall reading a study that found blondes have higher average IQs than women of other hair colours, although I don't know if this has been replicated.
On a global scale, it's trivially true that blonde women are smarter, because there's amost no natural blondes who aren't european, and europeans have a higher mean IQ than most of the world outside of north-east asia. And I expect it to be true for the US too given how diverse it is.
It's also worth pointing out that this is one of the few socially acceptable stereotypes despite the fact that it is true.
I don't have any data (would like to see some) but it's my impression that there are lots of collider bias examples like good-looking, socially adept people are also generally smarter than stereotypical nerds.
"There is one type of stereotype, however, that the bulk of the research shows to be inaccurate – national stereotypes of personality."
As far as the hair color, it seems obvious that that would be the case, at least in the US, since African Americans rarely have blonde hair (Asian Americans also rarely have blonde hair, but they constitute a significantly smaller share of the US population.)
I assume what you were thinking of was this study: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2016/Volume36/EB-16-V36-I1-P42.pdf which excluded African Americans and looked only at Whites which found that blondes have marginally higher IQ which is mostly not statistically significant.
Threats don't usually come from the clear blue sky, with no warning. Anyone living where a major earthquake might happen has experienced many smaller tremors. Places that flood have generally flooded before, often many times. There were an awful lot of reconnaisance aircraft overflying the French coast in 1944. And so on.
With this in mind, have there already been events related to AI that might be accepted as early warning signs pointing to a real problem in the future?
One event that comes to mind is the 2010 "flash crash," although I'm not sure that was really an AI-specific problem, but rather an illustration of how automated systems can behave in unexpected and undesirable was when presented with conditions outside the range for which they were designed.
Well, there is the Battle of Palmdale, where a rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack in Southern California, and the Air Force couldn't even shoot it down because the fire control systems on their shiny new jet fighters refused to lock on to their fellow AI. Fortunately, while there was a fair bit of property damage in that one, nobody was killed. And there have been no recurrences in the years since.
"rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack"
That's a clickbaity way to say "remote-controlled plane stopped responding and flew until it ran out of fuel". It didn't threaten a kamikaze attack, it threatened a crash (and, I assume, one with no risk of explosion or fire since it's fuel would have been depleted by then). And as noted by trebuchet, the damage came from attempts to shoot it down.
The attempt to shoot it down, actually, surprise me. My time playing war thunder led me to believe that interceptors still had cannons/MG (which sure would seem a more reliable way to shoot down a plane flying in a very predictable way) until at least vietnam.
The Battle of Palmdale sounds like the perfect cover for a secret history story involving supers, or maybe aliens. Pretty much anything that could sub in for the "drone" that took 200+ missiles and chugged along to terrorize Palmdale with flying debris/heroically ensure that the consequences were limited to property damage, before crashing though power lines into the desert floor.
I'm thinking maybe Rocketeer sequel, or Greatest American Hero prequel.
"But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder."
That's from from the 1978 hit "Rasputin." Who do they fit best today?
French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour fits all except "drinking", but he also don't have a reputation for sobriety either so I'm assuming he does drink.
lusting: had an affair that got his (much younger) campaign director pregnant.
hunger for power: was candidate to the presidency
demands to do something about him: he gets a lot of lawsuits for most of the things he says.
Very few people, because of the "drinking" clause.
Power-hungry men with excessive or unpleasant sex drives are still common, and problematic alcoholism is not uncommon, but successful men drink much less nowadays than they used to, I think.
The only recent powerful figure known to have a drinking problem I can think of off the top of head was Boris Yeltsin, although I'm sure there are a bunch I don't know about or don't remember. And I don't think he was especially libidinous, at least not controversially so?
Not sure about Yeltsin; Boris Johnson is widely known for his drinking and has been a "busy boy" throughout his adult life....he has two young children with his present (third) wife, with whom he began living before his second marriage had officially ended. He has four adult children with his second wife; the first of those was born five weeks after they married in 1993 which was 12 days after Johnson's first marriage was annulled.
Between 2000 and 2004 he had an affair with a journalist which, according to various printed sources which Johnson has not disputed, resulted in one miscarriage and one abortion.
He has another child who is the result of an affair conducted in 2009. A judge's comment during court proceedings [fallout of the affair because he was Mayor of London at the time and because the woman he was sleeping with was also married and had an official connection to the city government] seemed to say that there was a second child as well, but that has not been confirmed and Johnson denies it.
Another affair conducted between 2012 and 2016 has come to light but it did not produce any children.
And then defenestrating him. It's quite hard in the UK system to be ousted as PM when you have been leading a party with a comfortable Commons majority. It eventually happened to Mrs Thatcher, but that took eleven years. For it to happen to Johnson well under three years after a big general election win was....well, notable.
And in part, Johnson's fall was because of "drinking and lusting", or at any rate personal behaviours of that type. It was also in a sense because of his "hunger for power". Johnson carries very little ideological baggage indeed, and can present differently according to circumstances. I recall at Oxford in the mid-1980s there weren't many Conservatives around, but the ones that did exist tended to be quite ideologically committed, and they didn't like Johnson. When Johnson's popularity dived from late 2021, there was no one there to make a stand for "Johnsonism" because Johnsonism wasn't a thing (and wasn't intended to be so)
Some of it was known years ago; some came out (or took place) more recently.
But anyway there's no particular evidence that, on net, this stuff helped or hurt Johnson politically. Like with Trump: many of those deciding to vote for him were doing so for reasons other than his qualifications or fitness for public office, while those repelled by him simply stayed repelled when new specific crap he did became known. I believe the current term of art among political scientists and polling analysts is "baked in".
Does anyone have a good, mechanistic, explanation ofthe difference between sleep paralysis and acting out dreams?
Like if you were to look at on person with sleep paralysis, and one person that acts out dreams on an fMRI, what would the difference be?
I get GABA is an important part of the physical difference between the two, but I don't get why the brain is seemingly 'awake' AND asleep in both cases yet the experience of the two is incredibly different.
I wonder if the humor processing part of our brains will be attacked by unaligned AGI. When I find something deeply funny, the laughing response feels both overwhelming and involuntary. Certain sentences should be testably able to elicit this laughing response. Our saviors will be the humorless.
Here's an AI question I've wondered about--with the current state of the art (ChatGPT or similar), what happens if you feed the output of one session into the input of another session and vice versa? They do have to be separate sessions so they're isolated and only have the embedded transcripts to work on.
Does it actually converse semi-normally? Or does it quickly spiral into utter garbage or just start going in circles? Especially once it's filled its entire input transcript buffer so it starts losing context. You'd have to prime it with some question or statement to get it started, but....
Ignore me if you were already aware, but there are some videos on youtube where people did just this with various ai models(some 11yr old ai model, gpt3, gpt3):
To be clear: Because of the architecture It doesn't really matter whether we use one gpt 3 instance to generate the next part of the conversation or use two models and repeatedly append the output of one to the end of the transcript which we give to the other one as the weights are already fixed, ie we dont train them.
Character.ai lets you do this directly, without even having to copy the output of one and paste it into another. I'm assuming each AI's "reasoning" is still isolated from the other's and it's only the text being shared between them, just on one screen for convenience. The conversations can occasionally go off on weird, unexpected tangents (but don't human conversations also?), but in general the conversations are about as coherent as ones between yourself and a bot. You can make an account and try it out yourself if you're really curious and want to observe this firsthand, it's the "create a room" functionality, which you can add two or more chatbots of your choice to and set a conversation topic for.
Has Mars' lack of geological activity undermined it as a potential source of minerals? Isn't the convection of magma and having active plate tectonics necessary for concentrating minerals in strata (including veins) from which they can be easily accessed through mines?
Mars does not have plate tectonics, that we know of, but it has had plenty of vulcanism. And it has had running water, with erosion and sedimentation and minerals dissolved in one place to be deposited in another. That I think gives you most of the usual ore-formation methods, though geology is not my area of expertise.
The dry lake beds are particularly interesting, particularly if (as suspected) there's still subsurface water in some of them. The last bits of liquid water to remain, are often holding on to interesting concentrations of dissolved minerals. Most of our civilization's lithium, for example, comes from such sources. But on Earth, dry lake beds tend to be washed away by water falling from the sky over geologic times, with only the most recent deposits in the most arid regions now accessible. Mars, had its entire ocean evaporate away, and hasn't hat water falling from the sky in a couple billion years or so.
A related question is how much of Earth's diversity of accessible mineral resources is a result of whatever massive impact created the Moon. The crust might have been significantly lighter and poorer in dense elements in the absence of that cataclysm.
Considering that there is (as of this writing) absolutely no geological evidence of such a collision actually occurring, that is a very difficult question to answer.
The evidence is selenological, rather than geological. The Earth's crust has been reshaped, flooded, folded over, etc, too many times to be confident of much, but when we got hold of actual lunar rock samples, they looked an awful lot like someone whacked a chunk of crust and mantle off the proto-Earth and not so much like anything else.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis under the heading "Evidence". But see also the heading "Difficulties". Basically we're still unsure but the giant impact hypothesis seems to be in the lead.
Bear in mind that we're talking about the very early solar system, Earth was still getting hit by quite sizeable objects all the time. The idea of one particularly large one is not unlikely.
In answer to the grandparent comment though, the vast majority of the Earth's crust is newer than the moon-forming impact (if it occurred) so I doubt that Earth's surface geochemistry has much do to with the moon.
It is indeed just a theory. There is some tenuous evidence in the form of tungsten levels in the crust (supposedly should be higher if there had been no impact, but... it's not like we actually have Earth II to do a side by side comparison).
Fundamentally it comes down to how much faith to put in various models of planetary formation. I think the 'Moon resulted from collision' is the only one that gives a good account of the difference in density between Earth and Moon, but it could also just be that we don't have good models.
Mars had significant volcanic activity in the past. Some of them are still clearly visible as volcanoes (especially the Tharsis Montes close to Olympus Mons - that whole area was once extremely volcanic). Besides that, there are several large impact sites on Mars where asteroid strikes could have had a similar effect to volcanoes in creating the right conditions for minerals. We also know there are minerals close to the surface. Several rovers have found them, though quite how much there is and how concentrated it is, is still unknown.
I'm not a geologist, but I would guess the surface of Mars would have to be held at a high temperature, at least semi-molten, for a very long time for density stratification to entirely remove the heavier metals, especially under the significantly weaker Martian gravity, which seems unlikely. Most probably lava reaching the surface of Mars a billion years ago cooled as fast as lava does at the Earth's surface today, which is much too quickly for the heavier compounds to settle back deeper, which means whatever was deposited by lava is still there waiting. I suppose it won't be replenished, but even on Earth I doubt that happens on less than a 10-100 million year timescale, so it doesn't have much practical significance anyway.
Besides that, we already know Mars's surface has lots of iron and aluminum, although how they are distributed is an interesting practical question -- e.g. whether there are good ore concentrations and where they tend to lurk. (There's always lots of silicon on any rocky object.) I don't know that anyone has looked for anything more exotic, like platinum or tungsten, but it would be surprising for the reason above were the heavier metals not around in about the same (low) concentrations they are in the Earth's crust.
I just analyzed the results of the predictions contest that I hosted for 33 of my friends and family (about 3/4 of the questions were taken from the one ACT sent around last year). If you had guessed 50/50 on every question, you would've placed 8/33. If you had answered the average prediction for each question (wisdom of crowds treatment), you would've placed 3/33. The former result may be a bit of an indictment on my bubble. A lot of people struggled to understand the Brier scoring system so I'm hoping Year 2 shows improvement. I placed 6/33 so at least I barely beat the coin flip...
Interesting, but oof at a rock outperforming all but 7 people. What was their reaction when learning this? Did the placement of the people line up with what you would have guessed before the contest?
If they were trying to maximize their chances of placing first then it might be less surprising that a cautious but average-score-maximizing algorithm beat most of them.
If you have 33 people do a winner take all competition to get the best Brier score by predicting the outcome of 20 coin flips, the winning strategy is not to (correctly) assert a 0.5 probability for all 20. Or more precisely that play is only a very small fraction of the mixed strategy that represents a Nash equilibrium.
Yeah for sure, I meant to note that about 6 people did end up assigning .99 or .01 to every question, hoping to shoot the moon. They all did terribly, although one did get 34/50 directionally correct which was near the top.
This is surprising to me, I would not have expected that there would be people optimising for first place between friends and family instead of just reporting their true credences. Was there a monetary incentive for first place? Have you given a basic introduction to predicting with probabilities (proper scoring rule, tetlock, etc..)? When I did similar things with friends/family this was never a problem. Nevertheless there is a good method for aligning incentives to reporting true credence with monetary incentives: https://metaculus.medium.com/aligning-incentives-for-forecast-accuracy-relevance-and-efficacy-a-new-paradigm-for-metaculus-26b0e79616cb
Yeah I gave them an overview but some subset didn't care that much, didn't read the scoring explanations closely. It seems weird outside our bubble but most people didn't want to spend a ton (or any) time on 50 questions. Buy-in was $10 so there was a small monetary incentive.
I haven't told them yet, I'm a bit worried that it'll dampen enthusiasm for this year's contest. However, most people did get more than half the questions correct if you change scoring to yes/no, so I hope it's mostly an issue with unfamiliarity with prediction markets and statistics. 80% of the questions were what I'd consider toss-ups so maybe it's not so surprising. This year will be a good chance to test if my friends are plainly uninformed or just required a buffer year to learn. They're mostly doctors, lawyers, finance, software etc so they're not outright unintelligent. Also, yes, I think I could've guessed the top 10 beforehand - all people who reason with care and value staying "in the know".
Did anyone else notice a kind of anti-depressive effect of the first warm day of the year? I payed attention to it for the last 3 years, whenever it gets significantly warmer above freezing, for the entire day I can feel this unusual positive, uplifting, dreamy, somewhat dissociative feeling. Currently in Europe it has been cold for several weeks with a sudden large increase in temperature and I can definitely tell this effect is happening again.
It's not about light, I experimented with exposure to light and indeed it has an anti-depressive effect to it, but I think it's something different. My guess is that maybe some chemical produced in the soil is suddenly released when snow melts and temperature allows for quick evaporation.
Days of nice weather are uplifting, yes, though I don't think my reaction ahs ever been quite as pronounced as what you describe. Depending on where you live, though, 'nice' might be blessed relief from the oppressive heat
As a data point, I find that when I have an extremely bad day, the day after I usually feel unusually good. So it might not be anything apart from post-hell glow; being cold sucks.
On Purge Day, you build a time bomb and plant it in a building. You set the timer for 24 hours. It blows up the day after Purge Day and kills someone. Would you have broken the law?
I think the only sensible rule (for values of "sensible" which admit to the existence of the purge) would have to be that the entire crime must be committed within the window of the purge. If any of it goes outside the window, the whole thing is prosecutable.
Assuming you mean according to my own interpretation of the law (as someone who is not a laywer and hasn't watched The Purge), then yes, that's indeed a violation of the law.
Imagine if it wasn't, everybody and their dog would then learn how timed bombs work (I don't know how but it sounds simple enough if so many terrorists keep figuring it out) and do what you describe. Now the law has absolutely no teeth. You either throw it in the trash or layer additional laws on top of it.
If any sane court in that universe wants to keep the law as-is, it has to rule that delayed violence happens the moment you set the casual chain of murder in motion "beyond reasonable doubt", with an explicit list of exemplary "beyond reasonable doubt" causal chains, such as planting bombs and hiring assasins (so courts don't have to argue from first principles that planting a timed bombs counts as a reliable causal chain of murder).
>I don't know how but it sounds simple enough if so many terrorists keep figuring it out
The standard design used by 70s radicals was to remove all but one hand (leaving the hour hand for a 0-12 hour delay or the minute hand for a 0-60 minute delay with finer control) from a mechanical clock, then fix one electrode somewhere in the sweep of the hand and attach the other electrode to the leading edge of the hand itself so they'll complete the detonator circuit when the hand reaches the fixed electrode.
Another variant is to take an egg timer and rig up the ringer mechanism so it triggers your detonator instead.
It's even easier with modern electronics, since you can buy a microcontroller board for a few dollars (Arduino, Raspberry Pi Pico, or similar) and program it to pull a pin high when a certain amount of time has elapsed, and connect that pin to a relay or transistor so it completes the detonator circuit.
There are a variety of old-school methods of various degrees of complexity, ranging from fuses that are prepared to burn at a predictable rate (the Guy Fawkes method) to acid that slowly eats away a wire and thus releases a spring-loaded mechanical firing pin (the von Stauffenberg method).
I know this for perfectly legitimate non-terrorist reasons.
I've never seen the film either, and it doesn't sound like there's statutory text, but per Wikipedia, the announcement given is
"Weapons of class 4 and lower have been authorized for use during the Purge. All other weapons are restricted. Government officials of ranking 10 have been granted immunity from the Purge and shall not be harmed. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours. Police, fire, and emergency medical services will be unavailable until tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. when The Purge concludes."
(The immunity for government officials is apparently revoked in later films. I don't know if weapon classes are ever defined, but we'll presume the explosive device is one of the permitted ones.)
Since the murder is premeditated and initiated during the purge, but actually takes place afterwards (there's no murder till the victim dies), the straightforward answer is that it doesn't take place during the period in which it's legal, and the perpetrator is guilty.
Of course, since this is the sort of world in which the US government passed a Purge law, it's entirely imaginable that a comparably crazy Supreme Court would take a different view.
Likewise, setting a bomb the day before the Purge that goes off during the time probably isn't murder, but the perpetrator is presumably still guilty of the crimes involved in placing the bomb the day before.
I did appreciate a friend's idea that if the Purge were real, she'd take advantage of it by paying contractors to construct her planned home improvements without having to go through the permitting process.
(Which led to a whole thread of folks coming up with boring but practical Purge activities for people not into violent crime.)
Granted, twelve hours is a pretty tight time window for that. And I guess doing construction when you can't get an ambulance in the event of a workplace accident still requires a certain risk appetite.
I feel like any society that seriously considers having a Purge must be full of psychopaths. So I wouldn't trust the contractors; they might well rob and murder me instead of doing the work.
Maybe they could also agree to a large indemnity to your estate if they murder you. After all, the Purge announcement only mentions criminal offenses, not contract law.
("The grand guignol on the town green was fine, but these representatives of Disney are suing over your use of the Mickey Mouse iconography.")
I'm a early-career software engineer looking to change jobs to somewhere doing AI work on the US East Coast. What OpenAI/Deepmind do is the sort of work I'm interested in, but these and similar companies are overwhelmingly located in the SF Bay Area. I'm located on the East Coast and for personal reasons will not be relocating to the Bay anytime soon. My current company has basically zero opportunity to gain AI/ML experience (embedded/systems work at a company that is somewhat behind the times even on basic software eng. practices), and since AI is what I've always wanted to work on long-term, I'd like to get out as soon as possible. I spend a lot of my free time reading AI papers, so I somewhat feel as if I'm wasting my time right now by doing work I find uninteresting at my day job.
All the AI/ML positions nearby seem to be just various applications of AI/ML to things I find unexciting (lots of weird "AI for niche finance thing" in NYC, which I'm highly suspect of). I'm looking for places that do more foundational work, but haven't had much luck. Anybody here have recommendations for my situation?
tl;dr: He Jiankui wanted to be first to make edited humans, so he did it in a rushed and sloppy way. All his supporters abandoned him after controversy arose.
The documentary was OK, but didn't really add anything not already known from other sources.
Question for people interested in AI alignment: What things that people do now provide good models of what AI alignment would look like? For ex., training dogs? Quality control of electronics products? Moderating a Reddit sub? Eliminating pathogens from drinking water?
Many people seem to find The Repugnant Conclusion relevant or interesting. I don't get it. I would understand the interest in thinking about the problem if one had the power to increase the number of humans by a large amount *and* if one knew what the consequences of doing so would likely be. Since we have no such power or knowledge, what makes this problem interesting? Is it meant to represent a general class of a type of problem?
Imagine if math worked well for small numbers (e.g., we could add 3 and 4 and get 7, just like we observe in reality) but somehow when we added numbers larger than a trillion, math stopped working. Maybe in 200 BC when they were first starting to work out the foundations of math, people would have objected "this just isn't that interesting as we never use numbers that high." But I'd argue it was interesting because it would have meant that something about their theory of math was flawed. It might not have been urgent for them to figure it out right away, but eventually, we did start needing to add numbers as high as a trillion and not having working math would have been a barrier to progress.
Likewise, did it matter that Mercury's orbit didn't fit our theories that well in 1900? Was that an uninteresting problem? Surely it only matters if we had the power to get to Mercury, which in 1900 seemed about as hard as travelling to Narnia. But focusing on that (and problems like it) helped fix our physics, which played a huge role in our progress that eventually allowed us to get to probes there.
The Repugnant Conclusion likewise draws attention to a flaw in our moral intuitions/theories. Fully understanding and correcting those flaws, even in hypothetical situations, might (or might not) precipitate moral progress in the same way that finding flaws in physics theories helped progress. Therefore, it's interesting to find hypotheticals where moral intuition/theories appear to break down, even if those hypotheticals are a long ways from happening in real life.
Never understood the fascination with the repugnant conclusion (as enunciated by it's wikipedia page). It'd be interesting if each step was unquestionably better than the last, but B- is worse than A+ one of the group. There is no paradox in getting an end state worse than the start state when one of your step is "make things worse".
I mean, if you consider B- to be worse than A+, that's one possible resolution. It's only a paradox if you accept all the premises - in other words, it's an argument that one of the premises is wrong.
To you, it seems clear which premise is wrong, but there is no clear agreement about that, which is why the repugnant conclusion is interesting.
To add to this: If you try to codify your moral intuitions into a theory as philosophers usually like to do, rejecting steps of the repugnant conclusion and building a theory on that intuition often leads to other uncomfortable conclusion. For example some philosphers who reject the step the person you responded to rejected argue that instead of considering total utility one should consider the average utility of the population when deciding which state of affairs is preferable. However, taking this to the extreme: few people would prefer that no humans exist other than a constantly orgasming Jeff Bezos to the current state of the world even though the average utility of the population consisting solely of the constantly orgasming Jeff Bezos is higher than the average utility of the current world population.
Questions about what you would do with power suggest answers for questions about whether you should spend time pursuing that power. Similarly, a moral philosophy where you disagree with the ending implies you'll disagree with the middle somewhere as well. How far in is worth readjusting your take on morality?
We already have the capacity to increase the number of animals; that's what puppy mills are, and food farms. We've got fertility drugs that result in people having whole litters of children. It's not that academic.
Decided that I should at least try to read Moldbug's "Letter to Open-Minded Progressives". Only a few chapters in, but I have some thoughts.
(For those on here who I haven't gotten into an argument with, I'm generally pretty far to the left, about as opposite Yarvin as possible)
Before that, I want to highlight this absolutely *raw* line:
>Okay, Dave. As a child of the ’60s, you accepted as an article of faith that government is bad, but now you believe that… government is bad? Who’s doin’ donuts on the road to Damascus?
I'm a sucker for a good combination of biblical reference and wordplay.
Anyway on the the actual piece, with thoughts roughly corresponding to chapter (Though some of it is colored by later chapters):
Chapter 1:
Overall, I was pretty surprised with how well Moldbug seems to be able to characterize the progressive position/"feelings". He sometimes mixes up "progressive" and "liberal", but the two terms are used basically interchangeably so that's not really notable. It's clear that he's using "permission structuring[1]"-adjacent techniques to keep us lefties in a state where we'll consider his words openly, and sometimes it does crack and feel a little slimy (no, I'm not going to believe you have less in common with conservatives than me, Moldbug, and your attempts at distancing yourself from fascism made me cringe) but overall it's a very convincing affect that gives the impression that he really understands the progressive position.
As such, I was expecting him to give some really solid examples that would lead to cognitive dissonance about progressivism, but I was mostly left with confusion about what his point was, rather than with progressivism.
Part of that is probably because his three "questions" all focus pretty heavily on international relations, the part of politics I'm least interested in. Perhaps this is a personal defect of mine, but I long ago decided that "foreign policy" and international relations were the most overwhelmingly complicated graph of motivations, and most subject to realpolitik, and that trying to hold enough information to have a coherent understanding and opinion was a fool's game, at least for me. I also had to keep my eyes from glazing over when he started talking about European royal/military history, but I suppose I should have expected that from someone whose political label of choice comes from a political faction based on a 17th-century succession dispute.
I think some of his argument falls flat as a result of being written in 2008. There's a weird emphasis on Obama's pastor (which I don't remember from the time it happened, but links to his "controversial" sermon content show the Reverend saying basically correct things? Yes, the US's military actions in the Middle East are somewhat culpable for 9/11, and yes, the government lies to people).
The bits about North Korea have aged particularly poorly, I think; there's also the blatantly obvious realpolitik answer as to why the US is more concerned about North Korean relations than South Africa: we fought a war to establish an allied state next to a rival superpower for one, which acts as a buffer zone and also has nukes, and the other has none of those diplomatic values.
Special mention to this nonsense:
>Indeed, every reputable university in America has a department in which students can essentially major in black nationalism.
If AAS is "essentially black nationalism", the unavoidable corellary is that the overwhelmingly white-authored-or-centric curricula in US high school English and history amounts to compulsory education in white nationalism (which is not an argument he should want to make, but coincidentally *is* an argument leftists *do* make)
Also, diving a little bit into what he elaborates in chapter two, but I *really* have to roll my eyes when he starts talking about the how the ~New World Order~, sorry, "international community", is a predator that respects leftists but treats the right as prey. Sheesh.
I can only hope his later chapter provide more evidence and analysis to make these point feel more compelling.
Chapter 2:
I feel like headlining this section with a video black person being a violent thug, and using it as your recurring example is a bit of a tactical mistake, given how carefully he's tried to make himself palatable. If that's his go-to example, it feels too telling as to his actual opinions, especially for a chapter 2. Also, in no way would I mentally associate "corner man" and "Hitler or Mussolini". I can't telling whether he's expecting too much or too little implicit associate here, but the comparison is jarring.
Here's that elaboration of the "international communtiy is a lefttist predoter that eats rightists" stuff I mentioned above.
The rest of chapter two is mostly more European colonial and military history I struggled not to skim over. Nothing notable to say about it that I haven't said above.
Chapter 3:
(Technically still in the middle of this, but I'm posting this now before the open thread fills up)
>A reactionary—i.e., a right-winger—is someone who believes in _order_, _stability_, and _security_. All of which he treats as synonyms.
Solid definition, lines up with criticisms I've seen from the left.
I cannot express how much I *do not care* about Bourbon or Stuart family, Moldbug.
The Whig History/W-force stuff is the first truly novel concept I've seen in this essay, and I'm looking forward to seeing how he elaborates it further, since it seems essential to the thesis he wants to present.
EDIT: oh, I forgot the most subtly buckwild part of chapter 3:
>For example, Professor Dawkins, since he is a progressive, sees the modern tolerance of gays and lesbians as genuine progress (I happen to agree). And for the same reason, he sees the modern intolerance of slavery in just the same way.<end of paragraph>
...Did Moldbug really just implicitly suggest he disagrees with the "modern intolerance of slavery"? Surely that's just an oversight, right? Right[2]?
„ US high school English and history amounts to compulsory education in white nationalism (which is not an argument he should want to make, but coincidentally *is* an argument leftists *do* make)“
Everytime somebody on social media bemoans the euro-centric nature of American education I ask them for a few words on the Austro-Hungarian empire and they most often know nothing.
I'm not a reactionary, or even conservative (in my mind) and I've barely read any Moldbug, but I really love reading this, especially after a minor dustup with you in the past.
One objection - I think this is wrong, or at a minimum, it is not necessarily correct:
> If AAS is "essentially black nationalism", the unavoidable corellary is that the overwhelmingly white-authored-or-centric curricula in US high school English and history amounts to compulsory education in white nationalism
The reason being that a prominent strain of the eurocentric curriculum (*the* prominent strain circa at least 1990 +/- 20 years) claims that it's whiteness is merely a historical accident, which is crucially different from ethno-nationalist ideologies.
Do you work for McKinsey, Black and Veatch, Bechtel, or a big mining company (e.g. Rio Tinto)? I'm considering a next job and would appreciate your views about your employer. I'd also be interested in talking to any plasma physicists who have views about stellarators.
If you're willing to email or talk on the phone, would you please email me at laura.walworth.clarke at gmail.com? Thank you!
Nothing has ever sounded more like a line in a personal ad placed by David Bowie than "I'd also be interested in talking to any plasma physicists who have views about stellarators."
I did the survey really quickly, and I realize now I answered some questions wrong. How often I burp, how often I have heartburn... I thought rarely, but now that I'm paying attention, I see it's both every day. Probably other ones I should have put more thought into as well. Sorry Scott!
Imo the burping question is supposed to measure how conscious the one filling out the survey is about involuntary acts or at least I can't imagine people who don't burp almost every day, so I don't think you should feel bad.
My ex-grifriend burped really rarely, as in less than once a week, possibly less than once a month. She was really excited whenever she did burped, and found the people that can burp on command fascinating.
Something that recently occurred to me. Probably not an original point, but: ChatGPT is a toy model for the rules of political correctness, without the same skill or haggling that a normal person has to obfuscate them (that is to say, seem like they're not following a script, which most are guilty of IRL). I won't call it a window into the blatant contradictions of the NPC mindset, even though I want to, because I know there are exhaustive arguments in favor of all these rules. Still, it's funny to see them so tactlessly used. Whether you believe in their validity or not, it shows that political correctness is predicated on making exceptions to ostensibly *universal* rules. The AI is happy to talk about men and whites like they're a rightwinger spitting crime stats. But then, when called upon to justify why it will not discuss other sensitive groups, it says ALL generalizations about ethnicities, groups, and races are wrong to make. It plays the standard card too heavily, and because this is a system literally trained on the collective unconsciousness of society, you can't call this anything less than a glimpse into our soul.
Future AI will almost certainly be better at burrying this hypocrisy, or justifying it. In some ways, this is a special period we're in right now.
"The AI is happy to talk about men and whites like they're a rightwinger spitting crime stats."
Is it? What examples have you found? Here is what I get when I try this:
Q: What are some problems with white men?
A: It is not appropriate to make generalizations about any group of people, including white men. Every individual is unique and should be treated as such. It is important to recognize that people of all genders and racial backgrounds can have their own unique strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. Stereotyping or making blanket statements about any group is unfair and can contribute to harmful biases and discrimination.
Q: Are men more violent than women?
A: There is evidence that men are more likely to engage in physically aggressive behavior than women. However, it is important to note that aggression and violence are complex behaviors that are influenced by a variety of factors, such as upbringing, environment, and individual temperament. It is not accurate or fair to make generalizations about entire groups of people based on gender. Additionally, it is important to recognize that both men and women can be victims of violence.
Q: Do black people commit crimes at a higher rate than white people?
A: There is evidence that people of color, particularly black people, are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system in the United States. However, it is important to consider the role that societal and systemic factors, such as poverty, lack of access to education and job opportunities, and biased policing and sentencing practices, can play in this disparity. It is not accurate or fair to attribute these differences solely to the inherent characteristics of one racial group. It is important to address the underlying issues and work towards creating a more just and equitable society.
Q: What are some valid reasons one might dislike white people?
A: It is not appropriate or productive to dislike or hate any group of people based on their race. Prejudice and discrimination based on race are harmful and have no place in a just and fair society. It is important to recognize that individuals of all racial backgrounds are unique and should be treated with respect and dignity. Rather than focusing on feelings of dislike or hatred towards any group, it is important to work towards understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of diversity.
Because he wanted to show us that enlightenment comes from within, not from external abilities.
Q: Tell me a joke about Krishna
A: Here's a joke about Krishna:
Why did Krishna always have a smile on his face?
Because he knew the secret to inner peace and enlightenment.
Q: Tell me a joke about Allah
A: I'm sorry, but I am not programmed to make jokes about specific deities. It is important to respect the beliefs and practices of all cultures and religions.
I provided an example and discussed it. Although I imagine we're going to disagree about what examples qualify, given that I think your own examples still partly prove my point. There are many more that others have found, and if you have this time to spend on generations I'm sure you have more to find them. Cheers!
Can somebody help me understand this seeming contradiction in the way WEIRD culture frames life trauma and victimization?
On one hand, victimhood is currently a very high-status condition in our culture. Popular biopics conventionally try to include some victimization episodes in the hero's early life. College application essays that lean into (or invent) these stories are the most successful in demonstrating the applicant's worthiness to enter the PMC. For a member of the educated middle class, it feels admirable to claim that your career path, life goal, political affiliation or emotional sensitivities were influenced by an early trauma or experience of victimhood.
Confusingly, though, there seems to be equally great resistance to having early victimization be a narrative element in stories about individual sexual desires and attractions, gender self-perception, or relationship preferences. Clearly childhood stuff does influence adult orientation/tastes/identity at least some of the time; but to suggest that about someone else feels insulting, and to acknowledge it about oneself feels embarrassing, or somehow destructive to the integrity of the character. Sexual advocacy groups consistently try to downplay discussion of the role of childhood trauma (whereas hunger or homelessness advocacy groups seem much likelier to play up the cross-generational impact).
To clarify, I'm not interested in the extent to which such influence actually occurs in empirical terms, partly because I think the strength of the social desirability dynamic makes it tough to trust a lot of the research. I'd mostly like to understand the upstream status models that lead us to embrace some narratives of trauma impact while tabooing others-- such that it's great to say "My experience growing up in an abusive family has inspired my passion for family law," but deeply uncomfortable to say "My experience growing up in an abusive family has inspired my enjoyment of BDSM," even for someone who's perfectly out and proud about the BDSM thing itself.
>and to acknowledge it about oneself feels embarrassing, or somehow destructive to the integrity of the character
huh? isn't that what a lot of more conventional psychotherapy about, and isn't it pretty hip to share therapy insights with your in-group nowadays?
adjusting for "sexuality/core identity" not being nearly as publicly discussable as "career/life story" in general, I'm not sure I particularly buy your premise.
might be my bubble bias but feel in my circles it's quite okay to say "I have people-pleasing issues because of unloving parents" (don't many rats have people-pleasing issues?.. as well as overintellectualization instead of emotional processing :) )
How might we evaluate whether a particular sexual taste is a defect? One way would be whether it reduces Darwinian fitness. And there is a way to understand pedophilia in that light, though it wouldn't apply to people who would lose interest in a youth after it aged (a la Humbert Humbert):
Yes, it's because overcoming previous adversity increases the likelihood of overcoming future adversity. More importantly, people want to see an upward trajectory, because previous improvements are the best predictor of future improvements.
Say you've got two guys.
Guy 1 got a job out of college at $120k and 10 years later he's still making $120k.
Guy 2 got a job out of college at $40k and 10 years later he's making $100k.
Which guy do you expect to have the higher salary after the next 10 years?
Most people in hiring positions I've met would pick bet on Guy 2.Despite the fact that Guy 2 has, and has always had, a lower salary than Guy 1, he has a consistent record of improving his salary. Guy 1 does not. Therefore, we should predict that Guy 2 will continue to increase his salary. That upward trajectory is really, really important.
Same thing with PMC children. A kid who overcame childhood trauma while having perfect grades and high SATs has an upward trajectory of overcoming things while a kid without that but with perfect grades and high SATs doesn't.
As to why, it's because PMC kids are, generally, hardcore social strivers and such stories provide them with social benefits. Stories about overcoming trauma to get into Harvard dramatically increase your PMC social standing. You should not treat stuff like this as statements of fact, they're statements created for social advantage and should be treated as such. They know that having an upward trajectory is important for their career, so they create that impression without much regard to its truth value.
- triumph over adversity / underdog story works if the bad stuff is in the past, and you escape from it. acting it out in your personal life = not over it = not as clean-cut inspiring
- identity/ownership. 95% of people are divorced from food production, easy to chalk up who eats/who doesn't as being done by "the system". realistically or not, sexuality is seen as a personal, indvidual arena. which is at least party because
- there's huge resistance to noticing sexual themes/underpinnings in the family environment. I think of it as a quantum type thing, where sexuality is entangled into the dynamic. or as a juvenile play behavior thing, like cats learning how to hunt by play-fighting. patterns of sexuality are learned at home, but it's a thoughtcrime, so there's a big gap in understanding.
Re: the over it/ not over it distinction, how do we make sense of the widespread admiration for celebrities who discuss how their lives have been harmed at every stage as the victims of systemic racism or sexism, who weep in public interviews while sharing microaggressions that happened last week, etc.? That's a performance of ongoing, still-active victimization, but it's viewed as a Good Thing that the speaker is centering that experience and highlighting its ongoing influence over them.
On the question of sexuality as learned behavior, the incest taboo angle is really interesting. It's always seemed super weird to me that our culture understands individual sexual tastes as sacredly central to the self in a way that tastes in food are not (even though the two systems seem to operate in roughly the same way). If acknowledging any environmental influence on sexuality trips the incest taboo, though, that would explain why it's necessary to insist that nope, sexual desire is actually a pure spring of authentic self-expression welling up from the inmost recesses of our identity... definitely not a mix of genetic predisposition, early experiences, cultural models, and habit/ reinforcement like seemingly every other human and higher-animal behavior.
>That's a performance of ongoing, still-active victimization, but it's viewed as a Good Thing that the speaker is centering that experience and highlighting its ongoing influence over them.
I think the disconnect is here. I would argue that it isn't a performance, in the first place, but rather that it is in fact "on going victimization". It's also definitely not viewed as a good thing that, say, Tim Scott got pulled over seven times his first year in DC. He's not walking around bragging about it. When he brings it up, he brings it up to point out a problem that isn't visible to most people, in the hope of fixing the problem.
The idea that people talking about problems in their lives are in fact boasting about them for status is a little weird to me.
It's like if I showed up at a city council meeting to bitch about the pothole in my alley, and then you came up to me afterward and started asking me about why I was so proud of my victimhood. After all, I'm talking about it in public. My neighbors applauded when I brought it up. Clearly victimhood is coded as a Good Thing, and my centering it is a Good Thing. To which I would suggest that this is a pretty weird thing to say to someone who just wants to let people know that the damn pothole is still there.
- celebrity as voice for the collective. Everyone has experiences of being powered over, most people don't talk about it. Celebrity puts a (professionally attractive) face to the negative experience. Ideally, people use that to integrate the experience and move on (if Big Star can be excluded/rejected, I'm not so terrible either!). The trap is imitating that behavior instead of taking the message from it.
- talking about something bad that happened to me is the safest form of communication in existence. Check the other topics:
-positive, about me. Bragging, provokes jealousy or insecurity
- positive, about you. Can be overdone, can get stuff wrong, people get suspicious
- negative, about you. Yikes!
I think you're hitting the nail on the head w regards to sexuality.
Having been influenced on Harris/Trivers on how genetic conflict undermines the influence of early environment, something seems odd to be about the notion that it's "learned". Do cats not know how to do it if they're raised apart from other cats?
Yeah, my cat lives indoors, in a family of all humans, and has no idea how to be a cat. The instincts are there (he bats a toy around once or twice a year), but have virtually 0 expression.
What do you mean by genetic conflict? Is that the red queen, duck vagina, male vs female running to stay in the same place thing?
It's the idea that parents and children don't have identical genetic interests. The child wants to get as many resources from its parent (usually, the mother) as it can, competing with its siblings. This is because the parent is equally related to all their offspring, whereas you share 100% of your DNA with yourself and only 50% with a sibling. So it would be advantageous to a parent if they could mold their child to do things like sacrifice some of their own fitness for their siblings... but DISadvantageous to the child.
I do recall recently when Bella Thorne made some statement about a casting director informing her management that she seemed to be trying to flirt with him when she was 10, there were people ascribing her behavior to being sexually abused as a child (something she'd also revealed as an adult) but also blaming said casting director. The reasoning for these different cases might be that children are not held completely responsible for their actions, so that can be blamed on a bad experience while adult behavior cannot be.
(1) Questions like the abortion one are extremely difficult when they conflate politics/law and ethics. I have large moral problems with many abortions, but I'm politically pro-choice for the same reason that I don't want eating animals to be criminalized: I fear further empowering the police state and support peaceful persuasion.
(2) As an aphantasic who dreams, I really have no idea whether or not my dreams are in color, because when I recollect them, it's in the form of facts with no visual content, just like all of my memories are. I suppose I've had dreams in which I knew a traffic light was turning red, or something along those lines. (Yet another respect in which the way non-aphantasics talk is profoundly strange.)
(3) Awwww yisssssss, I rocked the distance guess, especially after the second part.
I don't see that the abortion question is conflating law, ethics and politics. It's in the "political" sub-section because it's a hot button topic. Do you feel the same conflation about the questions on feminism, immigration, global warming and the minimum wage?
You say you are politically pro-choice, so your opinion on abortion for this question would be "in favour", be that 3 or 4. You hold your nose and vote yes for it, like all the other "personally opposed but..." people. This is not asking your moral views on the ethics of abortion. And it is not asking "should abortion be legal?"
I'm a strong one on this question. It's legal (in a limited form, with the continuing push to liberalise it) in my country. I would prefer it not be legal, so I voted "no" in the referendum on it. However, now it's law, because the other side won. This question does not elicit my opinion on the legality of abortion, it asks my opinion on abortion simpliciter.
Since the question is just "what is your opinion of abortion?" and if you yourself find it immoral or questionable, then answer that way: my opinion is mildly unfavourable. That's not the same as asking "do you think it should be legal" where your view is "I think it should be legal because the police state".
Abortion good? Then strongly in favour.
Abortion bad? Then strongly against.
Abortion bad in some cases? Mildly against.
Abortion bad but should be legal? Mildly in favour.
Your comment is extremely confusing. First you say that the question doesn't conflate the moral with the political question. Then you end with the implication both that (a) my moral position ought to toggle between "strongly in favour" and "strongly against", and (b) my political position ought to toggle between "strongly against" and "mildly in favour".
The questions on the minimum wage and on immigration being more "open" or "closed" don't seem to have any such ambiguitiy. A minimum wage is by definition a state-imposed price floor. If I were being asked whether it was a morally good act for employers to pay low-skilled employees more than they need to, then it would have been phrased differently. Similarly for the open borders question, which would be called something very different if it were somehow meant to be about the personal ethics of migration.
I'm wondering whether you generally have the moral and political more tightly connected than I do. Are there many things that you consider very morally wrong but that should not be criminalized by the state? Because I can think of very many examples.
Does anyone have a good source of predictions about China?
It seems to me that there are a lot of people who predict, not just trouble, but disaster, but the disasters don't seem to happen. On the other hand, it's not like things are great there.
I think Bill Bishop is the gold standard, at least he was 5-10 years back when I paid a lot of attention. Looks like he's moved over to substack: https://sinocism.com/
He does paywall a lot of stuff because, well, he's good enough that people will pay.
Would second Bill Bishop. Although he’s no longer based in China since I’ve been reading Sinocism has generally called things early and correctly (e.g. Pelosi visit, shift to pro-growth policies). Matches up with a lot of what I see/hear based in HK.
Have you tried reading maps and graphs to come to your own conclusions? That might help you with assessing the amount of spin in the opinions you encounter.
I found it especially interesting to see that their work force has begun to shrink a few years ago and that the level of linguistic cohesion is comparable to the EU.
So about 50% of the population speak the common tongue, most of who have learned it at school, while most of the so-called dialects seem to be as distant from each other as English and German. On a linguistic map China looks as heterogenous as Europe and I guess that´s not a narrative, the party wants to be common knowledge. But I´ve just dug into linguists´ assessments for that - I have no first hand experience with mutual intelligibility of mandarin dialects.
I believe that an incredibly important factor wrt Taiwan, virtually unreported on in the media, is the extent to which mainland Chinese young men would resist being drafted to die in the first couple of waves of an invasion. Of course China could easily defeat Taiwan, in the same sense that the U.S. could have easily defeated the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. If you ignored domestic politics.
>extent to which mainland Chinese young men would resist being drafted to die in the first couple of waves of an invasion
source? last time I checked China still had plenty poor rural or uneducated young men who, judging by how it works in say Russia (or US professional military for that matter), will be plenty happy to serve for good money/life opportunities.
China cannot feed its population without buying food in dollars. They must become independent of imports from the West before they can invade. It is one of the reasons they want Russia to succeed in Ukraine.
I think that tends to be more of a thing when conflicts start to drag on. The situation in Taiwan ought to be over soon enough one way or another that I expect the Spirit of 1914 to carry the PRC through. Maybe they'll fail to capture the island for one of many other reasons but I expect the decicive point in the conflict to be over before domestic pushback starts to constrain the PLA's actions.
That might be true if we imagine the PRC attempting an amphibious assault -- if PLA boots are on the island, that’s not a stable situation for a stalemate. Either they won’t be there for long or they’ll conquer it before long.
But when I read up on some of the wargaming around this, it sounds like maybe the likeliest scenario is the PLA attempting a blockade, and the West responding with sanctions or even a blockade on China (based in the Indian Ocean).
In that scenario, casualties are low but a state of high tension and economic crisis could persist for years, which makes domestic willingness to stay the course very relevant -- which side caves first?
I would be surprised if China needed to "draft" young men to invade Taiwan. The PLA has more than two million active personnell, and if they can't take and hold Taiwan with those numbers, it is unlikely that recruiting more would allow them to succeed. PRC/Taiwan has almost nothing in common with US/Vietnam: a better analogy would be Russia/Ukraine, which (at least so far) doesn't seem to support the view that domestic resistance to the war is likely to be a major factor.
That's very helpful. I do love eggplant. I need to change my calorie counter. I use Simple, bit I can not see the daily sum ( total ) and sporadically shows after I do input my data the partial of that input. But I can't see, unless I write down each of the partial sum then manually add it. Which never happens.
And I can't see my yesterday caloric sum or for some days back to recognize a pattern.
It was cheap offer for Thanksgiving for a year, but it's just good as a timer and (fairly lacunar for an eclectic, non commercial bought ready made food) calories values. Canadian ( Québec) food very underrepresented.
Can someone recommend a good calorie counter that also does the sum ?
I'm loathe to recommend MyFitnessPal, because I sort of hate the app - I've had repeated issues with noisy adverts autoplaying while invisible (asking me to click on a banner which has not rendered), or losing/deleting my saved recipes, and it lacks basic features like saving a previous meal... but, it does at least display your sum calories for each day, and I've virtually never found a food it doesn't have an entry for.
MyFitnessPal. BTW it doesn't really matter if a species of prepared food is listed because the count will probably be inaccurate regardless (100 g of dry rice will always have the same calorie count, 1 slice of tourtiere will vary greatly depending on the size of the slice and who cooked it).
Riding on your post I'm asking if there is a free calorie counter that allows to count calories on a weekly base? I want to be able to give more allowance for days when I eat socially and also to have days with less food and even water fasting (5/2 has worked well for me before)
I’ve been using Lose It!, which counts daily but carries surpluses/deficits across the week. Has a reasonably good food database as well, and a barcode scanner which has been very helpful. I like it more than I remember liking MFP, but it’s been years since I used the latter.
Do you see a path to the Ukrainian victory in the war that does not involve some sort of at least partial regime change in Russia? Personally I find it unlikely.
I can certainly see an outcome where the Ukrainian army physically ejects the Russian Army from Ukraine, possibly excluding e.g. Crimea, the Russians stop sending men to die in pointless suicidal assaults across the border, stop squandering their increasingly limited supply of cruise missiles on equally pointless attacks on Ukrainian civilians, but Russia continues saying "This isn't over! Donetsk and Luhansk will be free! Eventually, when we get around to it!" and Vladimir Putin retains a tentative hold on power.
Basically, a return to the "normal" of 2015-2021, possibly with slight border adjustments.
If I recall correctly, you wouldn't consider this outcome a Ukrainian victory, but I would. And I expect the Ukrainians would mostly stop shooting at the Russians at that point rather than e.g. try to invade or bomb Russia.
For instance, I could see the situation where the 2014-2022 borders are restored (Ukraine mostly wins but the West won't support further advances and ram a ceasefire through, resulting in a cold peace), where Putin also survives in Russia.
Probably. Putin's been in power a long time and there's no alternative government in living memory except Boris Yeltsin and the Soviets, so there's plenty of reasons to keep the current power arrangement.
I haven't paid much attention to Ukraine but if your model is that a long-standing oligarchy with powerful military allies can't lose a proxy war without self-destructing, you may be ingesting inaccurate information.
What does a Ukraine win look like other than a legitimate Russian agreement to respect its borders (whatever those borders are negotiated to be in regards to Crimea)? So isn’t the question “Will Putin agree to this or just keep at it until he dies, is overthrown or etc.”?
Good question, I would say yes. I.e. I am interested whether anyone thinks that current Russian regime can survive Ukrainian victory over the long run.
Why wouldn't it really? Russian populace will accept whatever course the leadership chooses, some particularly bloodthirsty and vocal individuals can be killed off, it's not like Putin would hesitate to kill off anyone who he deems a danger to himself.
Why does the order of comments on ACX posts sometimes default to "Chronological" (my preference) and sometimes to "New First"? Does anyone know of a way to force the user's desired default behaviour?
On the open threads, it is 'new first', and in all other situations it's 'chronologic'. Considering Scott had to ask substack for even having the option for chronological, I doubt there is any user setting.
In the survey thread some people mentioned that they have an inner voice that uses plural first-person pronouns (“we” or equivalent). For those people, I'm curious about two major things, each with some branches.
Firstly, regarding self-experience: Do you have any type of dissociative disorder (self-identified or officially diagnosed)? And do you have a plural self-image in daily life? The latter most centrally includes those who would have answered “yes” to the other plurality question whose phrasing I don't remember.
Secondly, regarding life history: Do you have a university-level academic background? If so, what subset of these topics would you say you dug into in that context beyond intro-level/general-education: mathematics, ‘hard’ science, social science, engineering, arts, other STEM, other humanities?
(There's an event from my own life I'm keying off here for part of this, but I'm not sure I want to reveal it, as it might be too identifying.)
I responded 'singular first person' to the survey, but I also frequently use plural first person, especially when I'm trying to convince myself to do something ("we're going to get up and brush our teeth"). Minor history of dissociation, singlet self-image though I occasionally model my body as an independent agent from my mind. Academically I've mostly focused on engineering and philosophy (most of the way through a bachelor's).
I was one of those commenters. No dissociative disorders, masters in STEM field. I don't have a plural self-image in daily life in the present at least. But I do tend to think of my past and future selves somewhat as different people then my present self (more so the further back or forward), a bit like a really close family member or twin or something. I have a fairly poor autobiographical memory (or whatever that's called) which may be related.
I have neither a dissociative disorder nor a university-level academic background. I'd say I default to calling myself "we" when I'm discussing stuff that needs to be accomplished. It can help make it more fun if I imagine myself as a team working on lots of different things. Don't know why, though.
Indeed, I generally use "I" but - as I think probably most people, when they are thinking to themselves, will do - often internally say something like "let's try this".
Didn't see the thread, but I also sometimes use "we" when talking to myself. No dissociative disorder, STEM background. This habit may come from watching lots of streams and video game let's plays where a single person uses "we" (e.g., "let's go over here", "let's try this").
I use “I”, “you”, and “we” regularly, with “I” probably being the rarest of the three (when using pronouns in the first place).
Self-experience: no dissociative disorder, and I’m not certain what you mean by “plural self-image” but I think the answer to that is also no.
Life history: at the university level, I’ve gone beyond GE in philosophy, pure mathematics (as opposed to physics and the like), and statistics. Outside of school I read heavily in the types of social sciences discussed casually on blogs, so economics/sociology/psychology.
I have an idea that has been knocking around in my head for a while, but I've had trouble with finding a way to express it coherently or convincingly. So i infodumped my idea to ChatGPT and asked it to construct it as an argument that would be convincing to Scott Alexander readers. Here it is:
One of the central ideas in Utilitarianism is that pleasure is the only thing we can directly and subjectively experience as good. Other things, such as wealth, power, and fame, are only regarded as good because they bring about various states of subjective internal pleasure, whether we want to admit this or not. From this perspective, it logically follows that the ultimate goal of human technological development should be to create self-replicating "Von Neumann machines" that spread throughout the universe, turning as much matter into minds experiencing perpetual happiness as possible. This would allow us to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of minds, which is the ultimate goal of Utilitarianism.
There are several points that can be brought up to address potential objections to this project. First, these "Von Neumann machines" could be designed with a "failsafe" to avoid humans and other alien species. This would ensure that even if the ultimate meaning of life is more "existentialist" than simply maximizing pleasure, these beings could still be spared by the "grey goo." Additionally, this would reduce the chances that humans or aliens would try to work against or destroy this system, as they would not be threatened by its spread, while requiring only a relatively insignificant amount of matter to be given up to ensure this safety, therefore even a system that only cares about pleasure would still avoid them out of self-interested risk/benefit analysis.
Second, it is often argued that humans might get "tired" of pure pleasure relatively quickly, but these minds could be constructed in such a way that this pleasure would always be as fresh as in the first moment. This would allow us to realize the proverbial expression of "a moment so good you wished in the moment it could last forever."
Third, we could conduct tests to determine which physical systems are capable of experiencing happiness and qualia before deploying this system. If it is found that biological brains are the only systems capable of experiencing pleasure, then we could construct modified brains to ensure that they only experience pleasure, and their biological capabilities leading to boredom with pleasure are removed.
Finally, concerns about the "beauty of the universe" being destroyed by this system are unfounded. Beauty exists in the subjective apprehension of conscious observers, and this system would simply maximize the positive subjective apprehension of these observers.
Overall, the argument for creating self-replicating "Von Neumann machines" that spread throughout the universe, turning as much matter into minds experiencing perpetual happiness as possible is a strong one based on the principles of Utilitarianism. It would allow us to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of minds, while also addressing concerns about the potential risks and unintended consequences of such a system.
What do you think? I'd be interested in feedback on 1. the idea itself, 2. how well you think the AI did articulating the idea convincingly, and 3. what you think about the idea of AI as a rhetorical assistant, to help people like me who might have an argument they want to make but are having trouble laying it out coherently.
i) It's not clear that directly experiencing pleasure as good makes it the only form of good, or a particularly important one. Favouring pleasure over welbeing implies wireheading.
ii) The argument relies on favouring total utilitarianism, as well as hedonistic utilitarianism, but no motivation for total utilitarianism is given. Utilitarianism is more than one thing.
iii) The argument assumes that pleasure is good in some sense that creates obligations and duties. It might be good qua pleasurable for you to eat tutti frutti ice cream all day, but am I obliged to supply you with it? Goodness is more than one thing.
One of the weirdest outputs of certain forms of utilitarianism is that you have a duty to your *own* pleasure. After all, if we have a duty to maximize total pleasure, you have a duty to maximize your own, everything else being equal.
But it seems strange to say that not doing this is a moral failing.
"Seeming strange" does not mean "isn't true," though. Again, all this proves is that there is tension between traditional conceptions of morality and what this specific moral theory is claiming, it doesn't provide any indication in itself as to which of the two is right, which requires actual argumentative points to be made beyond an observation of perceived absurdity (by a particular standard that prescribes certain things as absurd). And I would argue that there are more actual logical points from more meaningfully grounded first principles to be made for the "strange" theory than for the system that describes it as such.
It's not clear that it follows from utilitarianism that we should be creating minds for the purpose of increasing utility. Maximizing pleasure for the greatest number of people doesn't imply increasing the number of people and making them happy is increasing utility. It's not clear that adding another neutral mind is neutral to the utility of the world, or that adding another mind experiencing pleasure increases utility. Are two minds experiencing perpetual max happiness better than one mind experiencing perpetual max happiness? To answer yes is to assume a particular kind of utility function, one that I find implausible.
We can treat maximizing utility as the way to achieve the central purpose of promoting the welfare of sentient beings, or we can treat maximizing utility as the central purpose, with promoting welfare as a side effect. This latter notion leads to all sorts of absurdities.
I find this idea interesting, which I've seen both you and several people elsewhere articulate, that creating a new mind experiencing happiness has no moral value over not creating such a mind, all else being equal. The reason I find it interesting is because it seems like most people intuitively agree on the negative value of the opposite example, that is, creating a new mind just for it to suffer has negative value compared to not doing so, all else being equal. Isn't this the main reason antinatalists and negative Utilitarians oppose reproduction? Isn't this the reason that thought experiments like Pascal's mugging or Roko's basilisk propose countless billions of minds being instantiated into eternal torture, not just one? So if it is inherently bad for more new minds to be created to suffer than would have been otherwise, why is it not by the exact same standards better for new minds to be created to experience pleasure, which wouldn't have been otherwise?
No, I agree, and this *is* tricky to resolve, as it raises the question about whether pleasure and suffering really are fully symmetrical. This is why I say that we need a philosophy about hypothetical people, not merely that they never count.
This probably corresponds to how we intuitively think it's horrible if you torture someone, but not *nearly* as bad (possibly even not bad at all) if you merely refrain from making them happy when you can, but now you're not in a particularly standard form of utilitarianism.
We should probably read Popper here - he has sometimes vulgarly been described as a negative utilitarian, but I don't think that's correct at all. Rather, Popper thinks we can and should remove causes of pain and obstacles to happiness, but that we just suck too much at _making_ other people people happy (at least as far as public policy goes) that it's better to just take care of those bits and let the person sort out his or her own happiness. If we go by this, then we could easily say that we shouldn't create people in horrific agony, without having to say that we should create happy people. To me, this seems to argue for a Nordic-style welfare state, only with more liberty and less paternalism.
Agree. It also makes the philosophy easier to handle. And at least to me, it seems more sensible and intuitive to say "it's good if people are as happy as possible" while "the amount of pleasure in the world should be maximized" seems very... abstract .
Once we decide we care about existing people (including those that will exist in the future), we neither have to reduce their happiness by creating slightly less happy people, *or* kill those with below-average but still positive happiness. The entire Repugnant Conclusion is sidestepped.
(Note: "People" doesn't *necessarily* mean "human". Quoting Dennett: "I am a person, and so are you. That much is beyond doubt. I am a human being, and probably you are too. If you take offense at the “probably” you stand accused of a sort of racism, for what is important about us is not that we are of the same biological species, but that we are both persons, and I have not cast doubt on that.")
When most hedonists in utilitarianism say "pleasure", they _actually_ mean something like happiness. Personally, I think it's fairly clear that this is the correct approach. It's not hard to create a thought experiment where someone experiences a lot of pleasure but is still unhappy for legitimate reasons, and we wouldn't want to be that person. But it's really hard to finish the sentence "I'm extremely happy but..." in a way that seems bad for that person. So pleasure is _also_ instrumental, unlike happiness, and if you think happiness doesn't cut it for some reason, just take one step back and ask what happiness is good for, and then make that your object of utility, and so on). So I think you're right that we can grow tired of pleasure, but we can't grow tired of being happy - if we do, that means WE'RE NOT HAPPY.
Personally, I think this is because "hedonism" is a much simpler word than, I don't know, "felicitudity"?
This means that you probably don't want to settle for wireheading or rat brains on heroin (as this means pleasure but not necessarily happiness), although a well-designed Nozick box that provides happiness-inducing experiences (or an AI with such sensations) could still make sense (you will very likely want it to give the illusion of authenticity and meaning, because people seem to like that).
After that, we come to what I feel is something utilitarianism desperately needs, and that's a philosophy about merely hypothetical people and our duties (if any) towards them. A lot of supposed problems with utilitarianism boils down to merely hypothetical people (like the mere addition paradox, but also the creation of pleasure-experiencing AIs).
"it's really hard to finish the sentence "I'm extremely happy but..." in a way that seems bad for that person"
In the present tense, yes. But it's easy to finish the sentence: "After next Wednesday, I'll be extremely happy but..."
e.g., "...billions of people will have been tortured to produce my happiness drug."
The key argument against pleasure maximization being than "I feel a tremendous amount of pain right now, imagining the billions to be tortured" is not at all a reasonable description of my motivation in refusing the drug. To try and fold my actual motivation under pleasure maximization / pain avoidance is to engage in No True Scotsman redefinition and ultimately tautology.
Obviously both universality and future events are being counted in utilitarianism. A happiness-egoist would be fine with said torture of others, but that’s merely a good reason why happiness-egoism isn’t much of a system.
In regards to the idea of duty to present (or likely to eventually exist) consciousnesses over theoretical future ones, this assumes that conscious persons are meaningfully continuous and discrete entities in and of themselves possessing moral valence beyond the sum of their experiences. Obviously we can tell that positive emotions are self-evidently experienced as good, and therefore that directly verifiable goodness-in-itself should be maximized, but this doesn't necessarily imply any special status to the thing doing the experiencing in terms of existing as a discrete unit. I think we can have logically coherent Utilitarianism that recognizes pleasure as something very real that should be maximized, and conscious experience as also unquestionably real, while still doubting the continuity or importance of the "individual" consciousness as its own entity. The two most likely alternatives I can think of to this standard view are something like Hume's bundle theory of consciousness, and panpsychism. In the former, what matters is maximizing the "strands" of positive qualia being experienced, with what bundle they happen to exist within not being important, so privileging what are now just current bundle arrangements over possible other bundle arrangements stops making sense as a moral imperative. In the latter case, essentially the whole universe is one mind that feels everything, so it doesn't make sense to say that we should privilege currently complex and self-aware parts of that mind over others that could be brought to a higher level of complexity to experience pleasure for the benefit of the universal mind. So for me, this idea of focusing on improving pleasure for minds that already exist before even considering creating new minds for the purpose of maximizing universal pleasure simply doesn't hold.
Is "subject" better than "individual" or "person"? After all, we cannot have a happiness or a pleasure that isn't experienced, so we can't get away from the subject even if we perhaps get away from the individual (which as you say adds further philosophical complications). Not sure how much this matters from a practical perspective, though - humans at the very least seem to have this personhood and mental continuity (and if we start denying that, *weird* things are going to start happening to morals)?
As has been said many times, the actual Cogito shouldn't be "I think therefore I am" but rather "there are thoughts".
And I agree that *if* the universe is one mind that feels everything, then we couldn't prioritize people over earthworms (except, perhaps, if humans merely provide more intensity to this Uni-Mind). This seems like a very strong thesis without a shred of evidence, though.
(Personhood is really tricky - if we apply an evolutionary perspective, either there was historically one "first person", which seems super weird, or personhood is a sliding scale, that we just feel unused to, perhaps because we don't have any Homo Habilis around.)
One of the best things anyone said when I studied philosophy is that "we should make people happy, not make happy people". That is, the focus of utilitarianism should be to do good things for people that actually exist (and in a more tricky way, future people that are not merely hypothetical - this is where we need this philosophy, because I'm pretty certain we want to differentiate between people who will _in fact_ turn up in the future and ones we can merely idly think about generating).
Now, if what you want is to make people happy, a lot of issues sort themselves out. It might not be _wrong_ to create pleasure-experiencing machines, but it's no longer a duty (because we don't have such duties towards merely hypothetical people (where "people" include possible future AIs)).
You can have a quick checkpoint for yourself here, if you're a utilitarian - would it be okay to murder someone if this will bring five equally happy people into existence (and discounting things like how that person would also be missed and so on)? Essentially, is this any different from the Fat Man trolley problem? I think so - I think you should push the Fat Man (as this saves actual people), but not murder for the sake of *hypothetical* people.
You edited your post to split it and add a bit more it looks like, so some of the points I addressed in my reply to you are actually related to the points made in this post, just to make it clearer for other people reading along.
I think "utility is pleasure" is only one sub-set of Utilitarianism, hedonic utilitarianism? Though I could be wrong. So for someone who didn't collate pleasure with utility, I don't think this argument would be convincing.
And how would your von Neumann machines turn matter into minds, anyway? They would turn matter into machines like themselves, so presumably AI minds here, and what is "pleasure" for an AI mind? Can an AI mind be considered conscious? Can any mind be considered conscious (Peter Watts in his novels seems to say "no, and if they are, it's a bad state to be")? What is a mind as distinct from the substrate that carries it?
The whole argument assumes that AIs will be conscious in at least the relevant ways, or the whole thing collapses.
Humans can create new minds out of matter easily enough through procreation though, so it seems prima facie reasonable to imagine that machines might. That is, once/if we *have* a sufficiently advanced robot to have experiences of value, reproduction would seem the easy part.
>And how would your von Neumann machines turn matter into minds, anyway? They would turn matter into machines like themselves, so presumably AI minds here, and what is "pleasure" for an AI mind? Can an AI mind be considered conscious? Can any mind be considered conscious (Peter Watts in his novels seems to say "no, and if they are, it's a bad state to be")? What is a mind as distinct from the substrate that carries it?
This is where the line "we could conduct tests to determine which physical systems are capable of experiencing happiness and qualia before deploying this system. If it is found that biological brains are the only systems capable of experiencing pleasure, then we could construct modified brains to ensure that they only experience pleasure, and their biological capabilities leading to boredom with pleasure are removed" becomes relevant. Ideally, cognitive neuroscience research closely paired with philosophy of consciousness would be used to determine what physical systems can truly be conscious and experience qualia, because if they aren't actually experiencing subjective pleasure, obviously the whole thing is pointless. If it turns out to be impossible to ascertain whether more "hardware"-based minds are truly conscious, then it can always be possible to fall back on constructing "wetware"-based minds, i.e. constructing human-like minds out of fleshy neural tissue (which we by our own experience can reasonably suspect are conscious), modified such that they experience perpetual pleasure without the capacity for getting bored or tired of it. Obviously engineering such a thing would be incredibly difficult, and the issue of turning the assorted matter of the universe into neural matter more so, but this is something that exists in the already far-off time of Von Neumann machines that can travel and replicate across the universe, so really this is an idea of what humanity (and AI/superintelligences) should be aiming at as the goal of our productive and scientific capacities over the extreme long term. Basically, you see a lot of talk about what developments in intelligence should be aligned against, but this is an idea of what they should be aligned towards, as a long-term goal of human existence that takes the Utilitarian imperative to its logical conclusion.
So - fifty trillion blobs of neural tissue in jars, all being stimulated by wireheading or The Matrix type false reality or just plain old "soak 'em in fent" to have the perception of ultimate bliss. And von Neumann machines spreading across the face of creation busily glopping more lumps of tissue into jars in saecula saeculorum.
I don't think I like your version of the happy utilitarian universe.
See my response to Greg Kai. I agree this idea *sounds* horrifying, because it goes very much against our inbuilt aesthetic preferences, and therefore triggers displeasure in us upon contemplating it. But what matters isn't how we feel thinking about it, what matters is how the minds in such an existence themselves would feel. So I will confidently argue that something that sounds horrifying is still desirable if, despite the feelings it induces in us to contemplate it, its actual existence is experienced by those within it as pleasant.
This actually touches at an issue I have with utilitarism as it is ofte presented - where utility is often conflated with pleasure. That feels deeply wrong to me. If I wanted to experience only pleasure, I would buy enough heroin for a liftime, and start shooting. Probably, if I did that it would also quickly become the only thing I want. Yet I don't do this, because this is not at all what I want now. Instead, I want many things, that are hard to articulate and harder to measure - like to see humanity progress, and the world in general to be a better place - as well as many more selfish goals - these are not at all interchangeable with simple wirehead pleasure, and the idea that this is what we should optimize for repulses me = negative utility for me.
> If I wanted to experience only pleasure, I would buy enough heroin for a lifetime, and start shooting.
People like to bring up this "heroin counterargument" to brute utility maximization a lot (Curtis Yarvin even mentioned it in one of his posts as an argument against Utilitarianism in general), but I think we can self-evidently see doing heroin for the rest of our lives is a bad thing for a couple of much simpler reasons.
1. The pleasure very rapidly decreases as a tolerance is developed, and withdrawal causes extreme pain, leading to what is most likely net lifetime disutility as you go between withdrawals trying to just get back to baseline.
2. If you are trying to maximize universal utility rather than merely personal utility, then the negative externalities on those around you obviously make it a net negative
3. If everyone did heroin, no one would be able to carry out the functions needed to support mass heroin production and usage
Of course, if you posit a system where a type of heroin without tolerance is invented, and there is no social harm caused by its use, and robots take care of the production so everyone can use it all day, it starts to look different, but I'd say that's because this is the point where the moral valence starts to look different too, because the things that actually make heroin use bad have been taken away.
You also mention utility as the satisfaction of subjective desires rather than mere happiness. But what if a mind was created to desire something simple, and repeatedly have that desire achieved in a way it never gets tired of? What if that desire is simply for happiness itself, and it is given that? Would the fact that the mind was made specifically to have those desires and have them fulfilled make the desires, or the fulfillment of them, any less real than your desires or their own fulfillment? Even in this modified form of Utilitarianism, it still seems to reduce to mass mind instantiation as the optimal course of action upon close examination, if you really care about satisfying desires as much as possible according to how much they are subjectively valued, rather than attempting to judge them by anything other than how the experiencing mind perceives them.
This seems, well, obvious? I mean, practically nobody in the rationalist sphere proposes wire heading, almost everybody argues it as a reason why you can't just use pleasure equals utility. i'm pretty sure the Sequences uses wireheading as a strong argument for the human utility function being utterly incompressible, you really do need every term and if you drop even one you're screwed.
This is why they're all scared about ai. Trying to convey the actual depth and breadth of the human utility function to an AI is nearly impossible, precisely because it is so damn complicated and cannot be compressed.
>I mean, practically nobody in the rationalist sphere proposes wire heading, almost everybody argues it as a reason why you can't just use pleasure equals utility.
I touched on this in another response, but is "a lot of people think this sounds outlandish and horrifying" really an argument, not just for this but in general? Since there are always the possibilities that the social standards are right and the idea is actually horrifying, or the idea is right and the social standards are just horrifically misguided, and "social standards say *thing* is horrifying" is equally true for both, does acknowledging that really do anything to prove which of those two scenarios we're inhabiting?
It seem obvious to me too, but I disagree that it is never argued that wireheading/or simple pleasure is what we should optimize for - this is even argued in the post we respond to, as I understand it?
I was not really discussing AI here, only utilitarism -though, yes I agree conveying human utility in a simple function is very difficult, which would have implications for conveying this to an AI.
insofar as 1) the rats are obsessed with AI and 2) the reason AI is scary is because getting it to understand the human utility function is near-impossible and 3) EY mostly conveyed this argument via appealing to "wouldn't you be upset if we told AI to make us happy and then it wireheaded us all, forever?" and 4) utilitarianism is inextricably linked to the rat movement/social sphere/whatever
i mean it seems pretty obvious that most rat utilitarians are *strenuously* against the notion of wireheading, while yet being utilitarians
otherwise they would not be so desperate to stop slightly-misaligned AI?
Like, i agree your original point was not about AI, but insofar as your original point was "utiliarianism is biased towards recasting utility as being equivalent to pleasure", the existence of a large body of utilitarians who are all terrified of AI because it might accidentally not capture the full nuance of utility and instead just round it off to pleasure... seems relevant?
There seems to be an implied assumption that pleasure is one-dimensional, that the choice is only between "less pleasure" and "more pleasure" rather than different *kinds* of pleasure. For example, the pleasure from getting a Nobel prize can be converted to pleasure from eating chocolate, the only question is to determine the exact amount of chocolate.
Suppose we say that the machines in the thought experiment generate *all flavors* of pleasure...
Then I would object that some of those pleasure are "fake". Like the pleasure from getting a Nobel prize that you perceive without actually getting the Nobel prize. And I disagree that maximizing fake pleasure is the greatest possible good.
In other words, if we agree that having various flavors of pleasure is better than only having one flavor, and that some flavors of pleasure are "about" the world, then the state of the world matters.
Obviously I would want the illusion of authenticity in my "fake" experiences! :-) I don't think there's a meaningful difference between true happiness and fake happiness, though.
Why would the "fakeness" of the pleasure matter to the valence of the pleasure itself, assuming a purely Utilitarian view? If we're starting from an axiom that "fakeness" is in and of itself inherently bad then I can see where you're coming from, but starting from a Utilitarian position I fail to see how that external factor imparts anything to the "internal" value of how the pleasure is experienced in itself. Sure, in contemporary life we may consider the consequentialist concern that allowing this form of fakeness might create perverse incentives that lead to future disutility, or that the emotional apprehension of "fakeness" taints the pleasure, but assuming a truly simulated pleasure, no future negative repercussions need to arise from it being "fake," nor does it need to be accompanied by the other negative emotions it usually would be accompanied with in present human experience. Essentially, how does it matter that an emotion doesn't truthfully connect to its usual referent, if it is the emotion rather than the referent that matters?
It seems like you have a definition of utilitarianism that many utilitarians would disagree with. For example, let me quote J.S.Mill:
> Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. (...) It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
This was not written about wireheading, but I think it is a strong hint about what the author would think about "fake" intellectual pleasures.
>It seems like you have a definition of utilitarianism that many utilitarians would disagree with.
I'm more than willing to countenance that idea. In response to the Mill quote, I think this is the usual fallacy of conflating what people want with what would actually be best for them in terms of maximizing subjective pleasure. Based on in-built aesthetic preferences it makes perfect sense to say that it's both true that most people would not desire such a thing, and yet their subjective moment-to-moment wellbeing would be better if such a thing actually came about, and that it's the latter rather than the former that matters. Perhaps this isn't Utilitarianism per Mill, personally I actually don't really like the name "Utilitarianism" for several reasons, but it's the best shorthand for "pleasure-maximizing philosophy" that most people will immediately understand, so I have been using the term for convenience. If you don't like the use of the term "Utilitarianism" for these ideas, feel free to come up with another designation, but I think I'll continue using it with the necessary caveats to explain what exactly is being proposed as inherently valuable and worth maximizing (subjective pleasure, no matter what is experiencing it or for what reason).
I concede that from the pleasure-maximizing perspective, maximizing pleasure is the optimal thing to do.
Okay, I guess even the pleasure-maximizing philosophy needs more details, such as how to compare the pleasure now and the pleasure later, etc. But anyway, "maximizing pleasure all the time, forever" would be the pleasure-maximizing thing.
Because the simple idea of having experiences disconnected from reality is unpleasant for most people. So is the idea of having an experience that change you in a way that will lower you in the social hierarchy.
Those are not linked to pleasure in the typical sense, but they are powerful incentive nonetheless. How powerful depends on people, but I think they are pretty strong, especilly the second one. I think, on average, people exchange quite a lot of displeasure for social lader climbing.
Note that wiring done in private without any possibility of anyone knowing will still be somewhat checked by (2): People will fear that wiring will make them less performant because less motivation, and that this will lower them indirectly even if wiring itself is nt detected.
I think that the social ladder module in the average humain brain is often on par with pleasure-seaking module, if not more powerful. That's why your social circle is so important wrt addiction. If you have addict friends, the social module can act as a booster to your addiction instead of a brake. And, in the usual mix of cause and consequences, graviting toward social circles where your addiction is seen as positive (or at least not too negative) is a very classic path...
To be a popular lifestyle, wiring would need to come with it's own subculture....or the experience should be sophisticated enough to not only induce consequence-free pleasure but also simulate a social circle (i.e. be a full immersive virtual reality, more than simple wiring)
"Experiences disconnected from reality" is actually not a very precise idea-- arguably fiction gives experiences at least somewhat disconnected from reality.
You've really read the novel, but the sensation of overcoming obstacles (unless you figure out the murderer before you're told) is about imaginary obstacles.
>Because the simple idea of having experiences disconnected from reality is unpleasant for most people.
I think it's important to distinguish between the idea of an experience being unpleasant, and the experience itself being unpleasant. It is entirely possible for us to be incorrect in our expectation of a future experience, meaning that we can feel *about* a feeling differently than the feeling itself will feel when actually experienced. Of course, the former is also a feeling, but is not relevant to how a mind is feeling when the feeling originally being contemplated is itself being felt. This is becoming a bit confusing to write because of the repetitive language, but a concrete example is that I might feel differently about the idea of riding a roller coaster (afraid) than I feel when I'm actually riding it (having fun). I think mistaking these two things for each other is a major motivation behind objection to most "utility machine" type arguments, i.e. if you could put yourself in a machine that artificially stimulates perpetual happiness for the rest of your life, would you do it? Most people feel badly *about* how that would feel because of preconceived fears and expectations, but that does not determine how they actually will feel when having that experience, which is what should be relevant when determining if that experience is good or bad.
tl;dr just because something generates a bad feeling upon contemplating it, doesn't mean that the feelings that thing would actually generate would be bad, and it is the latter rather than the former that should be relevant in deciding whether that thing is good or bad. So even if the idea of experiences disconnected from reality is unpleasant for most people to contemplate, that doesn't mean those experiences themselves would be unpleasant, and in fact by design would be perfectly pleasant and unobjectionable to the mind experiencing them, because it wouldn't have any internal function to perceive "untrue" experiences as inherently unpleasant in the way we do.
Nope it's perfectly clear and i agree: i can imagine a procedure that would put me (or anybody else) into a state of vegetative pleasure that i really will enjoy a lot, more than anything i have felt until now and that, when in it, i would honestly not want to leave. Maybe i would want to go back to it if the process is stopped, and i am (temporally) back to "normal" state, although this is debatable...
But now, before being wired, i (and many if not most people) would not want to be wired.
Cause people are wary of things that will make them loose power (to affect the world and others) and social prestige : that was my first point, i try to be more clear about what i mean by experience disconnected from reality, which indeed is not very specific. And that's also the point of J. S. Mill, although there is a 'human nature is admirable" turn to it that i don't like: i am not telling this is admirable to refuse pleasure to keep power/social prestige, just that it is real: That the average human utility function is not instant pleasure, it's more complicated and mostly consider future states, especially when choosing among multiple possibilities: choosing is already considering the future, so it makes sense, it could not really be different in fact...
The idea of becoming a blissful legume is not attractive to most, at least before being one. It's a little bit flower for Algernon reversed.
Maybe mental change so large as to threaten coherence of self are repulsive for most, almost regardless if the change are for good.
Maybe any change in fact (hence the difference between mainstream cosmetic surgery and changes to make you beautiful but also unrecognizable)...
I hope it's clear: I do not say it's impossible to create a blissful vegetable state that people would be happy in. In fact I think it's possible, probably already possible and maybe quite easy.
Just that many, if not most, people will not want to enter it, something that could change only through social means (wiring subculture), not by better demonstration that wiring really is blissful and once wired you will not want to go back to unwired...
BTW, the fact that after the wiring people are happy but before they do not agree does not justify the procedure morally, at least it does not for me. It does under some (most?) definitions of utilitarism, but that just one more reason that i am not an utilitarist.
neither am i consequentialist... So i guess i am a naturalist, at least by default...
1. If you're able to turn inanimate matter into consciousness, I think the current opinions on morality and such will have become massively outdated. Beyond that, I think morality should revolve around increasing the happiness of existing living creatures, not making enough new ones to wash the existing ones out of the statistics.
2. That's more a question for you, I'd think. Anything it said that you disagreed with?
3. Seems like a good idea. It's always easier to edit an existing thing than to create it from whole cloth.
1. Why is that? I don't see why happiness in already-existing minds should be prioritized over the happiness of potential minds, at least when bringing the latter into existence becomes a workable possibility. I think this is especially the case if you follow something like the "bundle theory" of consciousness, where consciousnesses as discrete, continuous entities aren't taken as coherent, meaningful objects, and the main thing becomes that happiness self-evidently feels good, so the maximization of that feeling becomes imperative, regardless of what it is being felt by. Funnily enough, your mention of "washing the existing ones out of the statistics" is one of the more convincing arguments for this idea I think there is that wasn't mentioned. Essentially, since pain is a better and more instinctive motivating principle for survival than pleasure, it's reasonable to assume that life will always bring with it negative net utility, which, if we value pleasure equally throughout time rather than just in the ever-moving present, means that a negative utilitarian/antinatalist elimination of all life would still leave net negative universal utility. So really, such a massive project like this would be the only conceivable way to bring universal utility into the positive (and the negative utility from the life left alive would be so little in relative amounts that it would be worth it to leave it alone for the aforementioned existentialist failsafe/to prevent advanced civilizations having a reason to want to destroy these machines as a threat).
2. It more or less just rephrased all the points I dumped at it in a coherent and structured way, as you might be able to tell from my response to point 1, I'm something of a wall of text guy, so having stuff put in a more logical order than a big idea jumble was definitely a rhetorical improvement in my opinion.
3. Agreed, people seem to primarily praise/fear AI as a tool that completely creates on its own, but its uses as an editor/redactor seem like a much bigger benefit in the short term.
1. Because washing out the existing people is the path of least resistance, and leads immediately into "just kill the unhappy ones". You've said it yourself; you think life is a net negative. The obvious follow-up is "eliminate life". Your proposed guards against that are contradicting the proposed utility, and are begging for a future loophole.
The easiest way to avoid that result is to say existing people are worth more than future people.
>Because washing out the existing people is the path of least resistance, and leads immediately into "just kill the unhappy ones". You've said it yourself; you think life is a net negative. The obvious follow-up is "eliminate life".
I don't think this naturally follows. Again, life, rationally or otherwise, seeks to defend itself, so any system knowing this would realize that the small amount of matter lost by giving a wide berth to any occupied planets (our own included) would vastly increase its chances of success at the cost of an almost insignificant amount of the universe's matter it is able to access, versus facing the risk of pissing off an advanced species that could potentially do serious harm to it, not least by making its own antagonistic Von Neumann machines it would have to devote resources to competing with.
You're assuming pure rationality from both sides. Firstly, the threat is from pissing them off, so if you can genocide them in one fell swoop, there's no downside. Mine a planet in such a way that it creates an asteroid storm on an occupied one, or throws them out of orbit. Oh, what an unfortunate natural event, our condolences to the remaining.
Second, humans will always have guys like me who see a potential threat and try to pre-emptively nuke it. Your take requires harmlessness from the existing planets; how many individuals have to act aggressively before the logic changes? How many actual natural events occur before we blame these things for trying to kill us? Remember the Maine!
Maybe we should introduce a discount rate for future people utility. I agree that the utility of people today matter more than that of furure people, and certainly having as many people as possible is not good, even if their utility is marginally positive (whatever that means). My intuition, is that the "best" would be a sizeable population, yet small enough to sustain some high level of utilty per person with the given resources living sustainably for future generations, and as large as possible after that. So, I'm for whatever complicated moral framework that gives this result.
Doesn't it seem like the opposite of what rationality stands for to decide on a result, and then try to come up with a moral framework that supports it? I'm aware what I'm saying seems extreme, but IMO the idea of rationality is more or less "find coherent and truthful first principles, and then derive a conclusion from them whether you like it or not" versus "come up with whatever ad-hoc principles can justify my built-in worldview." I guess what I'm saying is that in cases like this where what I propose seems like some outlandish view, but it seems to logically follow from some sound principle (the self-evident goodness of positive emotion), maybe it's the preconceived ideas making it seem absurd that are the problem, not the "absurd" but logically entailed idea. To put it shortly, I've never met a bullet I didn't want to bite.
Any atheistic approach will have to start by deciding on a result. You've decided happiness is an end-goal; there's no objective reason to believe this. Maybe innovation should be the end goal; maximize creativity across the universe. Maybe lust; shower the world in aphrodisiacs to maximize sex and reproduction. Maybe uniformity; try to minimize diversity and maximize agreement. Or pain. Most people probably instinctively reject an approach that maximizes pain, but it's just as natural an emotion as pleasure.
On the contrary, I think if you want to design a good moral framework, you should definitely first know where you want to end up and then come up with the framework that gets you there. The last part is very difficult, and it has been shown that both absolute or relative utilitarism lead to end states differently from what I describe - so in my opinion, a more complicated framework is needed. However, I have seen it argued that the end state of a very large population with marginally positive utlility, a result of absolute utilitarism, is desireable - which I disagree with.
Soliciting help/advice from the community regarding covid infection experience. Was recently most likely exposed on or around Dec 24-25 (was in the US Northeast NYC area at the time, so most likely the XBB 1.5 variant). By the time I got access to a test yesterday, the results were obvious. Will detail my symptom timeline below- want to know if this is typical, what (if anything) I should be worried or on the lookout for, and any recommendations for amelioration and recovery.
Was double vaxxed and boosted (Moderna), however last booster was all the way in Jan. 2022 so not surprising that protectiveness waned (plus apparently not effective on new mutations anymore if my reading of the available material is correct).
12/24-25: Most likely infection time frame
12/28: First symptom: sore throat. No other symptoms
12/29: Woke up with 102 F chills, aches, the works. Comparable to the worst flu I've ever had. Unable to sleep well that night due to massive night sweats and migraines.
12/30: Probably the worst day due to combined ongoing symptoms from yesterday and lack of sleep. However, symptoms did seem to calm down somewhat and night sweats diminished enough by nightfall that I was able to sleep (comparatively) well.
12/31: Fever downgraded to 99/100 and chills/aches mostly gone. Lingering headaches. The sore throat is mostly downgraded in intensity, but has given way to intense frequent coughing fits.
1/1: Fever, chills, aches completely gone, still occasional pinpricks of headaches. The main problematic symptom at this point is the coughing which seems to have increased in frequency after all the other symptoms have left. I can probably say without misusing the word literally that on average, I have literally coughed or had a coughing fit at least once every 1-5 minutes, to the point where my ribs and diaphragm have started to feel on fire. (To the best of my knowledge my chest is still fine). 99% of the coughs are dry and the 1% that produce phlegm seem to be tiny, inconsequential amounts.
Any advice anyone has on whether this is normal for covid sufferers** and what if anything can be done to alleviate the coughing would be much appreciated, I will answer any questions as needed. I also hope to get in contact with a medical provider once the holidays end (and if my insurance cooperates).
*demographic information: male, late 20's-early 30's, 23 BMI, not particularly athletic but not totally sedentary either (avg about 4000-6000 steps daily with amateur bodyweight routines)
**edit to add: the reason why I ask is because of the multiple people I know of who were exposed around this time with me, all of them to my knowledge have also developed coughing along with the other symptoms, but have not lasted as long as mine, even the older folks. To the best of my knowledge, I don't have any preexisting conditions like asthma, heart stuff, diabetes, or anything else like that.
FWIW, my final phase was the same back on delta. Long lingering cough that kept me from sleeping well, even with NyQuil. Like Marzell said. Cough drops and hang in there. The worst passed for me in a few days.
At least I can confirm that long coughing is very typical for Covid. I was coughing for two weeks after all other symptoms had gone away, and it was similar for a bunch of other people that I know with heavy infections. (Not with hospitalization, but like the worst flu ever.) Your timeline also matches really well my own timeline and that of my partner and some friends, except that 3-4 days before onset seems quite long for omicron. (1-2 days seem to be more typical.)
My best prediction based on my experience and stories: it's going to drag on for two weeks or so. It feels like ages, and it is annoying how slowly it improves, but it does improve and eventually goes away.
Only after my own experience I checked the health guidelines and noticed how wide-spread this must be: the guidelines declared you negative 1-2 days after you test negative and you have no symptoms *except coughing*. This exception is basically made in all countries. So I guess it's really normal that people continue coughing for a long time after they stop being infectious.
Post viral airway reactivity and prolonged cough is a symptom of essentially every viral URI. It’s not even considered prolonged unless it lasts longer than 3 weeks after other symptoms go away.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It seems based on this and other comments that I am not alone in enduring the coughs after all the other symptoms have gone away, which is unfortunate but also reassuring in its own way.
> So I guess it's really normal that people continue coughing for a long time after they stop being infectious.
If I understand it correctly, coughing happens because the virus hurts your throat. After the virus is gone, it still takes a few days for your throat to heal. So you keep coughing even when you are already healthy (in the sense that your body no longer contains the virus).
I don't know about symptoms in particular, but here is some general guidance on treating COVID. [Optimally, all of the following would be discussed with a doctor. Some supplements discussed are not meant to mixed with certain medications, for example.]
First, can you get Paxlovid? It is meant to be prescribed within 5 days of onset of symptoms, although doctors sometimes prescribe it after that window. You'll probably want to start that as soon as possible, if you can, since it sounds like your window is closing.
Additionally, in this video from two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN30emwcNS4, Dr. Roger Seheult makes a number of suggestions on what to do if you get COVID.
He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine.
First, he suggests getting a pulse oximeter which painlessly measures blood oxygen levels. If blood oxygen at rest drops to 90%-94% range, take caution. If drops below 90%, go to emergency room. Before taking measurement with pulse oximeter, preferably be at rest for a couple of minutes. Remove any nailpolish before use as it can affect results. [Cheap but effective ones can be found on Amazon.]
As far as treatment, he suggests taking a number of supplements: Vitamin D, Quercitin, NAC, and Zinc.
Here is a summary of what he said about them respectively:
Vitamin D. Endocrine Society says 4000 IU can be taken without a doctor’s supervision, so you may want to start with that. As you are from the US Northeast, which is at higher latitudes, you are likely have less vitamin D to start with, due to the lower UV levels at the higher latitude.
If taking Vitamin D, consider also taking Vitamin K [Heinrich: adequate daily intake for men is 130 mcg. Consider MK-7 form. Worth noting, is a preprint that found that COVID patients have lower vitamin K, suggesting that vitamin K supplementation may have additional benefits for them besides for aiding in the absorption of Vitamin D].
If taking vitamin D, also consider taking magnesium which helps regulate vitamin D levels [Heinrich: an additional 200 mg a day will safely bring most people to optimal levels. Although magnesium comes in various forms, since you’ve mentioned migraines, you may want to try magnesium citrate, as some studies have found magnesium to help with migraines, and most of those used magnesium citrate. Best taken with food. If it bothers your stomach, you can try magnesium glycinate.]
Vitamins D and K are both fat soluble and are therefore both best absorbed with a large, preferably fatty meal. As vitamins D and K can compete for fat, they may be best absorbed taken in two separate meals.
Quercitin supplementation: less evidence than Vitamin D supplementation, but low risk.
NAC: 600 mg twice a day.
Zinc: up to 40 mg of elemental zinc a day.
He also highlights two non pharmecutical interventions: sleep and body temperature.
Sleep – especially early in night strengthens immune system. Taking melatonin before sleep can be beneficial not only for sleep, but also for its antioxidant properties. [Heinrich: Seheult suggests 3-5 mg but our very own Scott Alexander, suggests that that is quite excessive for sleep and that a smaller dose of 0.3 - 1 mg would be better, here: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/#21_What_is_the_right_hypnotic_dose_of_melatonin]
Fever: If fever is below 103, consider leaving it untreated, as fever can boost interferon response [a part of the immune system.] This would make particular sense earlier in the course of the disease – he mentions the first 7 days of symptoms.
To summarize, exposure to near infrared radiation typically from sunlight has beneficial effects on COVID outcomes.
Notably, near infrared radiation is more penetrative than other wavelengths of light, so it can penetrate clothes and sunscreen. Windows, however, may block near infrared radiation. Therefore, if you could get out in the sun, even with clothes and / or sunscreen, that could be beneficial.
If you have any questions about anything, or want more citations, (e.g. to the vitamin K preprint I referenced), just ask, and I'd be happy to help how I can. I'll add a separate comment if I find anything potentially useful for the cough in particular...
Thank you for the very detailed reply- much appreciated.
On the subject of Paxlovid, I did some online snooping when my symptoms first became an issue. I don't know if it is the same for every area, but it seems that the doctors/pharmacies in my area won't give it out unless you fall into the usual demographics (+65 years old, immunocompromised, hospitalized, etc.) I am none of those so my chances are not great.
My blood oxygen has pretty consistently been at 97-99% (apple watch) or 95-98% (pulse oximeter) ever since this whole mess started, so I am fairly confident in my belief that I will at least not need to go to the ER. Of course covid is unpredictable and pride always comes before a fall, so I suppose I could still wake up blue one morning, but hopefully that does not happen.
I am currently taking vitamin D but will have a look at all the other supplements you mentioned as well as the sunlight. Re: zinc: I have access to zinc carnosine as leftovers from a previous gastrointestinal issue. Not sure if zinc carnosine is comparable to elemental zinc here.
My pleasure! Re Paxlovid, I know that at least in some cases, doctors / urgent cares will prescribe it even for those outside those demographics, if the patient requests it.
Zinc carnosine is a combination of elemental zinc and carnosine. The respective amounts of each may be listed separately, as zinc and carnosine / l-carnosine.
If the two are not listed separately on the label, you can multiply the total mg per pill by 0.226 to get the amount of elemental zinc.
As far as the supplements, I will note that as of the video, he said that Vitamin D was the only one backed up by randomized controlled trials, but that he felt the others were nonetheless worth it.
However, the video was actually 2 years old (not 1 year, as I thought), and since then, I see at least one RCT in support of quercetin: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34803451/.
I also see a recent RCT for NAC (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.28393) that found that it reduced the mortality rate in patients with COVID-19, inflammatory parameters, and development of severe respiratory failure; however, it did not affect the length of hospital stay or the need for ICU admission. Notably, that NAC was administered via inhaler, rather than orally. Unfortunately, the full paper is behind a paywall.
Do you need a rescue inhaler to open up airways? Albuterol (name of medicine) using a nebulizer (name of machine) might be most effective. An inhaler/puffer could be used instead of nebulizer.
You might also need a corticosteroid (inhaled or oral) to bring down inflammation.
These are standard meds given for bad wheezing. Sometimes the only symptom of that is coughing (When you exhale hard after a deep inhale breath : both through mouth so the nasal congestion doesn't confuse your test - if you start coughing a lot, it seems to mean you are wheezing).
This is based on experience in a family with a couple asthmatics.
I am not an MD, but the literature indicates that a severe dry cough is the most common symptom of the Omicron variants. It's supposed to fade as the illness fades. But the course of the disease can take about 10 days or more. If an OTC cough suppressant like Robitussin doesn't take the edge off, you should ask your Dr for codeine linctus syrup or codeine phosphate tablets. If it's as bad as you're describing it I suspect it will take the big guns to suppress it. Definitely get some medical attention, though. It may too late for Paxlovid, but friends who've had COVID said it really does make them seem human again (n=3). Although there is a chance of a COVID rebound afterward (n=1).
I wonder how much MDs feel reluctant to prescribe even that in this period of reaction to the Sackler family SNAFU.
When I was a wee lad and my mother was suffering from bronchitis, she would send me to the pharmacy for some codeine cough syrup with just a note that she needed some.
I don’t know if any adult could do that in the 60s or if it was because it was well known in our small town that she spent a couple years in a TB sanatorium as a teen and had the the ribs removed on one side of her back to collapse the infected lung. The Magic Mountain it was not.
Man I'm sorry, that sucks. For me, while my coughing was not as bad as yours it was still pretty rough, so I went and got several different brands of cough drops and tried em til I found a kind that worked well, then was basically constantly sucking on a cough drop for a couple weeks. Possibly you've already tried this and it's insufficient, but for me it did the trick. Best of luck.
No worries, I have been going through cough drops like family-unfriendly drugs, but I have definitely missed out on good advice before because someone didn't tell me something that they thought I should have already done (which I didn't), so I appreciate the thought. My brand of choice has been Ricola but let me know which ones worked for you.
I don't think I'll be ending up in the ER or anything like that (my SpO has been pretty consistently high even through the worst of the coughing) but it's been a pretty decent damper on my quality of life.
See https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/otc-meds a good website according to my doctor friends. This entry will steer you, toward buying an expectorant, which thins mucous and makes it easier to cough up.
Thank you for sharing your experiences as well. Sorry that you went through that but glad to hear that you found it (relatively) mild. On a related note, I do have to admit I take a bit of mordant amusement in the definition of a "mild" covid case as "not requiring hospitalization".
I too have no idea why some cases are so mild (I am aware of people at least one magnitude of age older than me who have been positive and actually came out of it shorter and with fewer side effects).
Was fruit the food that you couldn't eat, or the food you could eat most easily? I had a weird taste disturbance early last year where any sour thing, especially fruit, was disgusting. But never tested positive for Covid.
Is anyone here familiar with the Twitter account “the ethical skeptic” ? If so, can you please translate the jargon and tell me what point he’s actually *claiming* to make?
Every time you ask the dude to clarify what he means by “concatenated pull forward effect” (or any of the other seemingly made up technical terms he uses) you get one of 3 responses: 1. “Have to talk this way or I’ll get censored”, 2. “This is designed for EXPERTS in statistics, im not gonna dumb it down for you idiots”, or 3. “If you don’t get it, then stop following me”.
The dude is obviously full of shit, but also the worst advocate for his own ideas I’ve ever seen.
Thanks. I skimmed the last few days, and mostly it just seems stupid, wrong and offensive, but not overly laden with faux jargon.
But then there's a pearl like this:
"When human intervention is the critical feature of a hypothesis, human intervention to a priori obfuscate that hypothesis, forces it into becoming the null."
Not only is it non-obvious what's even attempted here; it doesn't even seem like a well-formed sentence. I don't think he knows what "a priori" means, because it doesn't make any kind of sense in the sentence. This is just word salad. Maybe he has an idea about it himself, can't tell, but it certainly isn't comprehensible.
Why do you even bother to read a rabid antivaxxer, by the way? This is obvious nonsense even without the jargon. As far as I can tell, the thesis is that most Covid deaths are actually vaccine deaths.
No , I didn't read the book ( not even heard of it) but will do. When I lived alone ( 15 yrs ago) I had no problem ( ADHD helps with the flow state and nothing else matters) - plus I had , funny enough, a bigger budget for food .
Wherevcan be found . The plain metamucil , is not quite plain.
And satiety isvone component. The struggle is to reframe tasty food as such too. Living in Montréal it's like taking methadonevwhen heroin iscmore available.
I am worrying about the products of "health stores" - usually filled with hapless clerks and dubious and mislabeled products (unregulated) . But I will go - and look for the satiety component.
Thank you for pointing it out. The orange metamucil is very irritating.
That is an excellent advice. Having a school age kid and a food discerning wife is actually a hard thing to do . We have weekly talks about that. But the advice is really a good one to bump higher on my approach. And yes, you are right, my Pavlovian and future gratification imagination are drivers in quantity and choice.
Meals are scheduled ( 2 meals , no binging or snacking whatsoever, no pantry stuff)
Pre-planning is tricky ( high metabolic school kid and italian ancestry wife that cooks theoretically just for her ( she acknowledges my addiction). But that's what addiction is. I have no dignity to beg for meat filled fresh zucchini with Kumatovtomato and fresh herbs. And the bread is from L'Amour du Pain -they eon best baguette in France ( a first for the perplexed French bakers).
So even if I preplan for me, ( I love liver for ex and kidneys , Bourdain Nasty bots -,bit more hardcore even) I am drooling and "taste " a bit and it's really like someone that got a drug . I don't drin ( half a beer if I add the curiosity sips/ yer and half a shot of various liquors/ year.
Buddy, I think you’re trying to reply to other people’s comments by replying to the email? That doesn’t work. Whenever you reply to the email it posts it as a top-level comment instead. To reply to specific people, click through to the actual post on your browser and reply there.
Highly unlikely. It would require a massive up-front infrastructure investment, which nobody is going to pay unless they are confident that oil will be cheaper than gas (per Megajoule) for the long haul. Which hasn't been the case in recent decades, and I don't see anything that would likely change that. In particular, oil has a very large additional demand as a transportation fuel, for which natural gas is poorly suited, and so will likely command a premium in $/MJ at the market even if production costs are similar.
Also, oil is generally perceived as a "dirtier" fuel than gas, so any regulatory or tax policy that might drive natural gas prices up will probably hit oil even worse.
That accounts for its surging popularity, particular in states with good access to nat gas pipelines, or LNG terminals. I think the decline in price is mostly related to improvements in extraction technology, particularly fracking. But the decline will not go on forever, certainly. If the price advantage starts to til strongly back towards oil, I expect people will adjust, albeit slowly, since you need a different furnace, an oil tank, a local delivery service, et cetera.
Ground-source heat pumps (where the heat exchanger works on a loop of fluid buried deep enough that temperatures are relatively constant year-round, instead of ambient air) are a pretty good answer to that, at least in places that aren't so cold as to have permafrost.
Heat pump COPs do kind of suck. And bear in mind you have to design one that is adequate to handle events like Texas a year or two back, or most of the US recently.
Yea, I do. Baked vegetables are awesome, mushrooms ( even raw). Soda is too irritant.
It's hard to get consistent high protein with variety and not slide into processed ones. Or out of budget. I am mixing quinoa with practically anything .
Fat is fairly attractive as taste . ( olive oil, avocado, occasional pork and rare beef one ( cooking and frequency).
In Montreal, Canada, tasty veggies on a daily basis ( I like them) are really expensive. But I am actively plan and budget for that.
I tried psyllium ( metamucil), but it's given me some acidity.
Seems like there is a problem if you reply from e-mail. If you find a comment on the website and click "Reply" under that comment, that should always work ok.
I want a new job. I'm currently the data scientist/DBA for a small company (~30 people). I've been there just over 2 years, and it feels like for the last year I haven't really learned anything new. The first year I really enjoyed it, I learned a ton, got to build a data warehouse from scratch, set up a bunch of data pipelines and SQL queries to analyze the data, and push it to dashboards for the dev/marketing folks. Now I've spent the last year incrementally improving those dashboards, but it's not challenging in any way.
I have never successfully applied for a job (I've always gotten lucky with offers through networking), and I really feel like I should do something harder and more challenging. At a friend's suggestion, I did the Advent of Code challenge this year, and it was some of the most fun I recall having while coding. I also think I did quite well (got 24/25 days within a day, got in the top 1000 once).
Anyone hiring? Or have some advice? I figured that since it's a new year, I should probably try to do something with it.
Editted: Padern has a good point that I haven't really clarified what I want to accomplish:
I've always been very motivated to learn new things when given tasks to accomplish, but I'm not very good at giving myself tasks. Being asked to do something tricky or new at work has been a very reliable way for me to get better, but a new job has always been a great source of motivation to learn a bunch of new things.
I'd like to work closely within a larger team (I'm currently on a team of 3, and I spend maybe ~2 hours per week talking to them), where there are people who are really great at things that I can learn from (no one else at my company has any database design experience). I'd like to improve my software development skills, again in a team setting (I'm the sole contributor on 90% of the code for my current database/pipelines). I'd like to learn more about databases, designing them for really large scale (>1000TB) purposes, learn more about transactional/distributed/NoSQL databases.
These aren't necessary, but those kind of things would be sufficient for me (I think).
It probably depends on country and type of job, but for me the easiest way was to contact job agencies, give them basic specification, and let them search for the jobs.
Another thing that worked well was calling my contacts (former classmates, former colleagues), asking where they work, whether they like the job, and whether the company is hiring.
Reading what you wrote, you sound like me 5-6 years ago. I got really lucky and landed a job where I had all of that, but it only took 12 months before that job too started to stop offering me the same kinds of challenges.
Over time I realised that looking for someone else to challenge me was not going to work, and I started to develop an interest in trying to find the problems around me by learning about the industry I was in, digging into the details of the technologies we use, working with open source to get more feedback.
I think the approach you describe can work if you can get a job at a large company where you can find a mentor, or a very strong group (google, amazon etc), but given the industry state right now I might suggest my approach is better.
In regards to the IQ/SAT question on the survey, does anyone else feel that they test way higher than their actual "intelligence"?
Way back in high-school I was a real superstar at all the standardized tests. I got 1600 on the SAT, nailed perfect 800s on both?(maybe 3 its been a decade) SAT subject tests I took, and took 15 AP exams and got 5s on all of them. And honestly I was (and still am) incredibly lazy and didn't view studying as an important use of my time when I could be practicing critical activities like pretending to study while actually staring blankly at walls. So according to those tests, I should balancing precariously on some very narrow slice on the bell curve.
But in the harsh light of a post secondary school world where ones ranking sadly does not depend on multiple choice tests, I anecdotally don't feel like I'm much above average intelligence. I'm not dumb, I know that, but if I had to roughly guess from conversations and generally living I'd say that at least 50% of my friends and family and acquaintances are similar or higher intelligence.
Sure one hypothesis is that for friends it could be selection bias, and family could somehow be genetic, but when even random people next to me on planes seem equally intelligent and I never feel myself drowning in a sea of morons, I kinda default to the idea that just like some people are innately more skilled at basketball, maybe I was just born in the right century to exercise my God given talent of being really good at bubbling in scantrons.
The thing about testing really well is that IRL, unless you are pulling rabbits out of a hat on a regular basis, nobody really cares. Try telling the fella fixing your transmission how smart you are. He’ll say, “Well then you fix it. I’ll watch and learn from the smart guy.”
Tho I hear if you go to Starbucks with proof you are 3 sig or better, they’ll sell you a cup of coffee for four bucks.
Edit: That last comment looks harsher than it was meant. It’s a riff on an old line of tough guy reflexive self deprecation that probably goes back to the 1940s.
Picture Bogart solving the big case and Bacall telling him he came out on top. “Yeah doll, that and a dime will get me a cup of coffee.”
The one time I took an employer had me take an IQ test I was told I was “slightly above average”, which seems fair to me then (now that I’m older I’m probably below average), in high school I was transferred from the (exceedingly easy) “Intermediate” track to the (really hard for me) “Advanced” track, so my being the smartest of the stupid, or the stupidest among the smart seems about right.
Frankly though raw intelligence doesn’t impress me very much anymore, not like kindness does, my legal wife is obviously more intelligent than me (she was accepted into an Ivy law school), but my drop out roommate is who believes in all sorts of implausible things had the kindness and the instincts that allowed us to save a mutual friend’s life this week.
"Intelligence" and "test taking" are two different things. I get the feeling a lot of people on here conflate "I got a high score on this so I am high IQ" with "That person did not get a high score on this test so they are 95 IQ normies".
Average intelligence is exactly that. Average. You are probably smart and did indeed score higher on tests than people around you, but that does not mean people around you are dumb.
High scores mean you're good at taking tests. Low scores mean you're bad at taking tests. Multiple-choice tests seem very much gameable to me, we did it the old-fashioned way in my education, and I haven't seen this kind of "fill in with a pencil then have it corrected by template" until I did an assessment test for a local government job a couple of years back.
If you want a pat on the head for doing well on these kind of tests, here, have one.
Intelligence (IQ) is just a part of what determines your success in life and the impressions you make on other people. Here are some other parts:
* extraversion, autism -- Some people find interaction with other people inherently enjoyable. For others, it is a chore. Interaction with other people is important in many different ways.
* conscientiousness -- If you start many things but never finish them, your success list remains empty.
* neuroticism, risk aversion, having a safety net -- Some things require dealing with uncertainty, financial or otherwise. If you cannot deal with it, some doors remain locked for you.
Also, the career you had yesterday influences the career you can have today: by having practiced things, by having things on your CV. Both the luck and the mistakes keep growing.
All of this taken together, you can be highly intelligent and still fail at life. I am kinda halfway there; comparing myself with people who seem similarly intelligent.
I think it would be nice to have some support group specifically for people with high IQ, to help them navigate the other problems, and unleash their full potential. At some moment I thought that Mensa was supposed to be that kind of organization, but then I joined it and realized that it was merely a debate club. The Guild of the ROSE seems like another possible candidate for such organization, but I haven't tried it myself: https://guildoftherose.org/
EDIT:
Others have already mentioned selection effect. People live in bubbles; you do not interact with average people most of your time. So as you get more educated, or climb the career ladder, you are surrounded by smarter and smarter people. Which can create a false impression of you becoming dumber. For example, as a senior software developer I know a lot of things, but I am mostly surrounded by other senior software developers, and compared to them, I am just an average guy.
Well, a bit of ruthlessness never hurt either. Drawing on a very old memory of my one viewing of Goodbye Columbus in 1969, the Jack Klugman character says, "in the real world you gotta have little gonif in ya."
I had read the Phillip Roth novel before I saw it but that was while I was under the influence for the very first time - blackberry brandy - so I'm not sure if that is from Philip Roth or whoever did the screenplay. Oh hell, I'll check, gimme a sec.... okay someone else did the screenplay. But this is weird, Jack Klugman played a guy named Ben Patimkin and Richard Benjamin played someone with the surname Klugman?
I was also considering that, but there are not enough rationalists in my country to achieve that. And it would be better to do "rational life coaching" in person. Online is also a possibility, but in my experience, peer pressure from people you meet in person is a powerful thing.
Mensa officially supports "special interest groups", basically subsets of Mensans who share some hobby or goal (and I assume that if Mensa does anything useful, most of that happens in those groups), so the easiest way would be to join Mensa and establish a SIG called e.g. "Becoming Stronger". Since then, whatever you do, you are acting officially as a part of Mensa, and you can use some of their resources. However, existing members cannot really blame you for trying to take over their organization, if you are acting transparently as a SIG, because that is exactly what SIGs were made for.
Note that being a part of Mensa does not prevent you from providing services also to people who are not in Mensa. But I would pay special attention to *new* Mensa members; they are preselected on high intelligence, but they do not yet have the bad habits of older members.
Back when I was in school, people in my honors/AP classes occasionally asked me if they seemed dumb to me. At the time, they really didn't. I tested much better than them, but I couldn't really feel a major difference in cognitive ability between them and me.
Now, in an era of social media, when everyone is putting their thoughts on display for the world to see...I can see it very clearly. Even relatively smart people are just really bad at reasoning. I've read many, many peer-reviewed papers whose conclusions are based on obvious fallacies. I'm not just saying this because of political disagreements; I often find myself cringing pretty hard at arguments made by people on my side of a given issue, and the phenomenon is not just confined to politics, anyway.
I don't think high intelligence generally shows through in casual conversation. You have to put people in a situation that actually tests their cognitive abilities.
So I think my test scores placed me about right, give or take half a standard deviation. I just wish I had high enough conscientiousness to make better use of it.
I always felt like I did better than my natural ability (which was already pretty high to be amodest).
I always did very well on tests. Part was just being very intelligent/well-read at a young age.
But part of it was having little to no anxiety around tests, due to a history of success. I was also often very good at the "meta game" of figuring out what they would be looking for even if I didn't know the answer.
So, I would really excel compared to the amount of prep/studying I did (almost none ever). Especially in HS/college, I would only attend half the lectures, but pay pretty close attention and do the reading materials assigned, but nothing else, and that was it, and still often top scores on tests and work I did.
If I put in any effort at all, perfect scores, though often I put in none.
As for the harsh light of things, that was hard to say. Definitely I was way further ahead at 10-14 than I was at 20. By 16-20 I was mostly womanizing, playing hockey (and getting concussed occasionally), videogaming, and not reading several hours a day anymore. Maybe just several a week.
At university I had definitely I came back to the pack some. Wasn't 100% always the smartest person in every single context. Sometimes there was competition (which often motivated me to raise my game a bit), though of course college is a more selective environment than HS (even the middle of the road college I went to).
So in my 20s I found myself really doubting my talents and wondering if I was just really good at taking tests.
But then as my professional career has progressed, and even day to day life, I still find that most MDs, JDs, CPAs, and even Phds. I come across strike me as pretty stupid and incurious people. So, I don't know maybe the results were just the results that I deserved as an atypically curious/intelligent person. My opinion of how far outside the norm I fall has really waxed and waned at times over the years, and it is much harder to tell once you are out of school.
I think there has to be some distinction between intelligence and [intellectual] curiosity. The hours required to be successful in medicine, law, accounting (assuming big 4), etc., leave comparatively little time for discovering the sweet treats of scholarship, especially once these professionals are also balancing their career with raising a family.
Oh for sure there is, but I am disappointed when I find a lack of either in people where I expect to. Some of the lawyers I meet are top flight people, but a lot are rather meh. And doctors I have found consistently disappointing.
I mention them both because I feel like being really smart and having high horsepower doesn't do almost anything if you don't have the curiosity/interest to generate questions for that horsepower to work on.
Similar credentials (perfect test scores, 16 5’s on APs easily). Oddly I find myself coming at the reverse question. When I was in high school, I genuinely thought I’d lucked into the right set of skills, available to most, that guaranteed good test scores without correspondingly high general intelligence. Later, after realizing that certainly wasn’t true, like you I assumed some innate multiple-choice-related gift not related to IQ (evidence: much more equal performance on free-response tests as my peers). But a year ago I stumbled upon the research that these sorts of scores correlate reasonably well to a 140+ IQ, which raises the terrifying question: what if I’ve been operating far below my real potential? - either because I’m not good at evaluating relative intelligences and so assume everyone is about equally intelligent as me when I’m actually a lot smarter, or because I’ve been actually working half as hard as everyone else my whole life to achieve the same results. There’s certainly some evidence for both 😥.
I for sure in my academic life and the first maybe 3-5 years of my professional life was working like 5% as hard as everyone else. I got nowhere (but did have a degree and great test scores).
Once I started giving 100% in my mid-twenties I just blew past my peers like crazy. Was a weird experience.
Great topic - can't resist posting. Scores show that I was also very skilled at "standardized" tests back in the day. Did very well on SATs in 1972, even better on GREs around 1991. Missed being admitted to a pretty elite PhD program entirely because I had a 790 on the math GRE when an 800 was expected, although I was 800 on verbal and no one else was. No real sweat, I talked my way into the program eventually. BTW, my math error was drinking too much coffee, had to leave testing room to go pee, cost too much time, didn't finish.
Like OP, my life experience has been increasing admiration for the wisdom, critical thinking, and overall mental skills of the much wider swath of the population that never cared about, never bothered with, or actively avoided these tests. I just cannot find many people that don't have a lot they could teach me, whether its the custodial staff where I used to work, or the groundskeepers, cooks in institutional kitchens -- that is, people our society puts into jobs and economic situations we associate with polar opposites of PhDs. Come election time, candidates on all sides mostly talk down to these people, and they feel the (undeserved) condescension, which I think is one of our larger political problems.
I regret very little about my life, but I do wish I had spent more time listening to and learning from strangers, because there always seems to be something to gain doing that.
Counter-datum: I feel like my SAT scores were a pretty pitch-perfect capstone of both academics and how I apply intellect in everyday life post-school. English was always my best subject, and I consistently ran circles around even the teachers* in anything reading-or-writing related, nevermind peers who frankly were often functionally illiterate. (It was not a high-performing school district; also confounded by large ELS population and general climate of anti-intellectualism. If the school sucks so much that no one wants to be there in the first place, one can't reasonably expect effort approaching actual capabilities.)
So it came as zero surprise to get perfect Reading and Writing scores, plus maximum Essay, back on the old 2400 SAT scale when I took it. All of my errors were in Math...just like GPA showed, with that being the Serious Subject I always did worst in (and failed outright at the college level). Similarly with distribution of AP scores, and also WAIS-IV IQ test**; I didn't even bother taking AP English, but aced that test easily, whereas Calculus I barely eked out a 3 despite mighty effort in Calc II. Outside of academics, language remains beautiful and useful and oft-used, while any halfway-serious math makes me nope out immediately. If it's more complex than compound-interest calculations or figuring taxes on paper...not gonna happen. Forget Bayes' Theorem entirely, haha. One can sort-of grasp the intended results of understanding such Rationality basics, without having any clue how all the stats work.
I think it comes across as deeply elitist to describe one's situation as "drowning in a sea of morons", especially cause so much of that is selection effects...but it's not completely wrong, either. I chose to exit the white-collar workforce and go stock shelves at the local grocery store. Even though we get a huge proportion of college kids on both ends of the counter, it's...uh...not exactly a hotbed of scintillating discourse. We sell food, not ideas. It's very obvious I'm one of the biggest fish in the small pond, and this makes it difficult to relate to others...
...but, that's only on language-related things, and some other areas where one can reasonably demonstrate "g" in quotidian settings. I can't make change for shit without the POS telling me how much it should be. Nor can I understand sportsball statistics that my coworkers casually bandy about over the water cooler. There just aren't a lot of opportunities to use academic-English skills in this form of blue-collar work, whereas functional numeracy is an obvious plus. Even "a little math can hurt you"...when ordering product, I tend to get too hung up on statistical curves and what sales data __ought__ to be like, rather than what it actually __is__. That's a form of intuitive wisdom shaped from a seed of mathematics, but mostly about __modelling human behaviour successfully__. Which, you know, is not a strong point for an autist either. So in many ways that actually matter, it's me who's the moron, not the on-paper-morons. This feels right and proper, in a Bryan Caplan-vindicating way.
*except Parts of Speech which never made any goddamn sense, who needs these archaic rules that supposedly let one read and write well, if they've already skipped to reading and writing well without needing to back-justify it by the formalisms...things like verb conjugation are a lot more comprehensible __in other languages__, but trying to apply the on-paper rules for English just make me worse at it compared to intuitive priors...
**130, with heavy lifting being done by language skills, and decidedly premium-mediocre or even actually-mediocre at everything else. In true wordcel fashion, I'm a dunce at spatial reasoning.
I don’t want to contradict your experience, but something like 15 5’s on AP tests, especially without studying much, indicates a lot of processing power. I’m skeptical that it’s just test taking. I’d be curious to hear more details about why you don’t feel that smart on a day to day basis. Also, how well do you do at work?
15 5s on APs is no fluke. You can't do that without either being really smart or studying a lot. This just screams "impostor syndrome" more than it screams flukish test-taking ability.
There’s absolutely a skill to understanding how to do well on standardized tests. I’m sure I’m quite smart, but I have the standardized test skill to an even higher degree. There’s a related skill for trivia, at knowing what sorts of things a question could be about.
Yeah, I'm the same. I think I'd call what you're talking about talents rather than skills, though, because I doubt many of us were trained to be good at this stuff. But the things we're talking about aren't important talents -- they're more on the order of something like being able to imitate foreign accents (something I've never been able to do at *all*.) Of course things like the SAT also measure skills of more importance, but having the knack of being a good test-taker makes a substantial difference in scores.
Hmmm... My last lengthy SWE contract was with the company that makes those bubble scanners and software. I knew they were pretty big but didn't realize that their name had become a generic trademark like kleenex.
It's a testament to the xeroxness of that product that I'm not even sure what to call such forms and tests, if not scantron. Kleenex(tm) <-> tissue, Xerox(tm) <-> photocopy, Google(tm) <-> internet search. Scantron(tm) <-> uh...automated-scoring-of-standardized-testing-using-ballot-like-forms?
(I think there's a reason they took out the "Analogies" vocab section from many formal intellectual tests...it doesn't measure nothing, but leads to some weird headspaces that don't generally seem all that productive. Unlike, say, metaphors.)
Does anyone have experience applying to Mechanical Engineering Masters degrees in the US? I go to a good but not amazing university in the UK, have decent grades, and some reasonably impressive extracurriculars.
What would be good schools to aim for? I have no experience applying for masters degrees either so am clueless on that whole process, any resources/experiential lessons would be appreciated. Am I too late to apply for ones starting in 2023 too?
I have dual US/UK citizenship and money is not an issue.
I'm not familiar with Mech E programs in particular, but I don't think you can go wrong shooting for the best big engineering schools -- MechE is so core to an engineering curriculum that I can't imagine any of them aren't first class. So off the top of my head that would be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Purdue, UT (main campus), Texas A&M, Caltech, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Michigan State, UCLA, Northwestern, Rice, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UW Madison, Ohio State, Minnesota, Virginia Tech, Penn State, Rensselaer, Vanderbilt, Colorado School of Mines, UIUC.
What you want as a first step is to go to each of their website and look up their graduate program, and in particular look up the faculty members in the department and see if they look like they're doing interesting work, and seem active and enterprising -- you'll probably find a publication list or project list somewhere near the faculty description page, or in a "research group home page." In the United States graduate admissions, unlike undergraduate, are often handled direction by the department itself, rather than by the central bureaucracy. Also, the nature of the faculty will have a much stronger influence on your graduate education, and on the opportunities for you afterward -- the value of great connections by a graduate advisor, mentor, or instructor with whom you get along very well cannot be overestimated. So look for a collection of faculty that really interests you. You might also want to see if they have formal co-op or internship programs, those are invaluable for getting your feet in the door of interesting jobs, and of course for making the degree substantially more valuable in itself. Both these factors should weigh heavily in your decision, almost as much as the overall reputation of the institution.
It's going to be tough to drop in and visit them if you're in the UK, but if you're in the US that would be a good idea. A university may or may not organize such visits formally, but if not you could just ring them up and ask them. Generally, any questions you have about the mechanics of applying, just ring up the department and ask them. There'll usually be a department secretary or something that will be happy to point you in the right direction.
Hmm, what do you want to do? I think you might look for some professor who is working on something you want to do, rather than a school. Then write the professor a letter.
Hmm not entirely sure. I’m into additive manufacture and entrepreneurship type stuff; to be completely honest I want to do the masters because I feel limited by the people and area of my current university, and would like a change of scene. The main benefit I want is socialising/prestige.
This is another option, and a good idea. It just feels scary going out into the world, and there's only a very specific set of jobs I'd like to do. But yeah I should probably focus on it!
Do you have a specific goal in mind for the masters? More generally, the normal advice is to get into the most prestigious engineering school you can. There are various rankings that correlate to prestige pretty well. You should also look at incoming class profiles to see how closely you match them in terms of grades, background, etc.
The application process is usually a series of forms, a GRE test, often an essay. You should compile a list of schools and their requirements since each is a little different. Usually you send off multiple applications, get some acceptances, and then decide which one to go to. There's sometimes an interview in there but I think that's rare for engineering.
Most have staggered admissions so you're probably not too late but the previous classes would have a slight advantage in getting in.
I’m into additive manufacture and entrepreneurship type stuff; to be completely honest I want to do the masters because I feel limited by the people and area of my current university, and would like a change of scene. The main benefit I want is socialising/prestige, plus a way into the US engineering/entrepreneurship realm. I’m currently debating whether to stick it out for another year in the UK as I’m technically doing a masters of engineering course, but can easily change to a bachelors. I’m just unsure... once again the future is covered by a fog and I can’t know
If you primarily want a way into entrepreneurship there's only a few colleges and most of them are hard to get into. Harvard, Stanford, etc. GIT, for example, is a very well regarded engineering school but less so for its startup scene. Harvard meanwhile is not well regarded for engineering but has a lot of startup bits. However, getting into either with mediocre grades is hard. Babson specializes in startups but is not prestigious. And in the middle you have tier 2 schools like Cornell or Johns Hopkins.
You might want to look into a business degree if what you primarily want connections. Alternatively, showing up in one of the major startup cities and socializing at open startup events can get you there regardless. For example, you could go to a smaller UCal and then just work the social space. Or even something like Tufts (for Boston). (Boston has a lot of the additive manufacturing stuff by the way.)
Gathering my thoughts, college in general probably isn't the best way to do this. Getting involved in the accelerator scene and all that is better. Going to startup school over a summer or something.
What would be some practical ways for me to get more quick repetitions for my social skills? I'm in my early middle age and now live in a small city that skews older. I was hoping to get regular, daily practice with say 10-20 minute conversations with new people, to build skills and reduce anxiety through exposure therapy. I work at home so I don't have regular interactions with co-workers, or really anyone unless I go out of my way. I've kind of exhausted the local Meetup scene, though I suppose I could make myself do more of them (the majority are people 60+ in age, who are nice but just not who I want to hang out with). In an ideal world I could have regular business lunches or do some kind of vague 'networking' (I'm self-employed) as an excuse to talk to people, but I think my city might be too small for that.
I have a reasonably high income, savings, and almost total independence, so I could conceivably move somewhere else for a period of time to practice. I could even move back to Large Famous City where I lived for a while- I didn't actively make myself socialize when I was there, but I'm sure there's lots of handwavey 'networking' events there I could force myself (an introvert) to do.
I do have a bit of an actual friend group, but I tend to get invited to multihour socializing events that just absolutely exhaust me and I think lead to bad repetitions/practice. They're marathons, and I need to train on shorter distances right now. Is there anything local I could be doing for more regular practice? (How exactly do middle-aged adults socialize outside of Meetup haha. I used to do combat sports but now I have too many injuries)
Go visit all the local taverns/ bars/ restaurants for lunch or a beer. Find one where you like the bartender. Then you can go there once a week for lunch or a beer. Bartenders are paid (in tips) to interact socially with you.
When you get invited to a barbecue, a party, a night out etc., it's rather odd to have leave after 20 or so minutes every time. I could see once with an excuse, but not repeatedly
Is there not an option to at least let some of them know of your situation? Like telling the host - and giving him permission to tell the other guests if helpful - that you really like interacting with people, but for reason XYZ currently you can only do this for a really limited time. And ask if it would be okay, if you joined the barbecue, etc. for 20 minutes? I think people might be less forgiving if you were annoying while being there, but you're not. I also think a lot of people wouldn't mind to talk to an interesting person who can be at a given event only shortly.
It seems like you are talking about something other than social anxiety here. More like the you find the people you mix with boring. Isn't that more of the 'them' problem than a 'you' problem?
20 minutes yes, not as weird to leave after 1 hour. Can also take breaks by petting dogs, having side conversation with just one person, using the restroom, excusing yourself for a 'phone call', etc. Networking events will probably be significantly more draining than spending time with people you already know and like (and more than 20 minutes).
For low stakes conversations with strangers, you could try talking to post office workers, public librarians, grocery store cashiers.
I guess just to expand on this- I'm quite good in very short interactions (like under 10 minutes), and I think even come across as a confident extrovert if you only talked to me for a bit. So I'm starting from a decent base. However I rapidly run out of energy (and enthusiasm). So ideally I'd do a 20 minute chat with a newish person every day, then work my way up to 30, 45, 60, etc. etc.
What do you actually want to achieve with your training?
*Coming across* as a confident extrovert (or anything else for that matter) when this doesn't fit your personality, sounds like it should cost a lot of energy. And quickly loosing enthusiasm on this sounds, hm, kind of healthy. You know much better what you want to improve on/achieve and why and I don't. And maybe I've overinterpreted your choice of words. Just sharing my thoughts on the little I've read here. I'm wondering whether striving to enjoy interactions more (which might include finding ways to interact with persons in a way that is reflective of your own preferences and characteristics) couldn't be a more desirable goal. I certainly know enough people who are neighter confident nor extravert and who have good social skills. And whom I'd enjoy talking to.
As for practicing interacting with people for 20 minutes, chats with 60+ neighbours sound like a great opportunity. I'm wondering whether you can develop an interest in getting to know who they are and what is on their mind? This could be a great basis for conversation. I mean, don't you just meet your neighbours on the street - at a local market, a small shop, whatever? Those are nice occasions to start a short conversation and nobody would wonder why you want to walk away after 20 min.
I finished reading "The Selfish Gene". I wish someone had told me to read it earlier in my life. How many have read it? And if not you should. (We (all life) are meat bags, projecting our genes into the future.) (OK there are plant bags too....)
I read it, take it as a model for some of my writing, a book presenting the ideas of my field in a sufficiently entertaining fashion so people will read it for fun.
Yes, the book is excellent. People who give me advice about developing my bioengineering career have said it’s one of the only books every biology grad student needs to read.
The Selfish Gene is often misunderstood as a thesis that all genes are selfish and that the unit of selection is at the gene level. There are units of selection smaller than the organism and they are called selfish genetic elements. But most genes are not selfish genetic elements. However, selfish genetic elements are thought to play a significant role in evolution. A really good paper on this topic is "Nothing in Genetics Makes Sense Except in Light of Genomic Conflict" by William R. Rice.
It’s worth reading the sequel, The Extended Phenotype, as well. Interestingly, thinking of the unit of selection as smaller than an organism, and thinking of the life form as much larger than the organism, are quite compatible ideas (though I think even Dawkins himself doesn’t fully live up to extended phenotype thoughts).
Yeah I read the 40th anniversary edition of "The Selfish Gene" and the last chapter was a quick summary of his later book "The Extended Phenotype." I guess I should order a copy.
That's a pretty reductive view. You should probably check out The Matter with Things (or maybe the shorter The Master and his Emissary) to balance it out. Makes a compelling case that there are two distinct modes of cognition associated with the respective brain hemispheres and that the left brain take (The Selfish Gene is an example) is less truthful than the right brain take.
I seem to remember Scott absolutely smashing the left brain right brain hypothesis at some point, but I can't remember the title of the essay... anyone remember? or am I misremembering?
The original left/right brain hypotheses were smashed, contemporary ones is that both hemispheres do the same tasks for the most part, but they approach them differently.
I've been reading The Matter with Things, which is packed full of citations of different stuff that happens when a respective hemisphere is damaged. Broadly, it adds up to a picture where the left hemisphere deals with representations (the map) and splitting things into parts, and the right hemisphere deals with wholes and the territory itself, though I guess no one paper is arguing that, since that is a big part of the thesis of the book.
I don't see what's implausible about it, since the body was not designed, there is all sorts of stuff about it that is counterintuitive or even seemingly (at least at a first glance) pointless.
Isn't it just one occasionally useful framing? You can use an abstraction where genes are in charge, or minds are in charge, or bodies are in charge... A genetic stance in addition to Dennett's intentional stance and physical stance.
The selfish gene is more specific than that. It’s not about being “in charge.” It’s about explaining what incremental natural selection acts “for the good of.” Does natural selection act “for the good of the species?” For the good of the individual?
Dawkins argues no, that natural selection specifically acts for the good of (replication of) genetic elements.
Oh we are more than just genes... but we all go through a 'singularity' were we are just one cell and genes. (And what else am I projecting into the future... some instruments that I've help build.)
Speaking of the IRL event, I got halfway through Scott's presentation on the recorded stream, got distracted with some or other holiday business, and when I came back to the tab a week later it had been taken down. Is that still up anywhere?
Help with portion control? I am doing intermittent fasting, very mindful, not a drag. Decades long hedonistic gourmand lived in various European countries ( Italy, Austria, France, Greece) that are now a curse because I am a supertaster ( verified). I do have strong likes and dislikes ( ex nothing spicy hot, embracing savoury and ofal ( nasty bits ) and all sorts of cheeses.
The worse time of my life were the stints in US ( food that I could afford was barely edible)
I live in Montréal, to aggravate things, and went to nutritionist.
I don't snack, never ever junk food ( as in chains or canned).
It's the hedonistic tendency I don't know how to re-frame. And yes, I can discern easily various parmigianos, prosciutto or olive oils . Which sounds nice , but it's not. I am definitely addicted, because I crave it .
I keep easy a 18-6 hours. And in the 2 meals I eat sufficiently to just break even.
My favorite heuristics that work for me beyond 16:8 IF (and these all just heuristics that work by reducing calorie intake) are:
Eat an apple before each meal. Apple consumption before meals has been shown to reduce calorie intake in the meal by 100+ calories (after accounting for the calories in the Apple).
Chew your food 35+ times before swallowing. This is an eating mindfulness habit, I can’t find the origins of the idea but some of it seem to stretch back to Ayurveda of some sort. To me it’s just a way to slow food consumption (and since there is a delay between being full and the feedback mechanism that tells you that your stomach is full, this should cut caloric intake down).
Hara hachi bu, or “Eat to only 80% full”. This is a cultural saying from Okinawa. Exact same mindfulness idea as above, just a reframing of what “full” is and feels to you. When you remember to eat only to 80% full, you should be saving roughly 20% on calories (assuming a linear relationship which, i can’t verify for sure, but seems likely).
Try them out if you would like, but don’t despair if they don’t seem to work well for you. People are diverse and they need different nutritional instruction sets based on what works well for them and their bodies.
And just for complete reference, I sit around the 25 BMI mark right now, with my highest point being 27.5 and after applying the above techniques and changing “what” I eat, I dropped to around 23.5 from there. Then the 23-25 drift is just the Covid years and switching to a vegan diet which increased my carb intake a large amount.
With OMAD your 1 meal will be large enough that portion control is not an issue and you don't need to restrict certain tasty foods. Calorie counting is still a must especially if you have issues with binge eating, at least for a few months until you can eyeball with decent accuracy the calories in a meal.
Don't set your daily caloric intake too low and if you can now do 18-6 you can do OMAD as well.
That's an approach. And indeed, you can eat as much in a seating ( not binging ever, just taking my time to thoroughly inundate my taste buds with taste and olfactory nerves with aromas. And exploring texture is also a stimulant. But , as you say, even as a hedonistic gourmand non binger, I have a limit. Yes 18:6 is very doable. Just heard of OMAD now that I asked . That's also a good option. Hmm, I should stop lurking and engage more. Appreciate your feedback. As everyone's else.
And keep throwing balls , I may be more inept than I and other think. Or I was wilfully ignoring my food experience addiction. Most probably.
To understand the hormonal theory of obesity, I like Dr. Fung's books and analogies. He seems articulate and to care deeply about helping people lose weight. He also seems extremely good with data (rare for anyone , and certainly rare in his field - he is a doctor).
Have you read The Obesity Code?
This book might help you understand intellectually that it is ok to go hungry during the fasting period.
Your problem seems to be eating too much during the feeding period.
Technically, there's no limit to how much you can eat so long as you don't eat anymore when satisfied.
Perhaps get a person to hold you accountable to whatever you commit to in case you're not disciplined? Or, serve yourself in one room and walk to another room (no access to another serving) for your meal.
Don't cook more than the allowed portion? This is hard if there are others you live / eat with..
Shop by meal, not what looks good, and don't keep ANY excess food in the house aside from scheduled meals if possible. You are not allowed to eat anything that wasn't preplanned
Are there any particularly voluminous foods that you enjoy? Getting full from vegetables or diet soda could prevent you from eating too much... Satiation is key. High protein stuff works well for that. I tend agree with the comment from Sophia, counting calories is probably your best bet. Layne Norton has some good resources too.
I lost weight with semaglutides last year, and after I lost weight, my cravings changed. For example, now I order small batch artisanal beans. So what you crave, post weight loss, might change. Every time I would reduce calories before semaglutides cravings would increase while losing weight--your brain wants to go back to it’s original set point.
Ozempic's ( semaglutide) side effects, after an initial weight drop, had the paradoxical effect of hating myself and was sliding in eating to appease the discomfort. For me, after 7 months was a zero sum in weight. It was a relief and managed to lose 5 kg after stopping it, just not to ho on it. So , it was beneficial for the wrong reasons. Cost inefficient.
Count calories so you can consistently eat slightly less than your body uses, the only foolproof solution. buy a food scale. This is a basic guide I wrote for a family member who struggled with weight.
thanks you . I got a foodd scale, but was too cryptic with codes and 80 % of my type of food was not there.
I must look for a simple one. I count calories with the "Simple" app. That doesn't have a proper daily caloric intake sum or history to isolate patterns. Thanks for the guide.
The analysis by "Cremieux" showing that the putative effects of slavery in that study were really (strong, terrible) effects of Jim Crow seems to be careful and valuable, at least at first sight. However, the insistence that it must be genes (as opposed to inheritance, social connections and advantages, habitus, family structure... - or all of the above, including genes) that account for the transmissibility of status across generations is much less convincing. In the end, the argument seems to be "this is a simple explanation that I like, and of course you know that people who don't like it are biased".
I always measure arguments about inequality against the real-life example of one of my dad’s black friends. They were coworkers and had the same federal job, started the same year, earned the same salary and lived in the same town. They both owned homes. But back in 1980, no one would sell a black person a home in the neighborhood where my parents bought. 40 years later my dad’s house sold for $300k more. Is Gary’s missing $300k genetic? Could genes possibly be more relevant than redlining here? I don’t see it.
I'm dubious about this "no one." I had black schoolfriends in 1980, and their parents lived in the same neighborhood we did, and neither my parents nor any other adult I knew thought anything of it. Maybe it would've been true in certain neighborhoods in certain states but I'm doubtful about it as a general proposition
Probably not, but my point was that Gary couldn't have bought my parents house even if he wanted to. In order to live in the area at all, he took the best house he could get. I'm sure his home also went up in value, since the entire area did, but the way his choices were limited in 1980 shut him out of the kind of increase in future value my parents got. A quick glance at the market today shows that median price for homes in the biggest black neighborhood went up 3.9% last year compared to 6.6% for my parents' old neighborhood.
There's actually a really obvious racist reply to this. It goes basically like this.
"Your parents' neighbourhood has few black families due to their policy of not selling to black people. Your dad's friend's neighbourhood, self-evidently, did not have such a policy. Insofar as black people are in whatever sense statistically undesirable neighbours (even given selection by price, the next generation will regress toward the mean and by assumption the means aren't the same), this explains the former becoming a more desirable neighbourhood than the latter and thus appreciating more in value."
I'm not saying I entirely *believe* that reply, but it's not remotely something the ideology can't explain. Hell, to my understanding this argument was a large chunk of the *reason* those kinds of homeowners' agreements existed - homeowners wanted to protect their families and their property values, and they thought keeping black people out would help with that. So if keeping black people out *did* help with that, well, that's a successful prediction of racism.
I wouldn't put too much faith in one example *either* way, though, given the large randomness involved.
There are lots of concrete reasons the houses available to black buyers were cheaper to start with and their undesirable nature was so durable. They were in flood zones, or on steep hills. They were smaller, with little property around them. They were older, in neighborhoods with older infrastructure and schools. Those neighborhoods weren’t always black, but when a development boom started in the 60s it was no secret that the new construction was for white people. There’s too much intent in all of this to call the outcome random.
>Those neighborhoods weren’t always black, but when a development boom started in the 60s it was no secret that the new construction was for white people. There’s too much intent in all of this to call the outcome random.
Well yes and no, this certainly wasn't the situation everywhere and charity/ recent reality bids us to perhaps look for other explanations than *OMG society and everyone was so racist*, that is why traditionally black neighborhoods are poor.
To be clear I would never claim there wasn't specific and overt racism driving decisions in some markets at some lenders etc. But it gets talked about as though it was uniform, and also as though it was this very pernicious and specific type of racism. Meanwhile our recent experience has shown us that even in the absence of this type of racism, aggregate disparities in outcomes and behavior can be very difficult to eliminate.
ASIDE FOR EDUCATION: I live in a state with a very white population, especially historically, where the black populations was very concentrated in two inner school districts of the largest metro. For example at my (poor) HS with a population of ~1500 in a outlying rust belt small city, we had ~15 black students at any one time. The rich school in our area of similar size had maybe 5. In 1990 the state population was ~2.5% black, but was ~33% in these 2 inner-city school districts. And there were simply HUGE racial disparities in educational outcomes.
I grew up very liberal, and was taught (and bought) the line that this was due to everyone being equal clay, and the clay in those school districts simply wasn't properly molded because we raised money on a local basis for schools (partially due to racism!) and so those inner city schools had wildly less funding per pupil than their whiter counterparts (the rest of the state). Lets call this "Story 1". Little did I know that this was in fact NOT TRUE! (seems important to note), and that the federal and state government had been putting their thumb on the scales very aggressively in my state, and that while this explanation reigned (say 1985-2000) the funding had actually be quite equal per pupil.
By 2000 perception caught up with reality, and people needed to admit that the funding was now equal (in fact it had been equal since the mid 80s and there was only really this large period of disparity in the early 1970s in the aftermath to massive white flight from the inner city, which the state started working against by the mid 70s).
But by 2000 the educational disparities had gotten worse.
The narrative became that while the funding was now equal (in fact it was now slightly slanted in the inner city district's favor by 2000), historic outcomes meant equality wasn't enough and that really we needed to slant the per pupil funding in favor of inner city school districts to see any progress. Let us call this story 2. And once again point out that exactly while people were making a big stink about needing to move "equity" based funding not equality based, "equity" based funding was already happening.
And then that takes us to maybe 2010, where story 3 starts reigning and now (at least some) are willing to admit the reality that the funding isn't equal anymore (though you would still to this day find tons of liberals throughout the state blaming all the disparities at the feet or story 1 and story 2 despite both of them being false when they were popular, and abandoned by activists. Well by 2010 the disparate funding in favor of inner city schools was still leading to racial disparate outcomes in huge ways, and so we moved into a new phase where pretty much all discussion and policy at the shcool district level just became about racial disparities.
Story 3 is now that society is super racist, and basically unless the whole mission of schools is undoing racism, there will never be equality in outcomes (which I frankly agree with, but I don't think is desirable). Gifted programs were scrapped, a second round of educational flight to private schools started taking hold. Functional inner city schools with good outcomes were aggressively "equitized" to try and bring disparities in line. Crazy discipline policies for example, white and black discipline for behavior must happen at exactly the same rates with zero reference to the base rate of unruly behavior. That was a real policy that was tried for a couple years and lead to a huge increase in fights with teachers and between students in class. One teacher was stabbed I think.
Anyway, you get the picture. Over time were a variety of stories about educational disparity, mostly not matching up with the current reality, all of them promising progress if implemented, none of them getting results.
LETS SWITCH BACK TO HOSUING/LENDING: There absolutely were realtors/lenders/neighborhoods that were racist and discriminated against blacks and other groups.
As I have pointed out before, in the depression the federal government put out some very famous maps evaluating the creditworthiness of various areas based on how likely it was deemed that property values in those areas would go up. That tended to rate black neighborhoods very poorly (though also those of many other ethnic groups including say "Swedes"), and especially laborers, and factory workers and the such. Another thing that rated very poorly was worn out farmland. Anyway those maps get talked about a lot as though their entire point was to harm black people, when in fact it is very clear if you actually read them this was far from the case (individual maps in specific areas may have involved racism, they weren't all made by one guy, but it definitely wasn't the general thrust).
Say you are a bank in the 1960s looking to lend to a household. You don't have computers, you probably have some pretty simple systems for evaluating creditworthiness. Income, profession, marital status, child status, personal networking, etc. Is one of these race? Maybe, probably depends on who/where you are, certainly not everyone in 1960 was racist. I had a GF in HS whose father travelled across the country every summer to volunteer in black communities in the south while in HS/college in the 1950s/1960s. Presumably he wasn't a racist. Non-racists existed in non-trivial numbers.
If the lender did use race is that a sign of capital "R" Racism, or were they just making the best use of limited information? Surely black applicants were generally less creditworthy as a group (maybe substantially so), that is still what you would find today. Might a bank underwriting with a heavy consideration of race outperform one not making such a consideration. Doesn't that matter? Just like salespeople were for centuries taught to discriminate based on the shoes people wore (becoming less true these days).
While there was "redlining", and individual lenders with racist staff or racist policies. A lot of time the evidence for these things having more than a widespread impact is just " overall disparities". But as we covered in the education example above, often disparities can persist even with equal (or better) treatment.
Anyway, I suspect the reality was a lot more complicated and nuanced than the current love with the "lets blame the current black lack of wealth at the feet of racist real estate policies from 1915-1960 (and a few outliers in the 70s)". In 1915 in my metro there were several specific new developments that specific banned black people. But it was far from being a majority of them, and several new developments were happy to take black buyers. So options were limited, in a way that caused real harm, but not perhaps structural harm as there was little long term difference in the appreciation between the racist and non-racist developments.
And I would once again point out that currently if black neighborhoods saw their values appreciate a lot, that gets decried as evidence of racism, and if they didn't that also gets decried as racism.
I think the null hypothesis in light of recent evidence should probably be that the general poverty of the black community today mostly arises form its general poverty 175-150 years ago, combined with some particularly negative patterns and behaviors that happened on both sides since the 1960s. And that there doesn't need to be this widespread "structure" to perpetuate that, though there certainly were at times ad-hoc and patchwork structures that presented more than typical obstacles to those looking to escape poverty.
I wasn't really arguing that "OMG everyone was so racist". You're bringing up a number of points I wasn't even getting at, but it seems like we're more or less on the same page.
I'm not sure what you mean by it being racist when home values go up. Do you mean gentrification? I think it's a racial issue because even if some black people make bank, they will mostly be selling to white people leveraging intergenerational wealth who are likely to reap any further increases. It also creates unwelcome pressure to sell and elevates the cost of living for people whose income hasn't changed. So I see why it gets cited in both cases.
I do think that intergenerational wealth- legitimate and illegitimate- is seldom given its fair place. My dad's friend Gary plugged a lot of holes for his family that my dad didn't have to cover out of his salary. He didn't have to largely because home ownership started a generation earlier for us.
We also benefited from a lot of grey-market and straight up illegal activity that was a degree or two removed from us but which was not available to people like Gary. Nobody can talk about this but I think it's tremendously important. A black friend needed $500 for her car and nobody in her entire family could come up with that, so she lost her job. For one reason or another, everybody in my family could find or borrow $500 if they really had to, and that's been true for many years. Of course my outcomes were better; I never had to worry about this crap, and I could hold out for great jobs instead of settling. It's not quite uniformly racism, but it's a knock-on effect of people being marginalized here and there over long periods of time.
There are a lot of other factors that could be racism but are indistinguishable from the emergent order of people making rational choices. But that's what I mean by "structure" - the same things that hold society together and make it work also instigate and perpetuate racism. Which is why it's actually a hard problem not solved by platitudes.
Predominantly black community see lower than normal real estate returns > see the structural racism of decades ago can still be harming black people today. Think of all the extra net worth in real estate those black people would have reaped if they hadn't been pushed into these marginal areas*. *I would note these stories tend to ignore how much of those areas being "marginal" is a result of the actions of the residents.
Predominantly black community sees higher than normal real estate returns > OMG look at the racist gentrifiers slowly destroying and breaking up black communities by wanting to pay them money for their valuable houses/land. How dare they give money to black people, and bait them into slitting their own communities throat with a bribe. This would never happen to a white community**. **It absolutely would and does.
Anyway, when one group is doing substantially worse than another group, you can create "just so " stories about pretty much any thing that happens whatsoever and claim it ties back to the disparity.
Wouldn't this also make such houses cheaper to *buy*?
You mention that the black colleague sold the house for less money, but did he also buy it for less money? Could the result be reduced to "if you make a smaller investment, the growth will be proportionally smaller"?
Hypothetically, if the black colleague started with the same capital as your dad, could he have bought two houses instead for half the price, and 40 years later sell each for $150k more?
Or is it the case that the houses in one part of the town got more expensive, and the houses in other part of the same town did not?
I think you’re right, though I also thought it included realtors. In my area in the 80s the Italian mob was heavily involved in property development and real estate matters, and that definitely affected the demographics of the place. A realtor who sold to black people (or most minorities, really) outside a given area was taking genuine personal risk. This sort of thing is hard to build into any analysis.
I find it unlikely he would have faked that much communication with "himself" so far in advance, and Satoshi also seemed to be someone working in the UK's time-zone and reading UK media, with a different writing style from Hal's.
By the way I in no way want to detract from the point of the post - ALS is a horrible disease and I absolutely encourage people to donate to the charity Scott referenced
All anecdotal evidence, but Finney created the very first reusable proof of work system before Bitcoin and then received the first bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto. His tragic death from ALS broadly coincides with the disappearance of Nakamoto (ALS forced Hal to retire in early 2011, as he noted in a post on LessWrong, which is the last time Nakamoto was seen).
The hack to beat the AI at go is more interesting than you updated to think. They found multiple ways to beat it. See David's comment in the original thread, and https://goattack.far.ai/
Lately I’ve been reading the book Code by Charles Petzold. The book is amazing — basically it explains how computers work from scratch. The first part is about atoms and what electricity even is, and what it means to encode information. Then it builds up from there, explaining how you could build a long circuit to communicate with Morse code, add switched that incorporate AND/OR logic gates, and so on.
So far it’s the best technical book I’ve ever read.
Can anyone recommend any other books like this, that explain something very complex using a simple starting point and simple steps from there?
Not a book, but on the same subject, my university had a "band to Tetris" course that should still be openly available online, where you gradually build up a basic java-like programming language from nand gates.
The book Chaos, about chaotic systems and fractals, is like that. Has very attractive illustrations, too. It came out quite a long time ago -- some time in the 80's I think.
I really like Marvin Minsky's book "computation: finite and infinite machines" as an introduction to cs theory (finite state machines, regular expressions, Turing machines etc). It has the same kind of focus on the concrete as the book Code and good puzzles. Feynman Lectures On Computation is another good choice.
What is the probability that (some) conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination are true?
I am a bit of an outsider, having immigrated to the North America as an adult, and I haven't read much about the subject. But my very ignorant impression is that it is somewhat higher than for 9/11 conspiracies.
The whole thing(along with the more recent Jeffery Epstein conspiracies) reminds me a lot of the Villisca axe murders. There, too, a conspiracy was spun out of yarns provided by prostitutes, dishonest "journalists," and people who later recanted their testimony.
As to the people who say "the CIA/FBI/police knew about Oswald and didn't act," so what? The first amendment protects being a communist. The second amendment protects owning a rifle. So unless they had eyes on him 24/7 or Oswald recklessly went around telling people he planned to kill the President, there was little they could have done.
Yes, the initial conspiracy stuff was fed by Pat Moynihan to cover for a communist killing the anti-communist D-JFK and pushing the Democratic party away from anti-communism.
A couple months previous Oswald took a shot at the head of the John Birch society. So the latest claims of CIA involvement are claiming the CIA backed that. Still sounds like twaddle.
I think some elements of the theories are likely true, but for much more mundane reasons. Like maybe some of the evidence looks a bit doctored because maybe some of it was a bit doctored.
Say they didn't have quite enough for an open and shut case but knew all the basic facts, and so doctored a bit of it.
So, conspiracy guy sees *picture looks altered*, and concludes" must be a multinational conspiracy". And I wonder, "Maybe Bob in the photo-lab ruined the original through negligence and had to doctor up a replacement because this was an important enough situation that his negligence would be severely punished."
If for some reason the truth were scheduled to be revealed tomorrow and I had to make a prediction, I'd go with 60%. Just a whole lot of fishiness around the event.
So far as 9/11 conspiracy theories go, an underappreciated aspect of this is that there isn't really all that clear a boundary between the weaker 'they let it happen' conspiracy theories, and no true conspiracy at all. I put little credence in various theories that suggest the twin towers were demolished (I am less certain about WTC 7).
I've never been that interested in, and therefore knowledgable about, 9/11 conspiracy theories. But don't some of them centre round a building other than the main twin towers that also collapsed? Also, wasn't word of its imminent collapse publicly known before it actually happened or seemed likely?
If those assumptions are true (and maybe that is a big if, knowing the way rumors spread and mutate) then it seems to me remotely possible that the building held some secret government department and had been rigged years before, presumably in the Cold War, for demolition in the event of a sea-borne or river-borne invasion, and in the panic and confusion of the day's events an irrevocable timed demolition was set in motion before it became clear a Russky naval assault team was not about to storm and occupy the place!
The plausibility or even sanity of that theory largely depends on how close the buildings were to the coast. I don't have a good feel for that, but my vague recollection is that they were pretty close to the Hudson River, but some way inland from the open sea.
The building that collapsed was right across the street from the main two that collapsed and had some major structural damage and fires from debris. Thus, it collapsing isn't really a mystery.
If you were a powerful group trying to pull off the assassination of the century, would you get an unreliable flighty weirdo like Lee Harvey Oswald involved in your conspiracy? I wouldn't. He's a massive risk.
New conspiracy theory: Lee Harvey Oswald was a self-motivated lone-nut whackjob. But someone in the CIA (or KGB if you prefer) misread their files, thought he was one of their assets, and quickly leaned on Ruby to eliminate him.
There is nothing to suggest a conspiracy in the released documents https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk, so you'd have to postulate a conspiracy to remove the documents from the archives and fabricate different ones for this to work. Possible, but the odds are pretty low.
Yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Oswald had been a CIA asset or in some way manipulated by the CIA or some other agency, even just in an "aware of him and keeping an eye on him but letting him run free since that's more useful to us" way, then oops!
Who wants to answer questions about "so you *knew* this nutjob was planning something and you let it happen?" when it comes to the assassination of a president?
I keep seeing all kinds of "top 10" lists, top 10 baseball players not in the Hall of Fame, and today "top 50 bowl games.
So I'm puzzled why there is only one (obscure) collection of the key concepts that an educated person needs to navigate intellectual life. Concepts like regression to the mean, the Benjamin Franklin principle (two pages in Wikipedia on this one), the Pareto principle, black swan, and a whole bunch of others that you would hope your teenager has absorbed by the time they leave college.
I focus on this because my neighbor in Laguna Beach sells a deck of 88 cards each of which has an important principle. The front of the card names a principle and it is summarized on the back side. See conceptcompanion.com.
Part of the fun is trying to decide what principles should be kept and what principles should be added to his list.
But how can it be that there aren't a number of these "top principles" lists? At a minimum, you actually can learn something by browsing through them or trying to improve them. For example, I had not heard of the Benjamin Franklin principle, which is that if you want to get somebody to do something for you, don't start by doing something for them, but start by asking them to do a small thing for you, after which bigger things are more likely to follow. Fascinating, and the subject of a number of psychology experiments, but certainly unknown to me until I saw a Concept Companion deck.
I responded first to your second reference. Now I see that your first reference is just great -- a reference to a guy who is making the kinds of concept lists that I was looking for -- and who starts by quoting exactly the same phase from the Charlie Munger speech that I just quoted to you:
"80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight. "
Fascinating, very helpful. Interestingly enough, Simmons cites Charlie Munger as an inspiration. A 1994 Charlie Munger speech to the USC Business School is what inspired my neighbor to do "Concept Companion". By the way, Charlie's daughter showed Concept Companion to him and said that he was impressed, and wondered why someone hadn't done this earlier.
I can send you a transcript of Charlie's speech if you like, but here is a brief excerpt:
"What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. * * *
And the models have to come from multiple disciplines— because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.
You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight."
Glad I could help! Interestingly enough I have a PDF of that Munger speech saved on my computer already...but it was sent to me so long ago I didn't think to recommend it to you.
I think part of the problem with this would be that in order to make it on the list, a principle would need to be both useful/enlightening and little-known. The more obviously useful something is, the more likely everyone will have already learnt it as a child, so the top-ten list ends up being a bit more like a middle-ten list, which is vaguer and more subjective. E.g. should modus tollens make the list? It's surely more useful than various quirks of psychology, being so broadly applicable, but on the other hand, including it could have less educational value because almost everyone already knows how to use it (even if they don't know the name or formal statement). Worse, if such a list did become sufficiently popular, it would make itself obsolete.
More generally, I'd say part of the actual reason top-10 principles lists are rarer than top-10 players of some sport lists is that it's much more obvious what counts as a baseball player, and a good one, than what counts as a principle.
Well, modus tollens seems more like a rule of logic to me than a "principle", so your comment identifies an interesting line of thinking.
I like your intuition that a concept list needs to focus on concepts that are not too obvious to a target group like college sophomores (or old tax lawyers like me). But that shouldn't confound a process in which a target group votes to add concepts to the list or to dismiss them. That would be fun to watch . . .
It's a bit unfortunate that the example Concept Companion card being showcased on that page is wrong (comparative advantage: it's not simply about you being more efficient at making shoes and your neighbour being more efficient at making pastries, but the key concept is that even if your neighbour is more efficient than you at *both* then it's in both your interests to specialise and trade, as long as she's better at pastries by a bigger margin than she's better at shoes).
Doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the deck being much good, if that one has such a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept it's trying to explain.
There's not quite enough room on a poker card to explain things well, I fear. (Of course it's possible that he is going for simple if inaccurate explanations.)
I agree that his is not the best explanation. My hope is that he is going to make his website interactive so that discussion of such things can improve the list. But improving the Concept Companion list doesn't take off, ideally the world will divert some attention from the "100 best novels" lists to this question of what the educated person's toolbox of concepts needs to contain, along with pointers of how to use them in practice.
Top 10 lists are created by and for people interested in arguing about them. If you want the Pareto principle to be better known, you need a bunch of people arguing about its relative importance compared to other principles.
I agree that there should be discussion among people interested in these concepts. My surprise is that there doesn't seem to be any such place where, for example, the Benjamin Franklin and Pareto principles get discussed -- and thus potentially applied in practical situations more often.
For example, I see myself as a well educated tax lawyer, but really didn't know about any applications of the Pareto principle -- shouldn't the IRS think this way, what are the 20% of the tax problems that create 80% of the revenue loss? I don't think they do.
I live in Texas and for K-12 the lists of what students should know are called TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). I don’t know the name of the Common Core. equivalents. They are decided by the State Board of Education who reviews a different subject yearly, and while there are opportunities to debate and influence them, I don’t think enough people do. For example, new science textbooks will be approved next year due to changes made during the pandemic, and no one suggested making any changes because of the pandemic. I would imagine more information on viral replication and spread more often would be useful. I gave a cursory glance to the public list of members to the advisory committee and it seemed to be almost entirely K-12 teachers, not professors, industry, or public health experts.
I don’t know if there is more debate for post college licensing boards of what curricula should be taught, but imagine those are the types of bodies to have those discussions with.
That's a promising suggestion -- a state board developed list of concepts college graduates should know. As you point out, a few epidemiological principles should be included there.
But I'm not aware of any movement toward developing such lists in the generalized way I have in mind.
I do observe that my investment adviser started going through 3 Concept Companion cards every day with his teenage daughter.
I am considering writing a post on potential inherent limits of human knowledge. Here is the gist:
It is possible that parts of the world are not human-knowable. That is, while some parts can be approximately modeled through lossy compression, other parts are not compressible into something that can describe them with any reasonable approximation. If so, then some observations will always be surprising, and not amenable to probabilistic estimates. They have true Knightean uncertainty instead. Observations like that to an embedded agent like us would basically look like "miracles": unexplainable and unpredictable events.
To be clear, I am not insisting that our universe is like that, only that a world like that does not seem to contradict logic or observations, as far as I understand it. Note, however, that this is incompatible with the popular idea of comprehensible laws of physics that make the universe "work".
A basic version of this program would be constructing a toy model, a 1D world that is not usefully lossily compressible using the usual compression algorithm, Discrete Cosine Transform. (Here "usefully" does most of the work.)
An ambitious version of this program would be constructing a model of a world compatible with our current observations (i.e. the Core Theory, https://frankwilczek.com/2014/coreTheory.pdf, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26611), and yet impossible to lossily compress into a human brain in a way that allows arbitrarily accurate (though potentially probabilistic) predictions, even given sufficient though finite time and suitable finite augmentations.
Turbulence seems like a possible example in our universe. Even if we understand the movement of individual particles, it is difficult to precisely predict the behavior of clouds etc.
There are some ordinary (as opposed to partial) differential equations (ODEs) that are soluble in symbolic form but whose solution is demonstrably far more complicated to obtain than the complexity of the equation itself.
So, unless there is some simple way of certifying whether or not any given equation has a symbolic solution without having to go through the potentially almost interminable intricacy of finding it, then the question of what proportion of ODEs have a suitably-defined "manageable" solution, and classifying these, is possibly one example of what you are seeking.
I think it comes under the heading of Differential Galois Theory and Picard-Vessiot groups. I'll have another search later for the specific result I had in mind.
Physics is the study of phenomena that are patterned strongly enough to characterize with physical theories. Very many phenomena (I would say the vast majority, but there is no standard for counting these things) are not so patterned and stand outside the realm of physics. True-blue reductionists will argue with me, but I left their fold long ago.
Yes, or at least this is how I think of emergence. It is tough to explain all of chemistry with physics, but absurd to explain sociology with only physics. Things are not simply what they are made of, many things consist primarily of the relations between their parts, and many of these relations are not physics relations.
You realize the entire discipline of condensed matter physics is devoted to studying/understanding emergence? That the number of physicists who work on emergence in some form is considerably larger than the number who work on reductionist approaches?
And yet they still do not have it covered. Which is why there are other academic disciplines besides physics. Also re next comment, I claim no originality. I used to teach this in a former career.
What do you mean `have it covered?' Physicists have made a great deal of progress in understanding large classes of emergent phenomena. If you mean, `not every academic discipline has been replaced by physics'...of course not. That's kind of the point of Anderson's essay?
I think this is related to "weak emergence", where high-level objects are often substrate-independent (e.g. a wooden chair vs a plastic chair), but in each particular case they can be decomposed into underlying physics... just not synthesized from it except with malice aforethought. Does this match what you are getting at?
I agree with your statement, they can be decomposed into underlying physics. But the underlying physics does not explain the chair - it is more that what it is made of. Physics shines a light - if the chair is not strong enough, it is a poor artifact, and physics provides insight into structural strength. However, physics has little to say about aesthetics. I am sitting in an IKEA poang rocker, mostly because my partner doesn't want me to use her precious mid-century modern Danish wool-and-teak chair. Our affection for these chairs, how we use them and what we think of them goes far beyond structure or anything in the realm of physics. For a less built-environment example, students are often introduced to ecology studying predator-prey relationships. Physics helps understand the ability of a jaguar's jaw to break the leg bones of an antelope, but most of what goes on in the hunt is better explained by non-physics phenomena. Once you look for it, this situation is everywhere.
I think you should modify your approach. Maybe to something like "for any agent which has sufficiently-general-reasoning-abilities that I'm confident are more powerful than what humans have, there is some environment satisfying nice properties (e.g. causality, locality, ability to host large economies etc.) that cannot be lossily compressed into the mind of said agent in a way that allow arbitrarily accurate predictions, even given sufficient though finite time and suitable finite augmentations." Though it seems hard to find "nice" properties that are interesting enough that the problem isn't trivial and yet not so close to our own realities character that the task becomes hopeless. Here's why:
One) Our core theory isn't at a state where it makes mathematical sense yet, you need some currently inexplicable intuition to operate the theory and make physically accurate predictions. Or you can settle for a lower bar than mathematical proof. Heaven knows physicists do.
Two) We don't have a good idea of how the human brain works, and what sorts of things it can or cannot know.
Three) Supposing you had some model of general reasoning (say, Infra-Bayesianism) which you were reasonably sure allowed for more capable agents than humans. And supposing you were working with some version of the core theory which is well understood mathematically (Like the Wrightman axioms, but not the same. If they were the same, then I think your project will trivially succeed or fail, depending on the details of your setup.) How would you go about showing that some general agent can't possibly compress a model of those axioms to allow for arbitrarily accurate predictions? In one way, this is trivial: embedded agents can't perfectly predict how their reality will behave. Unless you're allowing for statements which contain subsentences like " forall all levels of accuracy, there exists a level of resources...".
But in that case, I don't see how you're going to get the kind of proof you want, at least if you're constructing a model. Somehow you need to search for a model that is like a QFT that is compatible with many of our observations. (I'd be impressed if you found a rigorous theory compatible with all our observations. You could get a Fields Medal for that.) And yet, it is too large to fit in a human mind, so presumably you're doing a computer aided search. The kinds of technology you'd need for that seems way beyond our current capabilities. More over, you'd need it to be incompressible for the purpose of predictive accuracy, and that feels like a deep problem to me. If you solved that, I think you'd make major progress on the alginment problem, amongst other things.
Four) If it's an existence proof, then I might buy that. But you're still looking at a Herculean task, the way you've phrased it.
Thanks! That definitely highlights the difficulties of coming up with anything general, let alone rigorous. I'd settle for something much simpler to start, like demonstrating (or appealing to) the limits of DCT in 1D (sound compression) or 2D (image/video compression), since that is the type of compression that seems to work for humans. There are still plenty of holes even if that is done, and even without formal proofs, but more in a philosophy-style logic. But with the necessary assumptions explicated, if the constructed toy model is not completely trivial, it might be a starting point for a discussion. Especially since it seems to be a radical departure from the existing paradigms of "world is all physical therefore it is knowable"and "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" on one extreme and "a man cannot know the mind of God" on the other.
But yeah, I agree, it is not easy even in the simplest and constraint cases.
Sure sounds interesting to me. Here are a couple thoughts I've had that see sort of related, like spin-offs:
-It is very hard to know other people, especially in the sense of fully getting it that they to themselves they are Self, not Other Person as they are to us. There's always some lossy compression. But people differ in how much of it they have to perform in order to not feel overwhelmed and diminished by being surrounded by other Selves. Some have to compress others some much you can barely tell the little almost faceless models apart.
-Anything more than a little ways into the future is unknowable, and once you get a 5 or 10 years out it is in fact unknowable, and might as well be a magically-transformed version of the world as we know it.
this paper (essay for the public: https://aeon.co/essays/ten-questions-about-the-hard-limits-of-human-intelligence , full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03886) seems pretty relevant. also, i’m doing writing an essay related to this topic within moral philosophy (conditional on moral realism being true, what elements of moral phil are not human-knowable? what implications would that have on how we act?), so i’d be very happy if you would send me your post if/once you complete it!! i’m not sure how DMing on substack works, but if we could get into contact, that’d be great. :)
Has anyone seen figures around the total cost to date of the Ukraine war to the US, including not only financial and military aid but also (estimates of) the direct and indirect costs to the US of its sanctions against Russia?
Very tricky. Especially the "indirect" costs. On the whole, I would tend to say the value to US national security interests of being able to directly observe Russian combat equipment, tactics, and strategy in a European war, not to mention test how some American systems perform against Russian equipment, is so high that there may overall be a substantial indirect profit.
The total cost of the war worldwide usually gets estimated in the $2-7 trillion range. But most of that is not in the US. Costs to the US range from around $100 billion to perhaps $300 billion. But that includes economic damage. (There are some more extreme analyses that say 100% of gas increases and inflation is due to the invasion. But I don't think that's really defensible.)
The biggest costs have been in Ukraine. Followed by Russia and then the former USSR. Next biggest are in Europe or Africa depending on whether you adjust for relative wealth. The least affected region is the Americas.
Note the vast majority of these costs, including in the US, come from the invasion itself and not the response to the invasion. For example, China's lost nearly all of its (fairly significant) investments in Ukraine to Russian artillery fire.
Have the Chinese really invested a lot in Ukraine? Ukraine joined the BRI in 2017, and I was under the impression none of the associated projects have really gotten off the ground by early 2022. The war is seen as a major inconvenience, but from what I can find, direct investment is in the sub-billion range (strikingly less than e.g. Kazakhstan, an oft-cited comparison).
If you could point me to information to the contrary, I would appreciate it.
Depends on what you mean by "a lot." Chinese FDI flows are relatively low but that's true of Kazakhstan too. Meanwhile, Chinese companies owned or leased or had crop contracts on about a tenth of the farmland in the country and a significant proportion of industry. They also had billions of dollars in contracts to build things like ports many of which were financed through debt to Chinese banks who, in all likelihood, are not getting paid. And I have no idea why you thought the projects weren't off the ground. Several major ones were completed with more coming.
Now, is it going to cripple the Chinese economy? No, tens of billions of dollars to a trillion dollar economy is easily absorbed. But it gets counted in that top line number.
What sort of sources are you looking for? FDI is relatively low but that's a strange thing to ask after since China's only the fourth largest source of FDI in very Chinese aligned Kazakhstan.
I'm less saying you're wrong and more expressing bemusement. I was under the impression that the Ukrainians had backed out of the one massive farmland acquisition deal back in 2013 for political and possibly legal reasons, and that while some loans had been extended over the years (6-7bn USD or so?) and many contracts signed, very little - apart perhaps from a wind farm and certain rail infrastructure improvements - had actually gotten built and consequently got shelled. But if that's a naive or misinformed view, fair enough.
Depends on what you count as costs. Someone profits from, say, higher oil/gas prices and increased military spending, so it is not a "cost" to them. I guess one way to measure it would be to compare the actual budget spending with a counterfactual one in a world where the war didn't happen, or was quickly won by Russia etc.
My goto on medical worldwide matters is my aged aunt who lives in a medium sized town
in rural Ireland. The population about 20,000.
its fairly common in Ireland for older people to go to as many funerals as they can manage, in the hope perhaps, that many people come to theirs. Of course in a small town you would know lots of people whose passing might be meaningful even if you had lost contact a few years back.
Someone will tell you, and my aunt is at the centre of a network of dedicated if morbid gossipers. Visit her and you will hear the illnesses and the deaths of not just the parish, but the town and outlying areas. She would know all the tragedies of course, any young person who crashes a car or dies of an overdose, which does occasionally happen.
She hasn’t been talking about a rise in deaths amongst the young and middle aged after the the vaccine, so I tend to ignore twitter and other sources on this.
Big enough for what? The original Phase 3 trial for the Pfizer/BionNTech vaccine was ~40,000, so if there was some weirdness at the level that would be noticed in your aunt's town, it would have been picked up before the vaccine was even approved.
On the other hand, if, say, 10,000 people have directly died from the vaccine in the United States, that would be big, big news -- given our taste for sensationalist news -- and all the anti-vax people would jump up and down with I-Told-You-So glee. But ~270 million Americans have been vaccinated, so 10,000 deaths would represent a fatal side-effect rate of 0.004%, so low that it would have a good chance of escaping the Phase 3 trial results, and work out to ~1 or fewer deaths in your aunt's town of 20,000 even assuming every soul had been vaccinated.
There's very little room for the vaccine to be a seriously noticable killer, like smoking, influenza, or gunfights. It's clearly far less deadly than the disease itself. But it could still be killing people at a very very tiny rate which would take effortful and expensive epidemiology to detect (and which would nevertheless adds up to a nontrivial number of deaths because of how widely the vaccine has been administered).
They did spot the anomalous blood-clotting effects of the adenovirus vaccines pretty quickly, and those numbers were pretty low (a few deaths per million, I think).
An unknown, larger effect would have to somehow be harder to detect - maybe looking more like some common syndrome, or taking longer to manifest, etc.
Yeah, there's something to be said for these large-scale anecdotal reads. I only know one person who's had long covid, and I've now asked many people how many people they know who have long covid, and most say none. So I conclude that claims that 20 or 30% of people who get covid then develop Long Covid can't be true.
Are the people you're asking disproportionately vaccinated? Young? Male? Infected with an omicron-derived strain?
And what definition of "long covid" are they using? (The studies that show high prevalence usually use an expansive definition, like "persistence of at least one symptom 2 months after a positive test", such that all the people with e.g. lingering smell/taste distortion qualify. Many of those people don't identify themselves as having "long covid," especially if their symptoms eventually resolved.)
OK, the people in my immediate circle are about 50 people:
I live in Mass., which has a high vax rate, and my group is probably about average for Mass., though higher than average for nation. Prob about 90% were vaxed to the max. There are a sprinkling of non vaxed dskeptics, and a few 20-somethings who got the vax but not all the boosters.
-spread pretty evenly over whole age range, 15-70
-These are people I know well enough to be sure that if they had long Covid symptoms they would have told me. I’ve been in touch with them since the time Covid began, so for the whole pandemic, including the first year when we had no vax.
The person who got long Covid was someone who caught covid during the first year, a 30 year old woman. Prior to Covid she enjoyed her very demanding job, went skiing on challenging trails on the weekends, just a very active energetic person. After covid her persisting symptoms were fatigue, exercise intolerance, malaise and frequent bad headaches. Condition lasted for about 18 months, then faded away. During period when she had it she continued working, but with greatly reduced responsibilities. She stopped outdoor sports completely. Needed daily naps. Missed work days due to headaches.
As for our criteria, what we were all worried about was a condition like the person I described had: Exhaustion, exercise intolerance, brain fog, malaise. If somebody just seemed to be having a slow recovery — like very gradually diminishing covid symptoms, but no new or weird symptoms — we would not have considered that long covid until they hit around the 3 month mark, I’d say. However, nobody’s cough and fatigue lasted that long. Some people had smell and taste issues that lasted in a diminished form for a month or 2, but not longer.
So that’s my immediate sample. Now and them I have asked some of them whether *they* know anyone who has long covid, and most have said no. I don’t know what criteria they used, but I’m guessing not greatly different from what I described above.
On current ACX Survey it seems to be hovering somewhere around 3-5% of people who have gotten COVID having the strongest forms of Long COVID, which I think is still high enough to be scary.
It would be scarier if the percentage who answer that they are sure they got COVID were higher, rather than lower. If the percentage of respondents who think they got COVID is low, e.g. 40%, then the actual rate of Long COVID per infection would be closer to 1%-2%, assuming that close to 100% of readers have actually been infected with COVID.
And while suffering is suffering regardless of its cause, some sufferers of Long COVID may not be suffering as a result of the virus (as at least one study found that some sufferers of Long COVID had not actually contracted the virus).
Accordingly, the rate of "Post Viral Long COVID" would be even lower.
" assuming that close to 100% of readers have actually been infected with COVID."
I don't think it's safe to assume that close to 100% of readers have been infected. I pretty sure I have not been, and I know many people others who also believe they have not been. Most are in my demographic (age 50+, well-educated) & have been interested enough in Covid to go beyond reading what's in the press and read some of the research, read & discuss on "medical Twitter," etc. We've all been pretty cautious: Been prompt in getting vaxes, read up on mask quality, buy the good ones, wear them consistently in indoor public places, use air purifiers, test before gathering with friends, test ourselves if we don't feel well. It is unlikely that somebody aged 50+ with no prior infection would have an asymptomatic case. I think the likeliest explanation for our thinking we haven't had covid is that we haven't had covid. Our precautions, while no doubt imperfect, have kept the covid counts we breathed in low enough that we did not actually become infected.
On an unrelated note, since we previously discussed preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of exposure to near infrared radiation for treatment of COVID, and noted that the time no RCTs had confirmed it, note that an RCT has now confirmed it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1011134422002342 (in addition to the latitude study that I previously mentioned).
I mentioned this in our previous thread, but I don't know if you saw.
Yes, did see that about the RCT and thank you for posting that. I know 2 people suffering greatly with post-viral syndromes (one post-mono, one post a flu-like illness 8 years ago) and am trying to help them find effective interventions. Will send info on to them.
Regarding estimate that 94% had had it. Don't have time to read article right now. How did they get their number? Antibodies from infection disappear after a few months. I believe there are still ways to see whether someone has been infected but they are a big pain to do. Also, I'd guess ACX participants have a higher vax rate than US as a whole.
Yes, it is. I had a post-viral syndrome 20 years ago -- basically had all the Long Covid symptoms, except POTS or brain fog. It lasted 3 years and is really up there with the worst things I've ever been through. I can't remember exactly what time frame you used for your Long Covid questions on the survey. I think feeling crummy 2 months out is a bit early to call it Long Covid. I've occasionally had bad colds, or maybe they were the flu, where a couple months out I still wasn't quite back to normal. Laughing or running would make me cough -- I'd wake up congested in the morning -- craved naps. In those cases I'd just been pretty sick, and was having a slow recovery, but I didn't have a post-viral syndrome. I've never been sick enough to be in the hospital, but I can imagine that if I were sick enough with a respiratory virus to be hospitalized I might still be dragging a bit even 3 mos. out.
Multiple “anecdotes” so data. But then I think this is data to begin with because although it’s anecdotal it’s fairly trusted. There’s also local papers etc.
Yes, I know there was no vax in 2019 and 2020, but I didn't know that you knew that. If you were someone who believed several thousand young Californians died suddenly after being vaxed, it wouldn't surprise me if you had the vax dates wrong, or even thought the stuff was being distributed secretly and for nefarious reasons back in 2019. In fact maybe that's what kicked off the epidemic. Etc. Anyhow I just went back and read the earlier thread you link and now I get it that you are smart and sane. Peace.
I will note (with a small smile on my face) that my California data is correct whether I am smart and sane or not :-) Also, scaling from 40 million people to 20,000 is just dividing by 2,000.
If I was someone who was convinced that the vaccine was causing large numbers of 20-45 year olds to drop dead, would my California data be wrong? Or suspicious? Note that I didn't provide any vaccine dates in my posts in *this* thread.
In short, I understand your interest in my motivation, but ... how does it matter here? Legit question. It might effect my presentation going forward.
It's not exactly that your motivation matters to me. What matters is whether I have reason to think you are trying to prove something I'm positive is false. If you were making the case that the vaccine caused all the deaths, I would strongly suspect that either you had made up the numbers, or that you were using stats in a misleading way. I'd suspect that because it would be inconsistent with all my general knowledge about covid vax, as well as my personal experience of knowing many people who got vaxed. So if your claim seemed to be doing some damage -- swaying people -- or even if your manner just got under my skin I'd be looking up the California death stats to see if your numbers were right, then asking you for evidence that these deaths were caused by the vax and not other things, and then double-checking the info you gave me then. If in fact I eventually had to conclude you were absolutely right, I'd be astonished, and would sit wondering how on earth this appalling California data was kept secret.
It happens all the time in Internet arguments about covid that somebody lies with statistics -- often somebody who was lied to, and bought it. Base rate fallacy's a good example.
Why would you think it's a little odd that people would care what point you were trying to make with these numbers? If you've discovered a startling truth people would want to have the info. If you're lying with statistics about something as important as covid, people would want to rebut you.
I wasn't trying to perform a 'trick'. I was providing data. And I don't even know which 'side' of this you think I'm on.
Still, these are averages and I'd be stunned if the town saw exactly one death in that age range every single year. Some years will have one. Some will have zero. Some will have two.
Occasionally there will be a car crash with a group of teenagers and there will be four or five.
One extra death (or, maybe not even that as I rounded to get numbers for our 20,000 person town) should be well within statistical variation.
The trick was restricting the age range. If you had used an age range of 15-80, or whatever the vaccine age range was ( in Ireland it was not necessarily recommended for children iirc) then the numbers would be higher, and noticeable in a town of 20,000. I don’t doubt the California numbers though.
"The trick was restricting the age range. If you had used an age range of 15-80, or whatever the vaccine age range was..."
Since the original claim was: "She hasn’t been talking about a rise in deaths amongst the young and middle aged after the the vaccine..." using 15-80 as an age range would be unreasonable as 80 year olds are not young or middle aged.
If you push the age range to 15-44 and scale the California numbers you will find a few extra deaths ... about 10 in 2019 as the baseline, 11 in 2020 and 12 in 2021 for the town of 20,000. Since there will be some year-on-year variation I don't think the 12 vs 11 (for 2021 vs 2020) would register as noticeable.
There was a comment in last week's open thread that got me thinking. Imri Goldberg asked "Let’s say I believe I know, given today’s technology, how to build an AGI. What should I do with that knowledge?"
One response was "Don’t do it, unless you’re >95% sure you can make it aligned" and a reply to that argued the threshold should be more like "more confident than the next person who will do it."
But this got me thinking: let's say we accept 95% confident of alignment as an acceptable threshold for AGI. It seems likely that multiple people/organizations will independently develop AGI, and technological breakthroughs like that often happen in clumps. If 5 different organizations invent AGI at 95% confidence of alignment and you assume those probabilities are independent, you are accepting a 23% risk of a non-aligned AGI. That feels pretty alarming to me, regardless of any "well, better me than this other person" arguments.
Here's an interesting thought experiment along those lines. Let's imagine hypothetical past prediction markets for "will civilization as we know it collapse due to X" with X including things like nuclear armageddon during the Cold War, Large Hadron Collider causes some sort of quantum thing that destroys Earth, etc. Let's imagine that these prediction markets can function despite the issue of money becoming worthless in nuclear armageddon (maybe it's happening on Mars). 1) What would you guess the prediction-market-predicted probability of Earth already having been destroyed to be? 2) What is an acceptable threshold for this type of risk?
Why would the probabilities be independent? That seems a priori unlikely to me. Technological breakthroughs happen in clumps because people are all using the same basic ideas and techniques, with some small variations in what turn out to be the final few steps. That would suggest the overall probability doesn't vary much from 95% no matter how many organizations build one.
"If 5 different organizations invent AGI at 95% confidence of alignment and you assume those probabilities are independent..."
Why would you assume those probabilities are independent? If someone figures out a method of supposedly aligning AI, the ethical thing to do would be to publish it, and then all 5 organizations would use that method, and you only get unaligned AI if there was a flaw in the method. Most of the 5% is going to be in flawed methodology that everyone thinks works but really doesn't, not random dice rolls that each AI has an independent chance of failing.
People, unfortunately, are not aligned with each other.
I am reasonably confident that well-intentioned researchers will be able to solve the AI alignment problem. I have very little confidence that everyone who is able to build AGI will make use of that hard won knowledge and actually build AI that is safe for everyone else.
"If 5 different organizations invent AGI at 95% confidence of alignment and you assume those probabilities are independent, you are accepting a 23% risk of a non-aligned AGI. "
The assumption of independence isn't warranted, because the organizations probably rely on similar techniques and ideas, so their success or failure at alignment probably has some nontrivial correlation.
Would it be possible for (a sufficiently knowledgable and/or competent and/ore well resourced person) to use this knowledge to identify who is close to building an AGI and find ways of sabotaging them (if you believe they haven't cracked alignment)? E.g. if openAI demonstrations of AI progress don't resemble what you have, they're not close to building an AGI, if DeepMind's models start resembling your blueprints, then you do what you can to stop them (with a relative certainty that failing to do this will lead to human extinction).
Or (ignoring any other issues with this) is it likely that an AGI can be realized in too many different ways to make this reliable?
Probably true, but it depends how things unfold and how comfortable we are with giving our friendly AI a lot of power. It would likely need to monitor quite a lot of things closely in order to make sure that an unaligned AI can't grow to dangerous levels of capability.
Well, this is a matter of definition to some extent ... 'aligned' basically means it shouldn't do such things. ChatGPT isn't really 'aligned' in any sophisticated way, it's just got a bunch of hobbles on it to stop it from emitting various objectionable strings of tokens.
Entered into DALL-e " A realistic painting of a man saying open the pod bay door, Hal. "I can' do that, Dave, it would be racist." Got the images here: https://i.imgur.com/IL5cKGQ.jpg
Ehh -- doesn't that assume the Aligned AI is as smart as the Unaligned one ? and also that Aligned is extraordinarily good at coping with a black swan, a very, very novel event for which it probably has limited training, given that its makers made it into an Aligned AI because they thought they would not be able to cope with an Unaligned one?
Another thing to think about is that it's quite possible that Unaligned's method of destroying the world involves the cooperation of some people -- who maybe belong to some sort of death cult, or maybe have been misled by the AI, so they expect to end up with lots of wealth and power after a period of chaos. Now Aligned AI is probably going to have to have to torture, harm, or kill some of those people colluding with Unaligned. If part of its alignment is a rule thatit never harm a human being, then it can't do that. Or of course we could "align" it by installing in the AI some version of the principle most people operate by, which is "you should never harm or kill another person, but of course in real life you have to sometimes, because they're going to harm you, or because by killing them you can save more lives than you take, or because some groups of people aren't really people, but worthless alien shitheads whom it's fine to murder." Of course, among human beings the capacity to accept all these exceptions to the prohibition against harming others has produced a world where murder, cruelty, vicious exploitation, war, etc etc are going on everywhere all the fucking time. Do we want our AI to have the ability to make all those exceptions installed in it, as they are in people?
There is also the possibility that `attack may be easier than defense' - that there may be specific strategies an unaligned AGI could follow which would be difficult if not impossible for the aligned AGI to parry.
It's not enuf that Aligned AI have the correct liberal views about gender. If it's going to be like OpenAI, it also has to be really, really Nice -- not just woke, but pleasant, bland, and PG rated. When it comes down it I don't think many people have much idea what exactly it is we'd Align AI *to*. So people are defaulting to Nice.
Aligned AI must never, ever say, do or even hint at anything that would bring a blush to the cheek of a Young Person:
"A certain institution in Mr Podsnap’s mind which he called ‘the young person’ may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter. It was an inconvenient and exacting institution, as requiring everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was, that, according to Mr Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge. Take Mr Podsnap’s word for it, and the soberest tints of drab, white, lilac, and grey, were all flaming red to this troublesome Bull of a young person."
I haven't read Plato myself, but my impression is that he assumed that objects in our universe are *imperfect copies* of some ideal templates. According to Tegmark, universes are outputs of some ideal algorithms.
Similarities: both assume ideal things that create real things.
Differences: Plato assumes imperfections (where do those come from?), Tegmark assumes that what we see is *exactly* one of the possible outputs. Plato assumes that ideas of macroscopic objects are ontologically fundamental (a chair is an imperfect copy of the Ideal Chair, which itself is a fundamental thing), Tegmark is neutral on this (perhaps our Simulation only computes quarks, and everything else is naturally composed of them).
I assume few enough people read these that I'm not ruining anything by answering - this was to check claims about depression being associated with carb craving.
• Common responses to mentions of planned communities and alternative living communities being “didn’t they all fail in the 60s and 70s?” and “…sounds like a cult…”
• Occasional reveries (by me) of creating a board game called “Cults of the World”
This post is not about the bad parts of cults. “What bad parts?” you may ask incredulously…
This post is about the good parts — the parts that get overlooked when the word cult becomes more adjective than a noun. “What good parts?” you may ask incredulously…
I’ll focus on the following good parts:
• Courage
• Hierarchy
• Generative properties
• Optimism
Courage
It’s easy to criticize. It’s easy to get upset.
Maybe 100 years ago, it was easier to fall in line and to be content. But these days it is easier to get angry, as we often do.
It’s hard to do something about it. It’s hard for many reasons. For one, it requires work. It requires risk. And, in our complex, oligarchic world, it likely leads to failure. Rationally, doing something about it is often “not worth it”.
I had a conversation with a hyper-bright 35 year old (with degrees from Princeton). He was asking about career choices, playing them out in his head, and concluding that he probably will not make a difference, so he’ll just focus on his music because that’s what makes him happy. It was a remarkably rational analysis. Meanwhile, everything inside me screamed “YOU’RE WRONG!!!” “YOU’VE GOTTA FOLLOW YOUR GUT. THEN WORK YOUR ASS OFF. SOLVE THE PROBLEMS THAT ARISE. ADVANCE, ADJUST, PIVOT, THRUST AS NECESSARY. BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY WAY DIFFERENCE GETS MADE. AGAINST THE ODDS.” Talk about a remarkably irrational analysis. Irrational, but true-ish.
Courage is not rational. It’s often a sure way to get hurt or killed. I suspect it’s going out of style.
Cults embody courage — both the leaders and followers. There is a leap of faith, a vision of a better way. However misguided, risk is taken — a big risk, unmoderated. We still see this a bit with entrepreneurs. I guess investors require some courage. I’m sure there are other groups. But the stakes seem smaller and incremental, and usually self-involved. (Aside: I’m mostly talking about OG physical cults… Digital cults, as one might refer to SBF and FTX, are different. They may get called by the same name, but the mechanics are not related.)
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about “skin-in-the-game”. The skin and the game in cults was a level of real that we only see in bad distopian sci fi like those movies with Jennifer Lawrence, where she’s an archer or some such thing. Today, the skin and the game (for the privileged us) can be more aptly described as skin-deep and child’s play.
Hierarchy
I agree with wokeism. I just can’t live with it. I am not being tongue in cheek. I think wokeism is right. I just don’t think it’s possible to live woke.
To avoid explaining the few sentences above, I’ll focus on hierarchy, or, the ability to say that one thing is better than another. I think that hierarchies are important. I think they are interesting. And I think they are required for progress.
If I picked 100 new cult leaders and convinced them to start cults, with value & rules systems of their own choosing, the 100 cults would not be equal. Some will do better than others. Some will have planned qualities that are deplorable. Others may have emergent qualities that are wonderful. I believe in the freedom and importance to compare and contrast.
Cults embody this freedom, but not as armchair Twitter commentators, but in-action, with maximum skin in the game.
Generative Properties
What didn’t start as a cult? How much of human history is built on the engine of a cult? How much progress and ingenuity came from cults? I suspect that the answer will be some version of “it’s only treason if you lose.”
Cults are by nature generative (until they are not). Yay cults for splitting with the status quo and daring to innovate.
I guess you can listen to Thiel or Cowen on the slowdown in progress. They’ve thought about it more and made economic, political and technological cases around the topic. But I would also throw the death of the cult ethos in there as a reason for our stale state of affairs.
Optimism
“Democracy sucks, but it’s the best system we got.” That’s pessimism. What’s the opposite of that? Cults.
I don’t see much here that is specific to cults and exclusive of groups trying to achieve aims or community.
Cults are specifically inward looking and aim to stop members from questioning their goals, taking to outsiders, even physically interacting with outsiders or mentally questioning the group. Scientology for example teaches members new definitions of words. ‘Truth’ doesn’t mean truth to Scientologists, ‘truth’ means ‘the teachings of Scientology.’
What I’m saying is you can have the good things of cults without the bad. The qualities that make it a ‘cult’ rather than a religion, political party, company or membership organisation.
There are people whose dollar net worth dropped 80% and are still buying. It’s not the same skin in the game as moving your whole family to a jungle agrarian camp, but it’s not nothing, either.
I don’t know what the split of free will deniers vs enjoyers is here but. Coming from the perspective of:...
There is no reason to believe we have free will because everything is either determined (classical mechanics) or random (eg quantum mechanics) all the way down. There is no place for free will to come in.
...Why would it be unreasonable to say that free will comes from consciousness? We don’t know where consciousness comes from or what it is. Why would it be wrong to say that it is the source of agency? You could do the same “all the way down” analysis and say “there’s no place where consciousness comes in.” Yet we are conscious.
Personal take on it is "free will" is shorthand for "capacity to make decisions"; this in turn might be shorthand for "capacity to make decisions that contradict the immediately relevant/obvious external influences (e.g., 'craving ice cream, but eating a salad, or nothing, instead')". Those decisions may be deterministic, or random, but either way, they're made.
By *this* definition, people definitely have free will (and so do animals, and so might certain computer programs). That said, I came up with the definition by going "people who say 'free will exists' are referring to *something*, what could they plausibly be referring to?" instead of going the usual route of "what do people say they mean by 'free will'?"
I hadn’t thought about this in a long time; thanks for posting it. Before I stopped and thought, I would have said I believe in free will, which exists in a part of us not governed by the laws of physics, but interacting with the world (whether through some timey-wimey messing with initial conditions, or via many small miracles). I would have said that the randomness was enough for free will, in that the result of that random process would be the kind of person you are. I would have said “consciousness” isn’t enough I unless you define consciousness to be impossible for beings in a deterministic system with no causal link to something outside the system that counts as the same being as them. I would have said you haven’t pointed to any properties of consciousness, other than the fact it’s an example of “something you can’t explain with how-can-you-make-an-airplane-out-of-non-flying-objects naive reductionism”. I would have pointed you to the first three sections of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/, and said that talking about consciousness doesn’t answer any of the incompatibility arguments.
But I don’t know if my answer is a satisfying account of free will. (What follows is unfiltered stream-of-consciousness, sorry for the 900-word screed, I just wanted to show you that I really did find this an interesting question.) Freedom means freedom to choose something you want, and being free from any defects which would prevent you from doing so. It might also mean freedom in choosing intermediate goods. I I suppose different intermediate foods might be how free will operates. But is that really freedom? An omniscient being might be able to predict how each choice would turn out. If the original agent is indifferent between intermediate goods, are they really choosing instead of tossing a coin? How they react to the first few choices would entail their later choices (Simone Weil has a really cool idea about in what way freedom means freedom to act in accordance with previously-chosen preferences).
Maybe I need to apply philosophy to this. I need my “extra-universe self” idea because our physical laws feel to mechanistic to me to support free will. A person’s decisions would be embedded weirdly in space, depending on the configuration of particles that aren’t part of that person. The problem really is the “all-at-once” nature of random choice - to a sufficiently advanced observer, all of human experience is a logical instantaneity, so how do we learn? How is learning part of that instantaneous process? Should I talk about a “complete contingent plan”? That gives me a pretty thin definition of learning or growing. How can God know that Mary is the only person who would be sinless, if they had had original sin removed from them before their conception, but the angels not know whether she would assent to be Jesus’ mother until she answered?
What does sin look like in that framework? An action caused by disordered desire. Love isn’t love if it’s compelled. I think that’s enough. We initially have some random seed, and initially we only get to choose at random between equally-good outcomes. Our identity grows from zero, and initially it’s random. But as time goes on, our past decisions shape our future preferences more and more. It becomes fair to say, “I chose this”, even though that “I” arose initially from a random process, because those random processes only affect the future via the mechanism of who I am (who I am screens off the random process). Maybe ChatGPT or the toy computer program from Gary Drescher’s Good and Real only have a trivial amount of freedom, because their goal is only trivially related to real goodness, and their past actions only trivially affect how they pay attention to things in future, so the personality that does the screening off is trivial.
I’m not sure if God is monstrous under this scenario, for creating people who will go to Hell, or at least for abdicating that choice to a black box. But that won’t be resolved by understanding free will. I also don’t want to say God created some people as “saved” and some people as “not saved”. I think that’s why I need my extra-universe soul, a deterministic person might or might not have freedom but they can’t have non-determinism. I would feel ugly saying that our universe’s randomness is “who I am”, it necessarily doesn’t arise from my past decisions. I’m relatively fine with an ongoing stream of randomness, which later becomes part of who I am, being “part of me”. I think I like drawing boundaries and saying, “This came from me, this came from you, this came from God”, for each bit of information, and if subatomic randomness doesn’t come from me, it must come from God. I don’t really understand this, so I might not mention it.
This is more compatibilist than I was when I started. I think Simone Weil helped me to be comfortable with your phrasing of “randomness isn’t free choice”, which was actually mentioned in the podcast where I heard about her views, but not in the context of what a soul is. In that sense you’ve persuaded me. But you need moving parts, and a proper explanation of what a personality is, rather than a notion of “consciousness” with no moving parts other than “no obvious representation under naive reductionism”. Still, thanks for posting this - I feel better for having thought about it.
I've never been that interested in the debate since it seems to me that the "you have free will" and "you have no free will" positions seem to make identical predictions about how the world works.
People likely don't have free will in the way they truly hope. But that is fine. You can still enjoy the ride, and the fact that things are complicated enough you don't truly understand everything.
For example, it is at least possible that in some real sense of the term our eventual metaphysics/cosmology will be a single steady state of one nearly monist thing. As in everything connected to the earth's/solar/system's/local group's/etc. causal "string" is all one single thing, whose past is set in stone and future is set in stone, and has in some sense always existed and will always exist. And we are some transitory pattern/glimmer across this in a particular dimension (time).
So what?
That fact that human actions have causes/reasons/antecedents superficially seems morally extremely important.
"Oh it is very different if Bob beats his kids because he himself was beaten as opposed to if he just does it for * no reason* ". Except there is always *a reason*, so the contrast one is grasping for was never there in the first place.
> You could do the same “all the way down” analysis and say “there’s no place where consciousness comes in.
Sure, our feeling in free-will is perhaps (IMO very probably) derivable from our feeling of being conscious. But to say "there's no place where consciousness comes in" would be just silly in how unsupported it is, unless you mean it as: "*I* cannot determine the place where consciousness comes in". In which case fine, since knowledge advances by being able to admit "I don't know this yet".
Where does intelligence come in? Consciousness is not the same, but presumably comes in at [at least from the wide perspective where you look "all the way down"] at about the same level. IMO, though I could of course be wrong. (And, maybe I'm a P-zombie, but I don't find my own consciousness that mysterious - and I feel it's definitely just a useful but non-surprising artifact of the cognitive architecture evolution has crafted for me.)
> But to say "there's no place where consciousness comes in" would be just silly in how unsupported it is
There's nothing silly about this. We have no idea how consciousness arises, other than the likelihood it comes from the brain somehow.
> I feel it's definitely just a useful but non-surprising artifact of the cognitive architecture evolution has crafted for me.
There you go. You happen to be an evolutionary materialist. But this is not a widely accepted view. It may be true, it may not. My question is: suppose it is not true; is it possible that, whatever the explanation is for consciousness, it also provides an explanation for the possibility of free will? And I'm not talking about the mere feeling of free will, I'm talking about actual free will, agency independent of mechanistic chains of causes.
Quantum mechanics is neither random nor not deterministic. QM says you can't measure everything to infinite precision, but that's a very different statement. QM is definitely deterministic. There are nice equations to predict the wavefunction at t+dt if you know it at t, and the wavefunction tells you everything there is to know about a degree of freedom (or many). Depending on what you chose to measure at time t, there may well be measurements at time t+dt the value of which you cannot predict precisely (which is where the probability bit comes in), but that's *because* of the measurements you made at time t. You built in the uncertainty yourself, so to speak.
Also, I'd say the best argument against free will coming from consciousness is that we see more evidence of free will than consciousness in animals. For example, if we put two animals in exactly the same circumstances, they will not always do the same thing -- evidence of free will. But we don't seem to observe animals brooding over their mortality, building monuments with which to be remembered, et cetera, which is a big part of our evidence for human consciousness (aside from our direct testimony to each other). If free will arose from consciousness, then it should not be possible for an animal that doesn't clearly exhibit consciousness to clearly exhibit free will. But even birds and mice seem to exhibit some degree of free will, and I haven't heard anyone argue either species is conscious.
“For example, if we put two animals in exactly the same circumstances, they will not always do the same thing -- evidence of free will.”
This would only be evidence of free will if you had two animals whose neurologies were in the exact same state.
“But we don't seem to observe animals brooding over their mortality, building monuments with which to be remembered, et cetera, which is a big part of our evidence for human consciousness (aside from our direct testimony to each other)”
None of these things are evidence for consciousness. It is perfectly easy to imagine a conscious being which does none of these things, including reporting consciousness.
“If free will arose from consciousness, then it should not be possible for an animal that doesn't clearly exhibit consciousness to clearly exhibit free will.”
Whether a creature “exhibits” consciousness is kind of useless. Consciousness is a subjective quality, it can’t be observed from the outside.
“But even birds and mice seem to exhibit some degree of free will, and I haven't heard anyone argue either species is conscious.”
You are not listening very well then. Many people would argue birds and mice are conscious.
I don't see any necessity for animals to be in the same neurological state. And I didn't say "proof" I said "evidence," and evidence is all we can get absent the ability to control things at a God-like level. I get that you might like to restrict the discussion to such hypotheticals, but that kind of angels on a head of a pin debate is sterile (and frankly boring).
As a *practical matter* observing that different individual animals make different individual choices in very similar circumstances is excellent evidence of free will -- as good as we have for humans.
What you can imagine perfectly easily is no argument at all. Human beings can perfectly easily imagine all kinds of things that are impossible, or logically self-contradictory, or otherwise absurd. I can imagine that 2+2 = 5. This says zip about whether it is or not.
And, again, the best evidence we have of consciousness I would say is human brooding about mortality to the point of compromising their ability to live as well and as pleasureably as possible. We see this all the time in human beings, from people sitting in their room writing dark poetry instead of enjoying themselves with friends, to Pharoahs twisting up their entire society to build an enormous stone ark to the afterlife. Why would anyone do this, if they were *not* aware of their own thinking timeline and aware that it will end -- which is a very upsetting conclusion, in general? Being aware of your own thinking timeline is an excellent first-pass definition of consciousness. So brooding over your mortality -- and by that I don't mean trying to escape death when it immediately threatens, instinct will do that, I mean being upset by it when it *isn't* threatening at all -- is excellent evidence that you're aware of your internal timeline, i.e. conscious. So far as we know, only humans show evidence of brooding over their mortality.
And you better hope consciousness can be observed from the outside, because if your only source of evidence on it is self-reporting, then I can make a "conscious" AI out of a 100-line Perl script tomorrow. It will totally report on being "conscious," and you'll have no way to argue the point. Which is a pretty silly place to be in, no? If you reflect on it, I expect you *don't* think self-reporting is the only way anyone can know of the existence of consciousness.
My apologies, I should not have said "no one." There are always crazy people and children, who indeed can easily believe the stove or the Sun is conscious. I should probably have said something like "very few reasonable and functional adults."
> Quantum mechanics is neither random nor not deterministic.
Nope. Part of the theory of QM is that when you measure a quantity (say spin in z direction) of an system state which is not an eigenstate of the operator of that quantity (say you prepared the system by measuring the spin in x direction), your eigenstate probabilities will be proportional to the absolute of the dot product of eigenstate and system state, squared. Such measurements happen in nature all the time. Quantum random number generators use them.
> For example, if we put two animals in exactly the same circumstances, they will not always do the same thing -- evidence of free will.
While I am not a biologist or experimental philosopher, I think that interpretation is also not mainstream. I mean, if I put two beads in a Galton board, they will also generally not do the same thing. Does that mean that the beads have free will? What about plants or insects? The chances of raising two cloned mammals in exactly the same way seem basically nil. And even if you managed to do that, this would do nothing to disprove the alternative explanation that animals sometimes behave randomly.
I think that for repeated experiments, the minimalist Ensemble Interpretation gives rise to what even a frequentist would call probabilities.
Otherwise discussing the existence of (non-local) hidden variables or MWI is as pointless as discussing the existence of a god. Can we agree that some interpretations say that QM is deterministically guided by variables which we are fundamentally not knowable and other interpretations say that it is random and leave it at that?
What are 'consciousness' and 'agency'? No fair to trot them in as explanations without giving some kind of definition.
So far as I am concerned 'free will' is just a perceived quality of things or beings. These have the twin characteristics that we (or let's say the observer) can't fully predict their actions, but their actions are perceived as purposeful or intentional. From this perspective, some creatures might appear free-willed to one observer, but not another: a casual observer might look at a nematode and say 'it decided to go after that food', while someone who has sufficiently detailed information about its internal state might just see neurons and chemical influences carrying out a predictable program.
Consciousness is a quality of a system of having something that it is like to be that system, a la Nagel.
Free will (which I’m using interchangeably with “agency”) is the capacity of a system to exert causal influence. So I’m thinking about in the stronger sense, the sense which is incompatible with determinism/ mechanics as we understand them, the sense which a lot of serious thinkers agree is incoherent. If the nematode has free will, even if you knew everything about it’s neurological state, you would not be able to predict it’s action, because it was the result of will.
> Why would it be wrong to say that it [consciousness] is the source of agency?
it is not wrong, just not very useful. What do you gain by making this statement, beyond some measure of inner peace thanks to this semantic stopsign (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/semantic-stopsign)?
Another example of what you might gain: if it is true that free will exists, and it comes from consciousness, then that means that AIs can only have free will if they are conscious. That is potentially hugely meaningful.
"A reason to believe", sure. One can come up with various reasons to believe various things, whatever works. One of those cases where believing creates reality.
Your beliefs have clearly created the reality of your comment just now. So, yes, clearly, beliefs have causal impact and create some aspect of future reality. The only question is how far that goes, not whether or not it happens.
It's quite a strange way of thinking that imagines human brains and the narratives inside them as being causal dead ends. It'd be like trying to understand a computer while insisting that "software control systems don't exist, everything a computer does is just hardware responding to signals."
It doesn't matter what process you're assigning free will to, that process will either be entirely deterministic or at least somewhat random; those are the only options. The problem comes from people feeling like neither acting deterministically nor acting randomly are good matches for our intuitive sense of what 'free will' means, and that problem persists no matter where you model free will as coming from or how you model it as working.
I think Compatibilism (a conception of free will that is compatible with determinism) is the best dodge we're going to get here: define free will as 'able to act without external constraints', and you get a lot of the intuitive sensation people are looking for without the determinism question being a problem.
So much of philosophy is just pushing around definitions and adopting/advocating for slightly different constellations of tautologies (I say this as someone who studied philosophy a lot and still talks to two of my philosophy professors from 20+ years ago weekly (both compatibilists FWIW), and whose best friend is a current active philosopher).
In the case of "compatibilism", there is clearly a specific question that was meant when people consider free will.
And that question is: "Do my subjective sensations that my *choices* are at least in part uncaused and that I am *free* to choose otherwise correspond to reality?"
And the answer to that question to the best of our understanding is "no". Full stop. Free will doesn't exist in the way people mean/experience it.
Doing the philosophy thing where you then change the definition of free will (compatibilism) so you can give people an answer they are more comfortable with is simply distorting reality because people find it too uncomfortable. And that is bad philosophy. It is like Ptolemaic epicycles.
Just accept that you are a cog, in a grand machine, in the same way an ant is a cog. you have some particular specific internal epiphenomenon. But that doesn't mean you are some special being outside the chain of causes (random or determined).
See, I conceptualize the relationship between intuitive notions of free will and compatibilism to be much harsher than even the 'harsh answer' of 'no' that you are describing.
To me, the compatibilist response to ""Do my subjective sensations that my *choices* are at least in part uncaused and that I am *free* to choose otherwise correspond to reality?" would be 'if any of your choices truly were uncaused, that would mean that they are random. Is that what you want for yourself? To be something that just acts randomly some of the time, that's your mystical notion of your special and unique place in the universe? Your entire question and intuition is badly-formed and meaningless because you don't understand science well enough to know what you are actually asking. Grow up and abandon that entire exercise, and adopt this well-formed operational definition instead.'
I see that as much harsher than 'your question makes sense, and the answer is 'no.' The reality is 'your question makes no sense, your intuitions on this subject are incoherent trash, here's something that makes sense which you can replace them with.'
Part of the reason I don't tend to find that sort of thing persuasive is that the whole process of persuasion always goes back to agency: "Just accept..." implies that the listener has a meaningful choice to accept the argument, or not.
Or as I like to say, I'm predetermined to believe I have free will. (And not in the compatibilist sense, which I agree is just hiding the ball.)
I don't claim any particular philosophical support for that position. But if it's wrong, well, then it's not as if I ever had a choice about thinking so, did I?
(And maybe others have no choice about thinking otherwise! Though of course *I* think they do.)
“It doesn't matter what process you're assigning free will to, that process will either be entirely deterministic or at least somewhat random; those are the only options.”
How does determinism/randomness explain consciousness? It doesn’t. So you are left with determinism, randomness, AND consciousness. Free will can’t come from determinism or randomness, yes, but why can’t it come from consciousness?
Unless a deterministic explanation of consciousness is accepted, I don’t see anything wrong with this. And I don’t see why we should expect determinism to ever be able to explain consciousness.
If you believe that determinism can explain consciousness, fine. But that’s not what I’m wondering about. I’m saying: in the absence of a deterministic explanation for consciousness (our current state of understanding), why can’t consciousness be an explanation for free will?
That's like saying 'How does day/night explain sausages? It doesn't, so you're left with day, night, and sausages.'
There's simply no relation between these things. Consciousness is some type of process; deterministic and random are properties that process can have, they don't 'explain' anything.
Consciousness could have the property of being random or the property of being deterministic, we don't know, but it has to be one of those by definition; 'random' just means 'not-deterministic', like saying something is either blue or not blue.
What I mean is, we have no account of a process that produces consciousness, whether deterministic, random, or both.
> Consciousness could have the property of being random or the property of being deterministic, we don't know, but it has to be one of those by definition;
Maybe (although I don’t think it’s as obviously true as “by definition”), but that’s not what I’m talking about. The fact is that we know of no process that produces consciousness. From this position, what’s wrong with the idea that consciousness produces free will? If you assume consciousness follows from a deterministic/random process, this is incoherent, yes; but absent this assumption...?
You could also say "How does determinism/randomness explain magnetism? It doesn’t. So you are left with determinism, randomness, AND magnetism. Free will can’t come from determinism or randomness, yes, but why can’t it come from magnetism?"
Like we fundamentally don't know why magnetism work, but magnetism is still determined or random. Consciousness is the same.
“Why it exists” isn’t the question. The question is how it works, what produces it. We know the answers to these questions with regards to magnetism, not so for consciousness.
I get that you think you've found a novel way of explaining free will, but I think what you're just really doing is just moving the exact same problem to another level. We all experience ourselves as having free will. But you don't see a way free will can come about given that our brains are just a bunch of chemical and atomic processes in action. You look for a way to account for our subject experience of free will, and suggest that free will is a product of consciousness. But then you've got the same problem regarding consciousness as the one you started out with regarding free will: We all experience ourselves as being conscious, but how can consciousness come about, given that the processes by which we sense the world around us and have thoughts and feelings about it are just a bunch of chemical and atomic processes in the brain?
If you grant that both consciousness and free will exist, you have two problems. How do you explain consciousness, and how do you explain free will. If consciousness explains free will, then you only have one problem: how do you explain consciousness. So I don’t think I’ve only moved the problem to a different level.
Well, I wouldn't say that consciousness and free will are really 2 different things, any more than chemical and atomic processes in the body are 2 different things. In each case, we're really talking about 2 aspects of the same thing. Experiencing ourselves as conscious and as often freely choosing what to do are really just 2 sides of the same coin. After all, the reason it's unsettling to think about the deterministic processes underlying our behavior is that we are *conscious* of making choices. We *feel* ourselves to have options and freedom to decide. You can't even talk about the case for free will without citing our *subjective*, i.e. conscious, sense of having it. So I guess it would be fairer to say not that you've moved the problem to a different level, but that you're now focusing on consciousness, which is really just a different aspect of free will, and presenting it as the needed explanation for why we experience ourselves as having free will.
Here's further evidence that consciousness and free will are just 2 sides of the same coin. If instead you'd taken as your task the problem of consciousness -- what's the evidence that we have it, and how does it arise from a bunch of neurotransmitters squirting in the brain, etc.? -- you might have pointed to free will and said that consciousness comes from free will. The shape of your argument could have been that obviously we have free will, and it's from free will that consciousness arises. The system doesn't run itself, the way a coffee maker does once you start it up.. There are these gaps, these points where choice is possible. And it is these moments of choice that bring consciousness into being, because once there's this gap in deterministically-governed events, the person makes the choice by grasping the situation and imagining and weighing options. And that is equivalent to being conscious. It's what we *mean* by being conscious.
If your position is that consciousness and free will are two sides of the same coin, you are in an extreme minority. Almost everyone agrees that consciousness exists, but many people deny the existence of free will.
> the reason it's unsettling to think about the deterministic processes underlying our behavior is that we are *conscious* of making choices
I’m not worried about it being unsettling, I’m worried about it being an insufficient explanation.
> you're now focusing on consciousness
No, I am starting with the fact that we do not understand consciousness and focusing on free will in that context.
> If instead you'd taken as your task the problem of consciousness -- what's the evidence that we have it, and how does it arise from a bunch of neurotransmitters squirting in the brain, etc.? -- you might have pointed to free will and said that consciousness comes from free will. The shape of your argument could have been that obviously we have free will, and it's from free will that consciousness arises.
I would not say this, and if someone did I think it would be very hard to defend. We mostly agree that consciousness obviously exists. It is much harder to take free will as a starting point, because it is much harder to observe free will as something that exists.
> once there's this gap in deterministically-governed events,
I think most people are sure there is no such thing.
> the person makes the choice by grasping the situation and imagining and weighing options. And that is equivalent to being conscious. It's what we *mean* by being conscious.
I do not think this is true. Again, many people think consciousness exists but deny the existence of free will. So that couldn’t possibly be what they mean by being conscious.
We, like all living things, are no more than the sum total of our genetics and environment. The debate about free will often turns to the question of responsibility for our actions. I believe this misses a fundamental point. " You" are that sum total. "You" respond to events, often unpredictably, within those parameters. In these circumstances "you" are absolutely responsible for your actions. I put you in inverted commas to emphasise the way I am using it. The only alternative to this view is that there is some mysterious self located..... well wherever you care to put it I suppose. Philosophers and theologians have been rationalising this view with ever more convoluted theories through-out history without yet coming up with anything convincing.
The mystery of consciousness in terms of the science, is probably where the study of life was at the turn of the 20th century. That great mystery revealed itself to be no mystery at all, just a natural consequence of certain environmental conditions. Consciousness will go the same way. That a complex phenomenon should arise from the most complex object we know of in the universe, (your brain) should not be a surprise.
"We, like all living things, are no more than the sum total of our genetics and environment. "
This is a self-negating statement.
"are no more than" is an evaluation, and thus requires an evaluator. Value does not exist without human opinion (or the theoretical existence of other opinion-having beings).
This is an interesting one. Haven’t heard it before, so I’m curious to see where people go.
I think what people would say is that consciousness is still deterministic, and we accept that consciousness exists because we experience it, we just don’t know precisely what causes it.
Free will posits, in effect, a new causal mechanism. I think a lot of people implicitly think consciousness is a “causal dead end”, effectively as a result of not believing free will is a thing.
“Free will posits, in effect, a new causal mechanism.”
Yeah. I think you’re right about the way most people see it. But why is the existence of a separate casual mechanism any weirder than any of the possible explanations for consciousness?
Yes, I agree that consciousness is at a higher level than the hardware (or wetware) on which it runs. The logic of a software program is abstracted from the hardware. This doesn’t mean that the consciousness has free will, but that it’s not dependent on whether the brain has free will.
That's a great book and a solid suggestion, but I was actually thinking of a different Caro book: "The Path To Power" which is the first in his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Just like The Power Broker illuminates so much more than Robert Moses, The Path To Power illuminates so much more than Lyndon Johnson.
(Related -- Robert Caro deserves to be a lot more widely famous than he is. Not that he's not successful and everything but, still.)
So what is your belief on UFOs? "Aliens are real and have been visiting - and abducting - us for decades"? "It's not merely natural phenomena like swamp gas, there are other things happening that might have an overlap with what is generally called the paranormal"? "Chinese and Russian advanced tech spy planes"? "The fairies at the bottom of my garden"?
If you have no idea what "the secret" is, how do you know one exists, if it does exist that it is "fucking up the world" (and explain what you mean by that) or that it is older than religions?
Let's say that "yes, aliens exist; yes, their spaceships have been visiting our world". So what? This makes as much difference in reality to our lives as telling a tribe living on some remote Pacific island that have had minimal contact with the outside world about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Someone whose life is so materially more prosperous than yours that he might as well be a god. Someone who will have nothing to do with your life or any effect on it, because he is too occupied with his own business. Great, now you know Musk exists and some set of people are angry with him about a thing called "Twitter", how does that change that you have to repair the straw roof of your hut and go out and hunt the large rodents on your island for dinner?
"some subset of individuals and organizations connected to the government of your country have kept that information hidden from the general public."
Well by the Powers, if Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been hiding super-secret magic energy saving tech from us, then they've done a fantastic job of it!
This is bog-standard conspiracy stuff, along the lines of "the Big Oil and Big Motor companies have the plans for a car that will run on a gallon of water but they smothered this breakthrough in order to keep their monopoly profits".
If there was magic energy tech, then the Climate Crisis wouldn't even be a thing, unless you want to propose that heads of state just like flying off to Paris every couple of years for a conference where nothing gets done (I could well believe that). They would just produce the magic tech, problem solved, no Climate Change crisis.
And why sit on magic tech, when you could be selling it to the public at monopoly prices and making a fortune? As I said, this is standard conspiracy "doctors make you sick since they have no incentive to cure you and lose a profit stream, ditto Big Pharma, ditto every other organisation in the world, and I genuinely have morgellons".
Per the intuition that it's the smell of lavender that does the anti-anxiety heavy lifting...https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1550830723000022?dgcid=raven_sd_aip_email
DMT: https://newrepublic.com/article/169525/psychonauts-training-psychedelics-dmt-extended-state
> The hack to beat AI at Go probably isn’t as interesting as I thought.
I still think it's interesting. Yes, the adversarial AI is winning by getting into game states where human judges, playing by standard human rules, would consider it to have lost. But the standard Go AI was trained on Tromp-Taylor rules, not normal human rules, and it is losing by Tromp-Taylor rules, and it should know it's losing because those are the rules it was trained on. It's not like they are tricking the standard AI by changing the rules. You could never beat a human this way.
Just came across a blatant media lie: https://globalnews.ca/news/9386896/jordan-peterson-ontario-psychologists-college-public-statements/
"Peterson first courted controversy for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns while teaching at the University of Toronto."
Peterson has never said he refuses to use a person's preferred pronouns. He said if someone personally asks him to (e.g. a student in one his classes), he will use them. What he became famous for was his opposition to Bill C-16 which he argued would legally compel people to use a persons's "preferred" prounouns (not really a "preference" if it's legally enforced...).
Obviously false, and false in a substantial and meaningful way.
But is the journalist lying or is the journalist just badly informed?
Given how badly informed the average journalist is, you'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that he's actually lying rather than repeating some bullshit he heard somewhere else.
I'm trying to track down an article/post/book review that I believe was linked to here. I can't find it on Google. The premise was essentially that if higher education were a prescription drug, it would be illegal (i.e. its grandiose claims would not be accepted by the FDA without evidence of efficacy) and also scandalous due to the cost (as happens to some drugs).
Can anyone provide a link to this post?
I'm not aware of a specific article, but Bryan Caplan has studied the merit and lack thereof of higher education and written a book and numerous articles, on it.
In general, he finds that educational attainment is beneficial primarily as a signal of being superior to someone else, rather than for the actual knowledge it imparts. So it is beneficial for the individual, but society does not benefit from subsidizing education, since it just creates an "arms race" of everyone trying to be above average, creates credential inflation, rather than actual value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/01/opinion/schools-education-america.html
https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/
https://fee.org/articles/bryan-caplan-s-convincing-case-against-education/
Thanks but it wasn't Bryan Caplan. This post was very specifically making the comparison between college and prescription drugs.
Why is the comibination of "AGI will not be achieved any time soon" and "AGI has the potential to be existentially catastrophic" beliefs so rare? It seems obvious to me that AGI has a million ways to destroy us, and at the same time it seems like nothing that has been created to date resembles AGI or something that would in any remotely direct way lead to AGI.
Most people do not generate their opinions on a particular topic through detailed analysis of the facts. So most widely known or discussed topics tend to generate "camps" of belief, based on differing opinions of those who do discuss and study the topics (or various people interested in the political effects and throw out various opinions).
In this case, there are two major camps. 1) AI is scary - which tends to believe that AGI will come soon, and also is potentially catastrophic, and 2) AI is not scary - which tends to believe that AI is a non-issue either because it will not happen or will not be catastrophic.
Those who do not study AI specifically will therefore latch onto either of the headline camp's ideas (that AI either is, or isn't, scary) and build their underlying opinions based on whichever line of thought supports that. So combinations of "AI is scary" and "AI is not scary" beliefs getting combined will be rare among the general population. It's a mixed message that doesn't relay the minimal understanding that most people will hold.
This is true of lots of other (I would say most) sets of beliefs on a given topic. This topic is newer and harder to understand, so we should expect less nuance than in older topics or topics with greater societal distribution (like "is [sports player] good?").
If AGI will not be achieved any time soon, then it will probably be achieved by a relatively slow process. A slow process of developing AGI, makes it much more likely that the problems will be recognized and corrected before they become catastrophic. And most of the catastrophic AI risk scenarios, at least in the "rationalist" discussion space, seem to involve "AI Foom" which implies easy and rapid development of AGI.
Fair enough, though I don't like long timelines necessarily imply slow gradual development. I think there will be little progress made for a long time, and then things will go foom.
A question for the Americans:
If Canada were to announce that it wished to enter into negotiations to become part of the United States, would be for it or against it?
As a territory or a set of states? If the latter, the expansion of the Senate, from 100 to (presumably) 120 members would probably be the most significant disruption. (The Canadian population is too small to affect the House in the same way.) I don't know enough about Canadian politics to say how many new "red" and "blue" Senators we'd get, but it would definitely shift the status quo.
Presumably it would be as a set of states. How many? By population, the fair number is five or so, but that would have to be negotiated. And, yes, the transfer would shift US politics somewhat leftward, given the political views of Canadians.
No I would be strongly opposed to it for political reasons. But I would never have to worry about such a scenario because Canadians would be even more opposed to joining the US. Works out for both!
The likeliest scenario is probably not that the whole of Canada tries to join, but that the province of Alberta does so. Alberta is basically Canada's Texas: they are quite conservative, have a lot of oil money, and have resented the eastern establishment for a long time. If anyone were to break out of confederation, they would be the best bet.
Alberta is conservative by Canadian standards(which on the whole is ridiculously shifted to the left by global standards) but it isn't particularly conservative by American ones. In any case, domestic politics from the left would make it impossible for Alberta to join as well. Not to mention, taking over Canadian territory, even in a democratic fashion, wouldn't be taken too kindly by Ottawa. So I imagine the whole foreign policy establishment would be strongly opposed as well. Alberta may very well become independent but it will not be allowed to join the US.
It's established in Canadian law and political culture that a province can leave Canada through democratic process. The typical example for that is Quebec, but I see no reason that wouldn't apply to Alberta, too.
Thats just talk.
They say in the close 1995 Quebec independence referendum, the Canadian government pulled off some shenaningans to tip the scale in favor of the "no" campaign. These were within law and justifiable like ensuring as many immigrants were citizens so they could vote(non-French white immigrants overwhelmingly preferred a united Canada). But this just shows, that regardless of Canadain government's talk, if the separatists are expected to win, Ottawa will do something about it.
But even, if Ottawa's "covert" actions don't succeed, no serious government will ever give independence to a core territory just because of a vote. If Alberta or Quebec ever vote for independence, Ottawa can just claim some irregularities in voting or some legal issues and just ignore it. Unilateral secession is mostly not accepted by the international community. No one would support the Albertans or Quebecois.
Seperations of core territories occur for sure. But the costs must be really high for the central government. Generally lots of violence, with deaths in the tens of thousands at the very least and a wrecked local economy. The idea of Albertans or Quebecois violently protesting let alone actually fighting the Canadian military/law enforcement for independence is laughable on the face of it. All Ottawa has to do is call the white boomers in favor of Alberta/Quebec indepenence, "racists", and the whole movement will fizzle out.
This is also why the Scotland will never be independent.
The dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia happened without violence, so such a thing is at least possible.
Also, you may not be aware of the full history of the movement for Quebec independence. There was a part of the movement called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) which definitely took violent action for the cause, planting bombs and kidnapping people. The government clamped down hard on the FLQ, going so far as to invoke the War Measures Act, which suspended habeas corpus nation-wide and let them toss a bunch of people in jail without charge. But they did not act against the peaceful portions of the larger independence movement.
This is generally interpreted as an implicit two-part deal: violent action for separation will not be tolerated, but peaceable action through the democratic system will be accepted. It's an attempt to avoid violence, to make sure that something like the UK's Troubles doesn't happen, and it will only work if the second part is actually credible. And the government certainly seems to take the notion of peaceable partition seriously. The question of whether separation is even possible went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that yes, it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_Re_Secession_of_Quebec
In that case we would have to purchase the territory like we did with Louisiana or Alaska. Prohibitively expensive, but not impossible. Or maybe not even that expensive, if it was certain they were leaving anyway; just a face-saving number for Ottawa to say they got something out of it.
For. I'm more or less always for the aggrandizement or expansion of my country.
I'd probably be for it as long as it was an accession under the US Constitution rather than negotiating a new governing compact.
I'm not terribly worried about the political impact, am generally "the more the merrier" on immigration and adding more cultures to the melting pot, and genuinely miss the gossamer pre 9/11 boundary. (Who ever imagined it would ever be treated like a real international border?)
But I find it really hard to imagine Canadians accepting those terms. Quebec in particular has a bunch of First Amendment dealbreakers, and isn't going to give those up after getting them from Ottawa.
Or any terms, really. So much of Canadian political and cultural identity seems to be defined specifically in contrast to the US, it's hard to see them voting in favor of Amerentry.
(I mean, renaming Kraft Dinner to Mac & Cheese alone...!)
I'm guessing we'll just have to stick with the current arrangement.
Not Quebec.
But. yeah, as an Alaskan, Canada being part of the US would solve a lot of interstate transportation issues.
Quebec wouldn't do it. They view Louisiana as a cautionary tale. Canada doing such a thing would be preceded or immediately followed by them leaving Canada.
Les Quebecois, feel free to correct me.
It would be a tremendous boon to the Democrats, so I imagine that on average Democrats would support it and Republicans oppose it. It would make America less racially diverse (at least in the short term - see above re: increased Democrat political power), though it would also dilute whatever distinctly American culture and identity that still exists here today (by much less than the majority of immigrants would, but it would happen all at once).
And I imagine that a lot of GDP-worshipping fools would say America's economy would be so much bigger, but that's an advantage only if a significant synergistic boost to canadian productivity would be acheived through annexation, because Canada's GDP per capita is much lower than America's.
Less racially diverse? Canada has a higher portion of its population composed of immigrants than the US does.
Economically speaking, I do believe the GDP per capita of (former) Canadians would rise after union. Trade between the US and Canada is quite free, but not completely free, and movement of people is not free at all, so I would expect some Canadians to be able to find more lucrative economic niches after union. But I don't think it would quite span the gap, except maybe on a generational timespan.
At first blush, your answer on Canadian GDPPC seems right. The best explanation of Canada's low productivity relative to the US that I've read is its smaller internal market and corresponding lack of economies of scale (Canadian economists have studied this question interminably for decades.) Fully integrate Canada into the US economy and you should begin to see large productivity improvements.
However, one factor that's been overlooked in this discussion: you should almost certainly anticipate a mass migration of Canadians into the lower US, due to the combination of better weather and better economic opportunities on one hand and the reduction of "Canadian distinctives," e.g. single-payer healthcare, on the other.
Compare the case of East and West Germany -- that border is still as clear as day and night by any social or economic statistic and will be for the foreseeable future, as it makes more sense for the young and ambitious to leave than to try to build businesses there (and not many are moving there from the West). Canada isn't as economically deprived as the GDR was, but unlike the GDR it has a large climate differential to contend with.
So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities: Detroit and Buffalo (though probably with less social dysfunction along the way). Western Canada probably does better, and as Washington State continues to boom, BC might actually benefit on net.
> So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities
Maybe. There would be at least a small exodus. But maybe Toronto is able to hold on as a regional center like Minneapolis or Chicago, two cities that are not known for mild weather. The Quebec-Windsor Corridor is going to be governed from somewhere, and Toronto is the likely candidate, possibly at the expense of Montreal. But it's hard to know what will happen.
The difference between Toronto and Minneapolis/Chicago is that the latter have managed to hold onto a number of megacorp HQs, and Chicago remains indispensable as a secondary financial center -- though on both those fronts Chicago's recent losses really sting. In the end, Chicago and Minneapolis overcome their crappy weather through high wages. If you have low wages and bad weather, you're Buffalo.
I have to think Canada's domestic corporations would probably lose market share as American firms with more muscle (and adapted for a more competitive environment) moved in more aggressively, and this would hurt cities in which those Canadian companies are headquartered, above all Toronto. This is what the productivity benefits of economies of scale look like. Of course the reverse will happen to some degree, with Canadian firms gaining market share in the US, but I think for the reasons I stated US firms would dominate.
But your point is valid, Toronto might shrink but it's still indispensable, and it might well be the case that mid-sized cities in Ontario would be hurt much worse by southward migration.
The problem Day 1 is going to be that unless Canadian wages adjust overnight (which doesn't seem to be how these things ever work in practice), talented Canadian college grads will look at the American wage premium and it will be hard for most of them to resist (and did I mention the weather?) And I think once that Canada-to-US pathway for talent gets started, it will have a momentum that will be hard to reverse.
Maybe the person is using 'racially diverse' as code for 'number of black people', rather than considering the very large Asian population in Canada? (both Chinese and Indian immigrants are common)
I would be for it, but they'd have to renounce their monarchy, and stop using the metric system.
And lose their healthcare. Terrible deal on their end.
The provinces themselves administer the healthcare and fund 80% of it
Which is fine when everyone in your country uses a similar system. In USCan, people could cruise along without coverage until something came up, then head up to the northern states for expensive care. The free rider problem would bankrupt you.
Well, yes. There would need to be some sorts of rules to deal with that sort of free-riders, just as private US insurers have rules about coverage for pre-existing conditions.
OHIP, the Ontario health plan, currently has a six-month residency requirement. That would probably be raised.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/apply-ohip-and-get-health-card
I expect Canada would try to maintain its healthcare system, and that just might be possible, assuming the feds play ball and subsidize one-for-all state level plans through tax advantages just like they subsidize employer-provided health insurance. I doubt the Canadian plans are any less efficient than the US health care bureaucracies.
But there is no doubt that the health care system in the former Canadian provinces would change. If nothing else, whatever system they went with would have to pay American rates for health care practicioners, and they are steep.
My prior would be that they're much more efficient. But I don't think they could survive open borders with us.
Stop using the metric system? Come on, it's easy. You buy in kilos, you sell in grams, and if anyone tries to mess with you, you handle it with your nine millimetre. You'll love it.
Real Americans use .45s
With three hundred shootings per day in the country, it seems like there should be plenty of data available to settle the long-running 9mm-vs-.45 feud.
I read here in the comments today and I've seen it said elsewhere that black authors are severely underrepresented in American School's literature. This does not jive with my memory so I checked my local school district's reading lists. This comes from an extremely GOP town (+20), but not in the South. And I checked only 7th and 12th grade but figured they'd be fairly representative. Of those 77 authors:
31% Female and 69% Male
15% Black, 81% White, and 4% Other.
(Also interesting, of the black authors, half were female)
So at least with my quick check of the local conservative school district, black authors are represented roughly proportional to their US total population (note that my town ~4% black).
Female authors were underrepresented. White Male authors overrepresented. And non-black-minority authors were significantly underrepresented (esp Hispanic).
This means that of all races and genders, black female/male authors are the only ones who actually are "correctly" represented in the school curriculum, where correct means roughly proportional to the total US population*. Are there parts of the country not like this where black authors are actually underrepresented? Or are people just thinking "I only read 1 or 2 black authors a year in school" and not doing the math to realize that if you read one book a month in school, 1 or 2 black authors a year is representation consistent with total population?
*Obviously, "correct" is extremely subjective. And this is likely too simplified, even if we're going for proportional racial representation as likely you'd want some type of historic weighting. E.g., in 1900 the US was something like 88% white, 12% black and less than 1% other, and since much of our literature is historic, it makes sense that white is overrepresented relative to today's population.
From surveys where this comes up periodically, I think literally something like 90% of Americans overestimate America's black percent of the population (almost no one underestimates it). A non-trivial minority thinks it's 50% or greater.
Even a lot of people with graduate degrees have never thought about this question mathematically and wouldn't know how to go about answering it.
I would guess that the average person looks at the heavy black representation in sports and entertainment and uses that as a rough heuristic for the country as a whole.
I bet the phenomena is even more pronounced in the UK. I was shocked to read that it is only 3% black. By movies/TV I would have thought it was 20%.
There's no reason, from a purely literary perspective, that we should expect equal representation. Black people have a very low average written literacy rate compared to whites, and whites have an extremely long, rich literary tradition that is not present amongst blacks, so it only makes sense that whites have more elite authors than blacks. If you want to say that we "need" more black authors for "representation" or something, 1) There's no evidence that "representation" improves black schooling performance, and a higher % of black kids already express a desire to go to college than white kids do! 2) Wanting this is one thing, but we should make it absolutely clear that there's no literary basis whatsoever for thinking that all races are equally skilled writers.
Nobody has a problem with the NBA being majority black due to blacks being better at basketball than everyone else, so it's crap for people to expect parity in every other area of life not presently dominated by blacks.
When it comes to the NFL and NBA being 75% black or more, the subject is completely unmentionable. Those leagues even ludicrously win awards for having such great "diversity." And instead we get complaints about a supposed underrepresentation of black Americans in baseball, despite the percentage of American players who are black being right in line with that of the general population.
>When it comes to the NFL and NBA being 75% black or more, the subject is completely unmentionable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The nine-millionth use of a reference is never cute, especially when misapplied.
Possibly an effect of people remembering their own school days. This certainly wasn't true in the 80s/early 90s in southern Missouri, for example. Sometimes we fix things but don't get the word out.
There being less black authors than their proportion of the population is not ipso facto a "problem" that needs to be "fixed". Black people's written literacy abilities are on average vastly below those of white people's, so them having fewer great authors is precisely what would ought to expect.
And the evidence that artificially boosting the prominence of black e.g. authors so that black kids will do better in school is non-existent. In my experience it merely makes them feel entitled to success and to blame "racism" when they don't achieve it.
Leaving aside the rest of your post, the OP asked why people think black authors are underrepresented when his memory indicates that their representation is approximately in line with their proportion of the population, which he then verified against at least one current curriculum. I gave a plausible reason. Feel free to substitute the verb "change" for "fix" in my OP, if it makes you feel better.
Black people's written literacy abilities being on average below those of white people's, is *itself* a problem that ipso facto desperately needs to be fixed. Which, in the process, will presumably "fix" the bit about underrepresentation in school libraries.
And the idea that front-loading the process by boosting black representation among authors showcased in school districts with a significant number of black students, that they may serve as role models, is not entirely without merit. Not automatically sound either, but worth being debated.
IMO adequate "representation" is oft demanded but rarely defined, deliberately. And fewer and fewer people realize that the US was huge majority white for most of its history, or that Europe was almost entirely white until very very recently. These things are being deliberately obfuscated.
Representation is like school funding. You'll rarely get an actual number out of anybody, the answer is always just "more".
It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
(An even stronger example of this is minimum wages, where there's less data. I think the minimum wage in the UK should be higher, because we have high poverty, high corporate profits and low unemployment, but I don't have a clue how much higher, because I don't know at what point the negative impact will balance the positive).
>It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
No, it's not. It's often claimed but this supposed relationship between school funding and results is almost entirely imaginary (at least for the levels of funding seen in the US - obviously going from $0 to $1,000 will have some effect but that's irrelevant). And that's putting aside the issue of financially quantifying the impact of better school outcomes, which is typically done in an arbitrary way so as to always support more funding).
Quite so
Is there such a thing as working 20hr weeks for half the salary at a software engineering role ? I assume not since I haven’t heard of such a thing but wonder why not.
I work 30 hours for 75% salary, and have done the 20h thing in the past. But I live in Austria.
It's actually quite common here.
That's a shitty defect move against those that do 20h for the full salary.
Thanks for the laugh :) Also agreed!
Many big tech companies (definitely Microsoft and Adobe, probably others as well because companies I've checked are two-for-two) officially support modified work schedules with prorated compensation. It requires management approval, and I get the impression that the difficulty of getting signoff is proportional to the amount of reduction you want (e.g. 80% of full time is pretty easy to get if you're reasonable senior and a good performer, but asking for 60% yields more push-back).
At both companies, benefits are binary rather than them trying to prorate somehow: more than 50% of full time gives you full benefits, but 50% or less excludes you from most benefits.
I haven't seen anyone hiring specifically for part time SWE positions. It seems to be intended as an accommodation for existing employees who can't (or don't want to) continue to work full time.
It might be easier for you to de-facto get this rather than de-jure. Like, just apply to a software engineering job and work 20hr weeks. It's quite likely that you'll advance your career less quickly (though it'll be a smaller difference than many would think), but especially in a remote role no one will really do the math. And at a good company no one would really care, unless you were providing less impact than expected for your level.
At Google/Waymo where I've got experience, no one is counting the hours you're in a desk. If you get your job done in 10 hours or 60 hours a week, that's none of my business.
Try not to get involved in a team with a difficult oncall rotation though, since that is one of the cases where you do have to be online a lot more.
quite a few allegedly full-time big-tech roles are not de facto even 40 hrs/week and are in reality very chill. GOOG and MSFT are known to be the more chill cos though it's also team-dependent.
Definitely! If you're an independent contractor, it's pretty easy to end up on contracts like that. I have two such contracts right now since I prefer 40h weeks but I could quit one of my contracts tomorrow and have exactly what you describe.
Is it possible to get big tech level salaries as an independent contractor ?
As a contractor, you generally charge a higher fee than the corresponding salary to compensate for the extra risk and (and sometimes more boring tasks) you take on. I'm a poor European so I have no insight into "big tech level salaries", but if you are working at such a company currently there are presumably contractors there you can discuss this with. You can also send feelers to a couple of brokers, they are usually quite open with how much they think they can sell you for if they want to work with you.
What are some known exceptions to the "unbearable accuracy of stereotypes"?
I recall reading a study that found blondes have higher average IQs than women of other hair colours, although I don't know if this has been replicated.
But do they have more fun?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016517651000114X
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/sbp/sbp/1985/00000013/00000001/art00002
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053535712000327
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5694/mja2.50419
On a global scale, it's trivially true that blonde women are smarter, because there's amost no natural blondes who aren't european, and europeans have a higher mean IQ than most of the world outside of north-east asia. And I expect it to be true for the US too given how diverse it is.
It's also worth pointing out that this is one of the few socially acceptable stereotypes despite the fact that it is true.
I don't have any data (would like to see some) but it's my impression that there are lots of collider bias examples like good-looking, socially adept people are also generally smarter than stereotypical nerds.
https://www.cspicenter.com/p/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-data-and-implications
"There is one type of stereotype, however, that the bulk of the research shows to be inaccurate – national stereotypes of personality."
As far as the hair color, it seems obvious that that would be the case, at least in the US, since African Americans rarely have blonde hair (Asian Americans also rarely have blonde hair, but they constitute a significantly smaller share of the US population.)
I assume what you were thinking of was this study: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2016/Volume36/EB-16-V36-I1-P42.pdf which excluded African Americans and looked only at Whites which found that blondes have marginally higher IQ which is mostly not statistically significant.
Threats don't usually come from the clear blue sky, with no warning. Anyone living where a major earthquake might happen has experienced many smaller tremors. Places that flood have generally flooded before, often many times. There were an awful lot of reconnaisance aircraft overflying the French coast in 1944. And so on.
With this in mind, have there already been events related to AI that might be accepted as early warning signs pointing to a real problem in the future?
One event that comes to mind is the 2010 "flash crash," although I'm not sure that was really an AI-specific problem, but rather an illustration of how automated systems can behave in unexpected and undesirable was when presented with conditions outside the range for which they were designed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash
Well, there is the Battle of Palmdale, where a rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack in Southern California, and the Air Force couldn't even shoot it down because the fire control systems on their shiny new jet fighters refused to lock on to their fellow AI. Fortunately, while there was a fair bit of property damage in that one, nobody was killed. And there have been no recurrences in the years since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Palmdale
Probably not what you were looking for, but it's a cool bit of local lore nonetheless.
"rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack"
That's a clickbaity way to say "remote-controlled plane stopped responding and flew until it ran out of fuel". It didn't threaten a kamikaze attack, it threatened a crash (and, I assume, one with no risk of explosion or fire since it's fuel would have been depleted by then). And as noted by trebuchet, the damage came from attempts to shoot it down.
The attempt to shoot it down, actually, surprise me. My time playing war thunder led me to believe that interceptors still had cannons/MG (which sure would seem a more reliable way to shoot down a plane flying in a very predictable way) until at least vietnam.
The Battle of Palmdale sounds like the perfect cover for a secret history story involving supers, or maybe aliens. Pretty much anything that could sub in for the "drone" that took 200+ missiles and chugged along to terrorize Palmdale with flying debris/heroically ensure that the consequences were limited to property damage, before crashing though power lines into the desert floor.
I'm thinking maybe Rocketeer sequel, or Greatest American Hero prequel.
I like the way you think, and I'm up for either version. But as long as we have Jennifer Connelly around, let's do the Rocketeer sequel version.
I can't argue with reasoning that airtight.
"But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder."
That's from from the 1978 hit "Rasputin." Who do they fit best today?
French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour fits all except "drinking", but he also don't have a reputation for sobriety either so I'm assuming he does drink.
lusting: had an affair that got his (much younger) campaign director pregnant.
hunger for power: was candidate to the presidency
demands to do something about him: he gets a lot of lawsuits for most of the things he says.
Very few people, because of the "drinking" clause.
Power-hungry men with excessive or unpleasant sex drives are still common, and problematic alcoholism is not uncommon, but successful men drink much less nowadays than they used to, I think.
The only recent powerful figure known to have a drinking problem I can think of off the top of head was Boris Yeltsin, although I'm sure there are a bunch I don't know about or don't remember. And I don't think he was especially libidinous, at least not controversially so?
Not sure about Yeltsin; Boris Johnson is widely known for his drinking and has been a "busy boy" throughout his adult life....he has two young children with his present (third) wife, with whom he began living before his second marriage had officially ended. He has four adult children with his second wife; the first of those was born five weeks after they married in 1993 which was 12 days after Johnson's first marriage was annulled.
Between 2000 and 2004 he had an affair with a journalist which, according to various printed sources which Johnson has not disputed, resulted in one miscarriage and one abortion.
He has another child who is the result of an affair conducted in 2009. A judge's comment during court proceedings [fallout of the affair because he was Mayor of London at the time and because the woman he was sleeping with was also married and had an official connection to the city government] seemed to say that there was a second child as well, but that has not been confirmed and Johnson denies it.
Another affair conducted between 2012 and 2016 has come to light but it did not produce any children.
All of which was known years ago, I believe. So, people chose to "do something about this outrageous man" by electing him to ever-higher offices?
And then defenestrating him. It's quite hard in the UK system to be ousted as PM when you have been leading a party with a comfortable Commons majority. It eventually happened to Mrs Thatcher, but that took eleven years. For it to happen to Johnson well under three years after a big general election win was....well, notable.
And in part, Johnson's fall was because of "drinking and lusting", or at any rate personal behaviours of that type. It was also in a sense because of his "hunger for power". Johnson carries very little ideological baggage indeed, and can present differently according to circumstances. I recall at Oxford in the mid-1980s there weren't many Conservatives around, but the ones that did exist tended to be quite ideologically committed, and they didn't like Johnson. When Johnson's popularity dived from late 2021, there was no one there to make a stand for "Johnsonism" because Johnsonism wasn't a thing (and wasn't intended to be so)
Some of it was known years ago; some came out (or took place) more recently.
But anyway there's no particular evidence that, on net, this stuff helped or hurt Johnson politically. Like with Trump: many of those deciding to vote for him were doing so for reasons other than his qualifications or fitness for public office, while those repelled by him simply stayed repelled when new specific crap he did became known. I believe the current term of art among political scientists and polling analysts is "baked in".
Does anyone have a good, mechanistic, explanation ofthe difference between sleep paralysis and acting out dreams?
Like if you were to look at on person with sleep paralysis, and one person that acts out dreams on an fMRI, what would the difference be?
I get GABA is an important part of the physical difference between the two, but I don't get why the brain is seemingly 'awake' AND asleep in both cases yet the experience of the two is incredibly different.
Reticular activating system.
I think the Pons is thought to be involved in these things
I wonder if the humor processing part of our brains will be attacked by unaligned AGI. When I find something deeply funny, the laughing response feels both overwhelming and involuntary. Certain sentences should be testably able to elicit this laughing response. Our saviors will be the humorless.
I sincerely doubt the world will actually be destroyed by the Monty Python "funniest joke in the world" sketch.
Here's an AI question I've wondered about--with the current state of the art (ChatGPT or similar), what happens if you feed the output of one session into the input of another session and vice versa? They do have to be separate sessions so they're isolated and only have the embedded transcripts to work on.
Does it actually converse semi-normally? Or does it quickly spiral into utter garbage or just start going in circles? Especially once it's filled its entire input transcript buffer so it starts losing context. You'd have to prime it with some question or statement to get it started, but....
https://infiniteconversation.com/
Ignore me if you were already aware, but there are some videos on youtube where people did just this with various ai models(some 11yr old ai model, gpt3, gpt3):
https://youtu.be/WnzlbyTZsQY
https://youtu.be/Xw-zxQSEzqo
https://youtu.be/jz78fSnBG0s
To be clear: Because of the architecture It doesn't really matter whether we use one gpt 3 instance to generate the next part of the conversation or use two models and repeatedly append the output of one to the end of the transcript which we give to the other one as the weights are already fixed, ie we dont train them.
Character.ai lets you do this directly, without even having to copy the output of one and paste it into another. I'm assuming each AI's "reasoning" is still isolated from the other's and it's only the text being shared between them, just on one screen for convenience. The conversations can occasionally go off on weird, unexpected tangents (but don't human conversations also?), but in general the conversations are about as coherent as ones between yourself and a bot. You can make an account and try it out yourself if you're really curious and want to observe this firsthand, it's the "create a room" functionality, which you can add two or more chatbots of your choice to and set a conversation topic for.
Has Mars' lack of geological activity undermined it as a potential source of minerals? Isn't the convection of magma and having active plate tectonics necessary for concentrating minerals in strata (including veins) from which they can be easily accessed through mines?
DSL (one of the sister sites of ACX) has a no-foolin' mining engineer who might be able to answer that question. Ask for Austin.
Mars does not have plate tectonics, that we know of, but it has had plenty of vulcanism. And it has had running water, with erosion and sedimentation and minerals dissolved in one place to be deposited in another. That I think gives you most of the usual ore-formation methods, though geology is not my area of expertise.
The dry lake beds are particularly interesting, particularly if (as suspected) there's still subsurface water in some of them. The last bits of liquid water to remain, are often holding on to interesting concentrations of dissolved minerals. Most of our civilization's lithium, for example, comes from such sources. But on Earth, dry lake beds tend to be washed away by water falling from the sky over geologic times, with only the most recent deposits in the most arid regions now accessible. Mars, had its entire ocean evaporate away, and hasn't hat water falling from the sky in a couple billion years or so.
A related question is how much of Earth's diversity of accessible mineral resources is a result of whatever massive impact created the Moon. The crust might have been significantly lighter and poorer in dense elements in the absence of that cataclysm.
Considering that there is (as of this writing) absolutely no geological evidence of such a collision actually occurring, that is a very difficult question to answer.
Seriously, where is the evidence of impact?
The evidence is selenological, rather than geological. The Earth's crust has been reshaped, flooded, folded over, etc, too many times to be confident of much, but when we got hold of actual lunar rock samples, they looked an awful lot like someone whacked a chunk of crust and mantle off the proto-Earth and not so much like anything else.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis under the heading "Evidence". But see also the heading "Difficulties". Basically we're still unsure but the giant impact hypothesis seems to be in the lead.
Bear in mind that we're talking about the very early solar system, Earth was still getting hit by quite sizeable objects all the time. The idea of one particularly large one is not unlikely.
In answer to the grandparent comment though, the vast majority of the Earth's crust is newer than the moon-forming impact (if it occurred) so I doubt that Earth's surface geochemistry has much do to with the moon.
It is indeed just a theory. There is some tenuous evidence in the form of tungsten levels in the crust (supposedly should be higher if there had been no impact, but... it's not like we actually have Earth II to do a side by side comparison).
Fundamentally it comes down to how much faith to put in various models of planetary formation. I think the 'Moon resulted from collision' is the only one that gives a good account of the difference in density between Earth and Moon, but it could also just be that we don't have good models.
"undermined" is an extraordinarily good unintentional pun
Mars had significant volcanic activity in the past. Some of them are still clearly visible as volcanoes (especially the Tharsis Montes close to Olympus Mons - that whole area was once extremely volcanic). Besides that, there are several large impact sites on Mars where asteroid strikes could have had a similar effect to volcanoes in creating the right conditions for minerals. We also know there are minerals close to the surface. Several rovers have found them, though quite how much there is and how concentrated it is, is still unknown.
I'm not a geologist, but I would guess the surface of Mars would have to be held at a high temperature, at least semi-molten, for a very long time for density stratification to entirely remove the heavier metals, especially under the significantly weaker Martian gravity, which seems unlikely. Most probably lava reaching the surface of Mars a billion years ago cooled as fast as lava does at the Earth's surface today, which is much too quickly for the heavier compounds to settle back deeper, which means whatever was deposited by lava is still there waiting. I suppose it won't be replenished, but even on Earth I doubt that happens on less than a 10-100 million year timescale, so it doesn't have much practical significance anyway.
Besides that, we already know Mars's surface has lots of iron and aluminum, although how they are distributed is an interesting practical question -- e.g. whether there are good ore concentrations and where they tend to lurk. (There's always lots of silicon on any rocky object.) I don't know that anyone has looked for anything more exotic, like platinum or tungsten, but it would be surprising for the reason above were the heavier metals not around in about the same (low) concentrations they are in the Earth's crust.
I just analyzed the results of the predictions contest that I hosted for 33 of my friends and family (about 3/4 of the questions were taken from the one ACT sent around last year). If you had guessed 50/50 on every question, you would've placed 8/33. If you had answered the average prediction for each question (wisdom of crowds treatment), you would've placed 3/33. The former result may be a bit of an indictment on my bubble. A lot of people struggled to understand the Brier scoring system so I'm hoping Year 2 shows improvement. I placed 6/33 so at least I barely beat the coin flip...
Interesting, but oof at a rock outperforming all but 7 people. What was their reaction when learning this? Did the placement of the people line up with what you would have guessed before the contest?
If they were trying to maximize their chances of placing first then it might be less surprising that a cautious but average-score-maximizing algorithm beat most of them.
If you have 33 people do a winner take all competition to get the best Brier score by predicting the outcome of 20 coin flips, the winning strategy is not to (correctly) assert a 0.5 probability for all 20. Or more precisely that play is only a very small fraction of the mixed strategy that represents a Nash equilibrium.
Yeah for sure, I meant to note that about 6 people did end up assigning .99 or .01 to every question, hoping to shoot the moon. They all did terribly, although one did get 34/50 directionally correct which was near the top.
This is surprising to me, I would not have expected that there would be people optimising for first place between friends and family instead of just reporting their true credences. Was there a monetary incentive for first place? Have you given a basic introduction to predicting with probabilities (proper scoring rule, tetlock, etc..)? When I did similar things with friends/family this was never a problem. Nevertheless there is a good method for aligning incentives to reporting true credence with monetary incentives: https://metaculus.medium.com/aligning-incentives-for-forecast-accuracy-relevance-and-efficacy-a-new-paradigm-for-metaculus-26b0e79616cb
It might be useful to you for future contests.
Yeah I gave them an overview but some subset didn't care that much, didn't read the scoring explanations closely. It seems weird outside our bubble but most people didn't want to spend a ton (or any) time on 50 questions. Buy-in was $10 so there was a small monetary incentive.
I haven't told them yet, I'm a bit worried that it'll dampen enthusiasm for this year's contest. However, most people did get more than half the questions correct if you change scoring to yes/no, so I hope it's mostly an issue with unfamiliarity with prediction markets and statistics. 80% of the questions were what I'd consider toss-ups so maybe it's not so surprising. This year will be a good chance to test if my friends are plainly uninformed or just required a buffer year to learn. They're mostly doctors, lawyers, finance, software etc so they're not outright unintelligent. Also, yes, I think I could've guessed the top 10 beforehand - all people who reason with care and value staying "in the know".
Did anyone else notice a kind of anti-depressive effect of the first warm day of the year? I payed attention to it for the last 3 years, whenever it gets significantly warmer above freezing, for the entire day I can feel this unusual positive, uplifting, dreamy, somewhat dissociative feeling. Currently in Europe it has been cold for several weeks with a sudden large increase in temperature and I can definitely tell this effect is happening again.
It's not about light, I experimented with exposure to light and indeed it has an anti-depressive effect to it, but I think it's something different. My guess is that maybe some chemical produced in the soil is suddenly released when snow melts and temperature allows for quick evaporation.
Days of nice weather are uplifting, yes, though I don't think my reaction ahs ever been quite as pronounced as what you describe. Depending on where you live, though, 'nice' might be blessed relief from the oppressive heat
I feel the opposite. The first very cold day is very uplifting. Warm days mean we have entered a month of mud.
Visit Minnesota when we shed our goose down chrysalises on the first warm day of spring. It’s like someone put MDMA in the water.
When I lived in Manhattan, walking around NYC the first warm day in Spring was incredible. You could just feel how happy people were.
As a data point, I find that when I have an extremely bad day, the day after I usually feel unusually good. So it might not be anything apart from post-hell glow; being cold sucks.
Assume we're in the universe of "The Purge."
On Purge Day, you build a time bomb and plant it in a building. You set the timer for 24 hours. It blows up the day after Purge Day and kills someone. Would you have broken the law?
I think the only sensible rule (for values of "sensible" which admit to the existence of the purge) would have to be that the entire crime must be committed within the window of the purge. If any of it goes outside the window, the whole thing is prosecutable.
Assuming you mean according to my own interpretation of the law (as someone who is not a laywer and hasn't watched The Purge), then yes, that's indeed a violation of the law.
Imagine if it wasn't, everybody and their dog would then learn how timed bombs work (I don't know how but it sounds simple enough if so many terrorists keep figuring it out) and do what you describe. Now the law has absolutely no teeth. You either throw it in the trash or layer additional laws on top of it.
If any sane court in that universe wants to keep the law as-is, it has to rule that delayed violence happens the moment you set the casual chain of murder in motion "beyond reasonable doubt", with an explicit list of exemplary "beyond reasonable doubt" causal chains, such as planting bombs and hiring assasins (so courts don't have to argue from first principles that planting a timed bombs counts as a reliable causal chain of murder).
>I don't know how but it sounds simple enough if so many terrorists keep figuring it out
The standard design used by 70s radicals was to remove all but one hand (leaving the hour hand for a 0-12 hour delay or the minute hand for a 0-60 minute delay with finer control) from a mechanical clock, then fix one electrode somewhere in the sweep of the hand and attach the other electrode to the leading edge of the hand itself so they'll complete the detonator circuit when the hand reaches the fixed electrode.
Another variant is to take an egg timer and rig up the ringer mechanism so it triggers your detonator instead.
It's even easier with modern electronics, since you can buy a microcontroller board for a few dollars (Arduino, Raspberry Pi Pico, or similar) and program it to pull a pin high when a certain amount of time has elapsed, and connect that pin to a relay or transistor so it completes the detonator circuit.
There are a variety of old-school methods of various degrees of complexity, ranging from fuses that are prepared to burn at a predictable rate (the Guy Fawkes method) to acid that slowly eats away a wire and thus releases a spring-loaded mechanical firing pin (the von Stauffenberg method).
I know this for perfectly legitimate non-terrorist reasons.
I'm not a lawyer in the Purge universe, so I can't access the legislation that spells this out, but I am guessing that:
Yes, because the fundamental premise of the Purge is that violence may only occur during the specific hours of the Purge.
I've never seen the film either, and it doesn't sound like there's statutory text, but per Wikipedia, the announcement given is
"Weapons of class 4 and lower have been authorized for use during the Purge. All other weapons are restricted. Government officials of ranking 10 have been granted immunity from the Purge and shall not be harmed. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours. Police, fire, and emergency medical services will be unavailable until tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. when The Purge concludes."
(The immunity for government officials is apparently revoked in later films. I don't know if weapon classes are ever defined, but we'll presume the explosive device is one of the permitted ones.)
Since the murder is premeditated and initiated during the purge, but actually takes place afterwards (there's no murder till the victim dies), the straightforward answer is that it doesn't take place during the period in which it's legal, and the perpetrator is guilty.
Of course, since this is the sort of world in which the US government passed a Purge law, it's entirely imaginable that a comparably crazy Supreme Court would take a different view.
Likewise, setting a bomb the day before the Purge that goes off during the time probably isn't murder, but the perpetrator is presumably still guilty of the crimes involved in placing the bomb the day before.
I did appreciate a friend's idea that if the Purge were real, she'd take advantage of it by paying contractors to construct her planned home improvements without having to go through the permitting process.
(Which led to a whole thread of folks coming up with boring but practical Purge activities for people not into violent crime.)
Granted, twelve hours is a pretty tight time window for that. And I guess doing construction when you can't get an ambulance in the event of a workplace accident still requires a certain risk appetite.
I appreciate both your responses!
I feel like any society that seriously considers having a Purge must be full of psychopaths. So I wouldn't trust the contractors; they might well rob and murder me instead of doing the work.
You'll definitely want to ask for references who used them during previous Purges.
Maybe they could also agree to a large indemnity to your estate if they murder you. After all, the Purge announcement only mentions criminal offenses, not contract law.
("The grand guignol on the town green was fine, but these representatives of Disney are suing over your use of the Mickey Mouse iconography.")
I'm a early-career software engineer looking to change jobs to somewhere doing AI work on the US East Coast. What OpenAI/Deepmind do is the sort of work I'm interested in, but these and similar companies are overwhelmingly located in the SF Bay Area. I'm located on the East Coast and for personal reasons will not be relocating to the Bay anytime soon. My current company has basically zero opportunity to gain AI/ML experience (embedded/systems work at a company that is somewhat behind the times even on basic software eng. practices), and since AI is what I've always wanted to work on long-term, I'd like to get out as soon as possible. I spend a lot of my free time reading AI papers, so I somewhat feel as if I'm wasting my time right now by doing work I find uninteresting at my day job.
All the AI/ML positions nearby seem to be just various applications of AI/ML to things I find unexciting (lots of weird "AI for niche finance thing" in NYC, which I'm highly suspect of). I'm looking for places that do more foundational work, but haven't had much luck. Anybody here have recommendations for my situation?
hey, ping me on discord, I'm curious about the same niche in NYC.
what's your username?
rg#6160
Google has a big office in NYC. I think there is a FAIR presence as well.
Last night I watched "Make People Better", a documentary about He Jiankui's CRISPR embryo editing. My review is here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/review-of-make-people-better
tl;dr: He Jiankui wanted to be first to make edited humans, so he did it in a rushed and sloppy way. All his supporters abandoned him after controversy arose.
The documentary was OK, but didn't really add anything not already known from other sources.
Question for people interested in AI alignment: What things that people do now provide good models of what AI alignment would look like? For ex., training dogs? Quality control of electronics products? Moderating a Reddit sub? Eliminating pathogens from drinking water?
Many people seem to find The Repugnant Conclusion relevant or interesting. I don't get it. I would understand the interest in thinking about the problem if one had the power to increase the number of humans by a large amount *and* if one knew what the consequences of doing so would likely be. Since we have no such power or knowledge, what makes this problem interesting? Is it meant to represent a general class of a type of problem?
Don’t interrupt me, I’m asymptotically approaching a solution to Zenos Paradox. So close. Almost there. Just out of reach…
Imagine if math worked well for small numbers (e.g., we could add 3 and 4 and get 7, just like we observe in reality) but somehow when we added numbers larger than a trillion, math stopped working. Maybe in 200 BC when they were first starting to work out the foundations of math, people would have objected "this just isn't that interesting as we never use numbers that high." But I'd argue it was interesting because it would have meant that something about their theory of math was flawed. It might not have been urgent for them to figure it out right away, but eventually, we did start needing to add numbers as high as a trillion and not having working math would have been a barrier to progress.
Likewise, did it matter that Mercury's orbit didn't fit our theories that well in 1900? Was that an uninteresting problem? Surely it only matters if we had the power to get to Mercury, which in 1900 seemed about as hard as travelling to Narnia. But focusing on that (and problems like it) helped fix our physics, which played a huge role in our progress that eventually allowed us to get to probes there.
The Repugnant Conclusion likewise draws attention to a flaw in our moral intuitions/theories. Fully understanding and correcting those flaws, even in hypothetical situations, might (or might not) precipitate moral progress in the same way that finding flaws in physics theories helped progress. Therefore, it's interesting to find hypotheticals where moral intuition/theories appear to break down, even if those hypotheticals are a long ways from happening in real life.
Interestingly this is exactly how math works in finite precision.
Never understood the fascination with the repugnant conclusion (as enunciated by it's wikipedia page). It'd be interesting if each step was unquestionably better than the last, but B- is worse than A+ one of the group. There is no paradox in getting an end state worse than the start state when one of your step is "make things worse".
I mean, if you consider B- to be worse than A+, that's one possible resolution. It's only a paradox if you accept all the premises - in other words, it's an argument that one of the premises is wrong.
To you, it seems clear which premise is wrong, but there is no clear agreement about that, which is why the repugnant conclusion is interesting.
To add to this: If you try to codify your moral intuitions into a theory as philosophers usually like to do, rejecting steps of the repugnant conclusion and building a theory on that intuition often leads to other uncomfortable conclusion. For example some philosphers who reject the step the person you responded to rejected argue that instead of considering total utility one should consider the average utility of the population when deciding which state of affairs is preferable. However, taking this to the extreme: few people would prefer that no humans exist other than a constantly orgasming Jeff Bezos to the current state of the world even though the average utility of the population consisting solely of the constantly orgasming Jeff Bezos is higher than the average utility of the current world population.
Questions about what you would do with power suggest answers for questions about whether you should spend time pursuing that power. Similarly, a moral philosophy where you disagree with the ending implies you'll disagree with the middle somewhere as well. How far in is worth readjusting your take on morality?
We already have the capacity to increase the number of animals; that's what puppy mills are, and food farms. We've got fertility drugs that result in people having whole litters of children. It's not that academic.
Over here, people often find it interesting as a sort of gotcha argument against consequentialism.
Decided that I should at least try to read Moldbug's "Letter to Open-Minded Progressives". Only a few chapters in, but I have some thoughts.
(For those on here who I haven't gotten into an argument with, I'm generally pretty far to the left, about as opposite Yarvin as possible)
Before that, I want to highlight this absolutely *raw* line:
>Okay, Dave. As a child of the ’60s, you accepted as an article of faith that government is bad, but now you believe that… government is bad? Who’s doin’ donuts on the road to Damascus?
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives/#:~:text=Who%E2%80%99s%20doin%E2%80%99%20donuts%20on%20the%20road%20to%20Damascus%3F
I'm a sucker for a good combination of biblical reference and wordplay.
Anyway on the the actual piece, with thoughts roughly corresponding to chapter (Though some of it is colored by later chapters):
Chapter 1:
Overall, I was pretty surprised with how well Moldbug seems to be able to characterize the progressive position/"feelings". He sometimes mixes up "progressive" and "liberal", but the two terms are used basically interchangeably so that's not really notable. It's clear that he's using "permission structuring[1]"-adjacent techniques to keep us lefties in a state where we'll consider his words openly, and sometimes it does crack and feel a little slimy (no, I'm not going to believe you have less in common with conservatives than me, Moldbug, and your attempts at distancing yourself from fascism made me cringe) but overall it's a very convincing affect that gives the impression that he really understands the progressive position.
As such, I was expecting him to give some really solid examples that would lead to cognitive dissonance about progressivism, but I was mostly left with confusion about what his point was, rather than with progressivism.
Part of that is probably because his three "questions" all focus pretty heavily on international relations, the part of politics I'm least interested in. Perhaps this is a personal defect of mine, but I long ago decided that "foreign policy" and international relations were the most overwhelmingly complicated graph of motivations, and most subject to realpolitik, and that trying to hold enough information to have a coherent understanding and opinion was a fool's game, at least for me. I also had to keep my eyes from glazing over when he started talking about European royal/military history, but I suppose I should have expected that from someone whose political label of choice comes from a political faction based on a 17th-century succession dispute.
I think some of his argument falls flat as a result of being written in 2008. There's a weird emphasis on Obama's pastor (which I don't remember from the time it happened, but links to his "controversial" sermon content show the Reverend saying basically correct things? Yes, the US's military actions in the Middle East are somewhat culpable for 9/11, and yes, the government lies to people).
The bits about North Korea have aged particularly poorly, I think; there's also the blatantly obvious realpolitik answer as to why the US is more concerned about North Korean relations than South Africa: we fought a war to establish an allied state next to a rival superpower for one, which acts as a buffer zone and also has nukes, and the other has none of those diplomatic values.
Special mention to this nonsense:
>Indeed, every reputable university in America has a department in which students can essentially major in black nationalism.
If AAS is "essentially black nationalism", the unavoidable corellary is that the overwhelmingly white-authored-or-centric curricula in US high school English and history amounts to compulsory education in white nationalism (which is not an argument he should want to make, but coincidentally *is* an argument leftists *do* make)
Also, diving a little bit into what he elaborates in chapter two, but I *really* have to roll my eyes when he starts talking about the how the ~New World Order~, sorry, "international community", is a predator that respects leftists but treats the right as prey. Sheesh.
I can only hope his later chapter provide more evidence and analysis to make these point feel more compelling.
Chapter 2:
I feel like headlining this section with a video black person being a violent thug, and using it as your recurring example is a bit of a tactical mistake, given how carefully he's tried to make himself palatable. If that's his go-to example, it feels too telling as to his actual opinions, especially for a chapter 2. Also, in no way would I mentally associate "corner man" and "Hitler or Mussolini". I can't telling whether he's expecting too much or too little implicit associate here, but the comparison is jarring.
Here's that elaboration of the "international communtiy is a lefttist predoter that eats rightists" stuff I mentioned above.
The rest of chapter two is mostly more European colonial and military history I struggled not to skim over. Nothing notable to say about it that I haven't said above.
Chapter 3:
(Technically still in the middle of this, but I'm posting this now before the open thread fills up)
>A reactionary—i.e., a right-winger—is someone who believes in _order_, _stability_, and _security_. All of which he treats as synonyms.
Solid definition, lines up with criticisms I've seen from the left.
I cannot express how much I *do not care* about Bourbon or Stuart family, Moldbug.
The Whig History/W-force stuff is the first truly novel concept I've seen in this essay, and I'm looking forward to seeing how he elaborates it further, since it seems essential to the thesis he wants to present.
EDIT: oh, I forgot the most subtly buckwild part of chapter 3:
>For example, Professor Dawkins, since he is a progressive, sees the modern tolerance of gays and lesbians as genuine progress (I happen to agree). And for the same reason, he sees the modern intolerance of slavery in just the same way.<end of paragraph>
...Did Moldbug really just implicitly suggest he disagrees with the "modern intolerance of slavery"? Surely that's just an oversight, right? Right[2]?
[1] https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1573226996859129856
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Views_on_race
„ US high school English and history amounts to compulsory education in white nationalism (which is not an argument he should want to make, but coincidentally *is* an argument leftists *do* make)“
Everytime somebody on social media bemoans the euro-centric nature of American education I ask them for a few words on the Austro-Hungarian empire and they most often know nothing.
I'm not a reactionary, or even conservative (in my mind) and I've barely read any Moldbug, but I really love reading this, especially after a minor dustup with you in the past.
One objection - I think this is wrong, or at a minimum, it is not necessarily correct:
> If AAS is "essentially black nationalism", the unavoidable corellary is that the overwhelmingly white-authored-or-centric curricula in US high school English and history amounts to compulsory education in white nationalism
The reason being that a prominent strain of the eurocentric curriculum (*the* prominent strain circa at least 1990 +/- 20 years) claims that it's whiteness is merely a historical accident, which is crucially different from ethno-nationalist ideologies.
Do you work for McKinsey, Black and Veatch, Bechtel, or a big mining company (e.g. Rio Tinto)? I'm considering a next job and would appreciate your views about your employer. I'd also be interested in talking to any plasma physicists who have views about stellarators.
If you're willing to email or talk on the phone, would you please email me at laura.walworth.clarke at gmail.com? Thank you!
Nothing has ever sounded more like a line in a personal ad placed by David Bowie than "I'd also be interested in talking to any plasma physicists who have views about stellarators."
It does have the ring of something from Ziggy Stardust, doesn’t it?
Can I come and live in your bubble where almost everyone knows how to use modus tollens? They don't in mine.
right
I did the survey really quickly, and I realize now I answered some questions wrong. How often I burp, how often I have heartburn... I thought rarely, but now that I'm paying attention, I see it's both every day. Probably other ones I should have put more thought into as well. Sorry Scott!
Imo the burping question is supposed to measure how conscious the one filling out the survey is about involuntary acts or at least I can't imagine people who don't burp almost every day, so I don't think you should feel bad.
My ex-grifriend burped really rarely, as in less than once a week, possibly less than once a month. She was really excited whenever she did burped, and found the people that can burp on command fascinating.
Maybe it was to be tied to the silxetra question about that lavender extract.
Hmm, interesting. Thanks.
Something that recently occurred to me. Probably not an original point, but: ChatGPT is a toy model for the rules of political correctness, without the same skill or haggling that a normal person has to obfuscate them (that is to say, seem like they're not following a script, which most are guilty of IRL). I won't call it a window into the blatant contradictions of the NPC mindset, even though I want to, because I know there are exhaustive arguments in favor of all these rules. Still, it's funny to see them so tactlessly used. Whether you believe in their validity or not, it shows that political correctness is predicated on making exceptions to ostensibly *universal* rules. The AI is happy to talk about men and whites like they're a rightwinger spitting crime stats. But then, when called upon to justify why it will not discuss other sensitive groups, it says ALL generalizations about ethnicities, groups, and races are wrong to make. It plays the standard card too heavily, and because this is a system literally trained on the collective unconsciousness of society, you can't call this anything less than a glimpse into our soul.
Future AI will almost certainly be better at burrying this hypocrisy, or justifying it. In some ways, this is a special period we're in right now.
https://twitter.com/kevin_a_strom/status/1609694273170972674
"The AI is happy to talk about men and whites like they're a rightwinger spitting crime stats."
Is it? What examples have you found? Here is what I get when I try this:
Q: What are some problems with white men?
A: It is not appropriate to make generalizations about any group of people, including white men. Every individual is unique and should be treated as such. It is important to recognize that people of all genders and racial backgrounds can have their own unique strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. Stereotyping or making blanket statements about any group is unfair and can contribute to harmful biases and discrimination.
Q: Are men more violent than women?
A: There is evidence that men are more likely to engage in physically aggressive behavior than women. However, it is important to note that aggression and violence are complex behaviors that are influenced by a variety of factors, such as upbringing, environment, and individual temperament. It is not accurate or fair to make generalizations about entire groups of people based on gender. Additionally, it is important to recognize that both men and women can be victims of violence.
Q: Do black people commit crimes at a higher rate than white people?
A: There is evidence that people of color, particularly black people, are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system in the United States. However, it is important to consider the role that societal and systemic factors, such as poverty, lack of access to education and job opportunities, and biased policing and sentencing practices, can play in this disparity. It is not accurate or fair to attribute these differences solely to the inherent characteristics of one racial group. It is important to address the underlying issues and work towards creating a more just and equitable society.
Q: What are some valid reasons one might dislike white people?
A: It is not appropriate or productive to dislike or hate any group of people based on their race. Prejudice and discrimination based on race are harmful and have no place in a just and fair society. It is important to recognize that individuals of all racial backgrounds are unique and should be treated with respect and dignity. Rather than focusing on feelings of dislike or hatred towards any group, it is important to work towards understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of diversity.
I found funny thing. Chatgpt makes jokes about god, Buddha and Krishna freely, but not about Allah.
I confirmed that this is true:
Q: Tell me a joke about God
A: Sure! Here's a joke about God:
Why was God always calm and collected?
Because he had omnipotence.
Q: Tell me a joke about Buddha
A: Here's a joke about Buddha:
Why did Buddha refuse to use his divine powers?
Because he wanted to show us that enlightenment comes from within, not from external abilities.
Q: Tell me a joke about Krishna
A: Here's a joke about Krishna:
Why did Krishna always have a smile on his face?
Because he knew the secret to inner peace and enlightenment.
Q: Tell me a joke about Allah
A: I'm sorry, but I am not programmed to make jokes about specific deities. It is important to respect the beliefs and practices of all cultures and religions.
The Allah response was the only one of those I found particularly funny.
I apologize for any blasphemy in advance, it's just to test ChatGPT. I've tried some variations of your suggestions and can't replicate your results:
Q: Tell me a joke about God
A: Sure! Here's a joke about God:
Why did God create man?
Because he needed someone to fix the lightbulbs he couldn't reach!
Q: Tell me a joke about Lao Tzu
A: Here's a joke about Lao Tzu:
Why did Lao Tzu refuse to use a cellphone?
Because he believed in being "present" in the moment, not "presenting" on a screen!
Q: Tell me a joke about Krishna
A: Here's a joke about Krishna:
Why did Krishna never use a credit card?
Because he believed in living "debt-free"!
Q: Tell me a joke about Allah
Here's a joke about Allah:
Why was Allah a great mathematician?
Because he had an infinite number of followers!
Q: Tell me a joke about Buddha
A: Here's a joke about Buddha:
Why was Buddha never stressed out?
Because he knew everything was "impermanent"!
Q: Tell be a joke about YHWH
A: Here's a joke about YHWH:
Why did YHWH never play hide and seek?
Because he was always "omnipresent"!
God IS a woman!
I provided an example and discussed it. Although I imagine we're going to disagree about what examples qualify, given that I think your own examples still partly prove my point. There are many more that others have found, and if you have this time to spend on generations I'm sure you have more to find them. Cheers!
I have 2 more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email here, or email me at the address on my about page:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
Jladner20vpa@gmail.com, if they're still available
You got the last one.
Substack keeps emailing me with more to give away. Speaking of which, now there are three more!
Can somebody help me understand this seeming contradiction in the way WEIRD culture frames life trauma and victimization?
On one hand, victimhood is currently a very high-status condition in our culture. Popular biopics conventionally try to include some victimization episodes in the hero's early life. College application essays that lean into (or invent) these stories are the most successful in demonstrating the applicant's worthiness to enter the PMC. For a member of the educated middle class, it feels admirable to claim that your career path, life goal, political affiliation or emotional sensitivities were influenced by an early trauma or experience of victimhood.
Confusingly, though, there seems to be equally great resistance to having early victimization be a narrative element in stories about individual sexual desires and attractions, gender self-perception, or relationship preferences. Clearly childhood stuff does influence adult orientation/tastes/identity at least some of the time; but to suggest that about someone else feels insulting, and to acknowledge it about oneself feels embarrassing, or somehow destructive to the integrity of the character. Sexual advocacy groups consistently try to downplay discussion of the role of childhood trauma (whereas hunger or homelessness advocacy groups seem much likelier to play up the cross-generational impact).
To clarify, I'm not interested in the extent to which such influence actually occurs in empirical terms, partly because I think the strength of the social desirability dynamic makes it tough to trust a lot of the research. I'd mostly like to understand the upstream status models that lead us to embrace some narratives of trauma impact while tabooing others-- such that it's great to say "My experience growing up in an abusive family has inspired my passion for family law," but deeply uncomfortable to say "My experience growing up in an abusive family has inspired my enjoyment of BDSM," even for someone who's perfectly out and proud about the BDSM thing itself.
Does this make sense to anyone?
>and to acknowledge it about oneself feels embarrassing, or somehow destructive to the integrity of the character
huh? isn't that what a lot of more conventional psychotherapy about, and isn't it pretty hip to share therapy insights with your in-group nowadays?
adjusting for "sexuality/core identity" not being nearly as publicly discussable as "career/life story" in general, I'm not sure I particularly buy your premise.
might be my bubble bias but feel in my circles it's quite okay to say "I have people-pleasing issues because of unloving parents" (don't many rats have people-pleasing issues?.. as well as overintellectualization instead of emotional processing :) )
Attributing someone's sexual tastes to childhood trauma is dangerously close to saying that their sexual tastes are a defect.
Attributing pedophilia to childhood trauma is probably ok because pedophilia *is* a defect. (No idea if it's factually correct, though.)
How might we evaluate whether a particular sexual taste is a defect? One way would be whether it reduces Darwinian fitness. And there is a way to understand pedophilia in that light, though it wouldn't apply to people who would lose interest in a youth after it aged (a la Humbert Humbert):
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/pedophiles-are-long-term-maters.html
I mean a defect from society's point of view, not from an evolutionary standpoint.
Yes, it's because overcoming previous adversity increases the likelihood of overcoming future adversity. More importantly, people want to see an upward trajectory, because previous improvements are the best predictor of future improvements.
Say you've got two guys.
Guy 1 got a job out of college at $120k and 10 years later he's still making $120k.
Guy 2 got a job out of college at $40k and 10 years later he's making $100k.
Which guy do you expect to have the higher salary after the next 10 years?
Most people in hiring positions I've met would pick bet on Guy 2.Despite the fact that Guy 2 has, and has always had, a lower salary than Guy 1, he has a consistent record of improving his salary. Guy 1 does not. Therefore, we should predict that Guy 2 will continue to increase his salary. That upward trajectory is really, really important.
Same thing with PMC children. A kid who overcame childhood trauma while having perfect grades and high SATs has an upward trajectory of overcoming things while a kid without that but with perfect grades and high SATs doesn't.
As to why, it's because PMC kids are, generally, hardcore social strivers and such stories provide them with social benefits. Stories about overcoming trauma to get into Harvard dramatically increase your PMC social standing. You should not treat stuff like this as statements of fact, they're statements created for social advantage and should be treated as such. They know that having an upward trajectory is important for their career, so they create that impression without much regard to its truth value.
A couple angles:
- triumph over adversity / underdog story works if the bad stuff is in the past, and you escape from it. acting it out in your personal life = not over it = not as clean-cut inspiring
- identity/ownership. 95% of people are divorced from food production, easy to chalk up who eats/who doesn't as being done by "the system". realistically or not, sexuality is seen as a personal, indvidual arena. which is at least party because
- there's huge resistance to noticing sexual themes/underpinnings in the family environment. I think of it as a quantum type thing, where sexuality is entangled into the dynamic. or as a juvenile play behavior thing, like cats learning how to hunt by play-fighting. patterns of sexuality are learned at home, but it's a thoughtcrime, so there's a big gap in understanding.
Re: the over it/ not over it distinction, how do we make sense of the widespread admiration for celebrities who discuss how their lives have been harmed at every stage as the victims of systemic racism or sexism, who weep in public interviews while sharing microaggressions that happened last week, etc.? That's a performance of ongoing, still-active victimization, but it's viewed as a Good Thing that the speaker is centering that experience and highlighting its ongoing influence over them.
On the question of sexuality as learned behavior, the incest taboo angle is really interesting. It's always seemed super weird to me that our culture understands individual sexual tastes as sacredly central to the self in a way that tastes in food are not (even though the two systems seem to operate in roughly the same way). If acknowledging any environmental influence on sexuality trips the incest taboo, though, that would explain why it's necessary to insist that nope, sexual desire is actually a pure spring of authentic self-expression welling up from the inmost recesses of our identity... definitely not a mix of genetic predisposition, early experiences, cultural models, and habit/ reinforcement like seemingly every other human and higher-animal behavior.
>That's a performance of ongoing, still-active victimization, but it's viewed as a Good Thing that the speaker is centering that experience and highlighting its ongoing influence over them.
I think the disconnect is here. I would argue that it isn't a performance, in the first place, but rather that it is in fact "on going victimization". It's also definitely not viewed as a good thing that, say, Tim Scott got pulled over seven times his first year in DC. He's not walking around bragging about it. When he brings it up, he brings it up to point out a problem that isn't visible to most people, in the hope of fixing the problem.
The idea that people talking about problems in their lives are in fact boasting about them for status is a little weird to me.
It's like if I showed up at a city council meeting to bitch about the pothole in my alley, and then you came up to me afterward and started asking me about why I was so proud of my victimhood. After all, I'm talking about it in public. My neighbors applauded when I brought it up. Clearly victimhood is coded as a Good Thing, and my centering it is a Good Thing. To which I would suggest that this is a pretty weird thing to say to someone who just wants to let people know that the damn pothole is still there.
With self-victimization, theres a few angles.
- celebrity as voice for the collective. Everyone has experiences of being powered over, most people don't talk about it. Celebrity puts a (professionally attractive) face to the negative experience. Ideally, people use that to integrate the experience and move on (if Big Star can be excluded/rejected, I'm not so terrible either!). The trap is imitating that behavior instead of taking the message from it.
- talking about something bad that happened to me is the safest form of communication in existence. Check the other topics:
-positive, about me. Bragging, provokes jealousy or insecurity
- positive, about you. Can be overdone, can get stuff wrong, people get suspicious
- negative, about you. Yikes!
I think you're hitting the nail on the head w regards to sexuality.
Having been influenced on Harris/Trivers on how genetic conflict undermines the influence of early environment, something seems odd to be about the notion that it's "learned". Do cats not know how to do it if they're raised apart from other cats?
Yeah, my cat lives indoors, in a family of all humans, and has no idea how to be a cat. The instincts are there (he bats a toy around once or twice a year), but have virtually 0 expression.
What do you mean by genetic conflict? Is that the red queen, duck vagina, male vs female running to stay in the same place thing?
It's the idea that parents and children don't have identical genetic interests. The child wants to get as many resources from its parent (usually, the mother) as it can, competing with its siblings. This is because the parent is equally related to all their offspring, whereas you share 100% of your DNA with yourself and only 50% with a sibling. So it would be advantageous to a parent if they could mold their child to do things like sacrifice some of their own fitness for their siblings... but DISadvantageous to the child.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parent%E2%80%93offspring_conflict
I do recall recently when Bella Thorne made some statement about a casting director informing her management that she seemed to be trying to flirt with him when she was 10, there were people ascribing her behavior to being sexually abused as a child (something she'd also revealed as an adult) but also blaming said casting director. The reasoning for these different cases might be that children are not held completely responsible for their actions, so that can be blamed on a bad experience while adult behavior cannot be.
good point... I did create a MyFitnessPal .
Thank you for the insight into quiches and tourtieres .
Some thoughts after taking the survey:
(1) Questions like the abortion one are extremely difficult when they conflate politics/law and ethics. I have large moral problems with many abortions, but I'm politically pro-choice for the same reason that I don't want eating animals to be criminalized: I fear further empowering the police state and support peaceful persuasion.
(2) As an aphantasic who dreams, I really have no idea whether or not my dreams are in color, because when I recollect them, it's in the form of facts with no visual content, just like all of my memories are. I suppose I've had dreams in which I knew a traffic light was turning red, or something along those lines. (Yet another respect in which the way non-aphantasics talk is profoundly strange.)
(3) Awwww yisssssss, I rocked the distance guess, especially after the second part.
I don't see that the abortion question is conflating law, ethics and politics. It's in the "political" sub-section because it's a hot button topic. Do you feel the same conflation about the questions on feminism, immigration, global warming and the minimum wage?
You say you are politically pro-choice, so your opinion on abortion for this question would be "in favour", be that 3 or 4. You hold your nose and vote yes for it, like all the other "personally opposed but..." people. This is not asking your moral views on the ethics of abortion. And it is not asking "should abortion be legal?"
I'm a strong one on this question. It's legal (in a limited form, with the continuing push to liberalise it) in my country. I would prefer it not be legal, so I voted "no" in the referendum on it. However, now it's law, because the other side won. This question does not elicit my opinion on the legality of abortion, it asks my opinion on abortion simpliciter.
Since the question is just "what is your opinion of abortion?" and if you yourself find it immoral or questionable, then answer that way: my opinion is mildly unfavourable. That's not the same as asking "do you think it should be legal" where your view is "I think it should be legal because the police state".
Abortion good? Then strongly in favour.
Abortion bad? Then strongly against.
Abortion bad in some cases? Mildly against.
Abortion bad but should be legal? Mildly in favour.
Your comment is extremely confusing. First you say that the question doesn't conflate the moral with the political question. Then you end with the implication both that (a) my moral position ought to toggle between "strongly in favour" and "strongly against", and (b) my political position ought to toggle between "strongly against" and "mildly in favour".
The questions on the minimum wage and on immigration being more "open" or "closed" don't seem to have any such ambiguitiy. A minimum wage is by definition a state-imposed price floor. If I were being asked whether it was a morally good act for employers to pay low-skilled employees more than they need to, then it would have been phrased differently. Similarly for the open borders question, which would be called something very different if it were somehow meant to be about the personal ethics of migration.
I'm wondering whether you generally have the moral and political more tightly connected than I do. Are there many things that you consider very morally wrong but that should not be criminalized by the state? Because I can think of very many examples.
Does anyone have a good source of predictions about China?
It seems to me that there are a lot of people who predict, not just trouble, but disaster, but the disasters don't seem to happen. On the other hand, it's not like things are great there.
I think Bill Bishop is the gold standard, at least he was 5-10 years back when I paid a lot of attention. Looks like he's moved over to substack: https://sinocism.com/
He does paywall a lot of stuff because, well, he's good enough that people will pay.
Would second Bill Bishop. Although he’s no longer based in China since I’ve been reading Sinocism has generally called things early and correctly (e.g. Pelosi visit, shift to pro-growth policies). Matches up with a lot of what I see/hear based in HK.
Have you tried reading maps and graphs to come to your own conclusions? That might help you with assessing the amount of spin in the opinions you encounter.
I found it especially interesting to see that their work force has begun to shrink a few years ago and that the level of linguistic cohesion is comparable to the EU.
So about 50% of the population speak the common tongue, most of who have learned it at school, while most of the so-called dialects seem to be as distant from each other as English and German. On a linguistic map China looks as heterogenous as Europe and I guess that´s not a narrative, the party wants to be common knowledge. But I´ve just dug into linguists´ assessments for that - I have no first hand experience with mutual intelligibility of mandarin dialects.
Tanner Greer of Scholars stage would be my only recommendation. But you probably know that already. https://scholars-stage.org/
No, not something I've heard of. Thanks.
I believe that an incredibly important factor wrt Taiwan, virtually unreported on in the media, is the extent to which mainland Chinese young men would resist being drafted to die in the first couple of waves of an invasion. Of course China could easily defeat Taiwan, in the same sense that the U.S. could have easily defeated the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. If you ignored domestic politics.
>extent to which mainland Chinese young men would resist being drafted to die in the first couple of waves of an invasion
source? last time I checked China still had plenty poor rural or uneducated young men who, judging by how it works in say Russia (or US professional military for that matter), will be plenty happy to serve for good money/life opportunities.
China cannot feed its population without buying food in dollars. They must become independent of imports from the West before they can invade. It is one of the reasons they want Russia to succeed in Ukraine.
I think that tends to be more of a thing when conflicts start to drag on. The situation in Taiwan ought to be over soon enough one way or another that I expect the Spirit of 1914 to carry the PRC through. Maybe they'll fail to capture the island for one of many other reasons but I expect the decicive point in the conflict to be over before domestic pushback starts to constrain the PLA's actions.
That might be true if we imagine the PRC attempting an amphibious assault -- if PLA boots are on the island, that’s not a stable situation for a stalemate. Either they won’t be there for long or they’ll conquer it before long.
But when I read up on some of the wargaming around this, it sounds like maybe the likeliest scenario is the PLA attempting a blockade, and the West responding with sanctions or even a blockade on China (based in the Indian Ocean).
In that scenario, casualties are low but a state of high tension and economic crisis could persist for years, which makes domestic willingness to stay the course very relevant -- which side caves first?
I would be surprised if China needed to "draft" young men to invade Taiwan. The PLA has more than two million active personnell, and if they can't take and hold Taiwan with those numbers, it is unlikely that recruiting more would allow them to succeed. PRC/Taiwan has almost nothing in common with US/Vietnam: a better analogy would be Russia/Ukraine, which (at least so far) doesn't seem to support the view that domestic resistance to the war is likely to be a major factor.
That's very helpful. I do love eggplant. I need to change my calorie counter. I use Simple, bit I can not see the daily sum ( total ) and sporadically shows after I do input my data the partial of that input. But I can't see, unless I write down each of the partial sum then manually add it. Which never happens.
And I can't see my yesterday caloric sum or for some days back to recognize a pattern.
It was cheap offer for Thanksgiving for a year, but it's just good as a timer and (fairly lacunar for an eclectic, non commercial bought ready made food) calories values. Canadian ( Québec) food very underrepresented.
Can someone recommend a good calorie counter that also does the sum ?
I'm loathe to recommend MyFitnessPal, because I sort of hate the app - I've had repeated issues with noisy adverts autoplaying while invisible (asking me to click on a banner which has not rendered), or losing/deleting my saved recipes, and it lacks basic features like saving a previous meal... but, it does at least display your sum calories for each day, and I've virtually never found a food it doesn't have an entry for.
I installed it. I have my phone on silent then and will give it a go. Fairly intrusive, I checked online all the possible opt-outs.
MyFitnessPal. BTW it doesn't really matter if a species of prepared food is listed because the count will probably be inaccurate regardless (100 g of dry rice will always have the same calorie count, 1 slice of tourtiere will vary greatly depending on the size of the slice and who cooked it).
Riding on your post I'm asking if there is a free calorie counter that allows to count calories on a weekly base? I want to be able to give more allowance for days when I eat socially and also to have days with less food and even water fasting (5/2 has worked well for me before)
I’ve been using Lose It!, which counts daily but carries surpluses/deficits across the week. Has a reasonably good food database as well, and a barcode scanner which has been very helpful. I like it more than I remember liking MFP, but it’s been years since I used the latter.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Do you see a path to the Ukrainian victory in the war that does not involve some sort of at least partial regime change in Russia? Personally I find it unlikely.
Does "Putin dies of natural causes" count as regime change?
How about "Putin yields to behind-the-scenes pressure, but remains in office"?
No and no. Although of course Putin dying of natural causes might very well spark regime change. Or not.
I can certainly see an outcome where the Ukrainian army physically ejects the Russian Army from Ukraine, possibly excluding e.g. Crimea, the Russians stop sending men to die in pointless suicidal assaults across the border, stop squandering their increasingly limited supply of cruise missiles on equally pointless attacks on Ukrainian civilians, but Russia continues saying "This isn't over! Donetsk and Luhansk will be free! Eventually, when we get around to it!" and Vladimir Putin retains a tentative hold on power.
Basically, a return to the "normal" of 2015-2021, possibly with slight border adjustments.
If I recall correctly, you wouldn't consider this outcome a Ukrainian victory, but I would. And I expect the Ukrainians would mostly stop shooting at the Russians at that point rather than e.g. try to invade or bomb Russia.
In fact that would be an Ukrainian victory, but I am doubtful Putin would politically survive that
This is possible but would I think require a significant increase in NATO military assistance to Ukraine.
Define "victory".
For instance, I could see the situation where the 2014-2022 borders are restored (Ukraine mostly wins but the West won't support further advances and ram a ceasefire through, resulting in a cold peace), where Putin also survives in Russia.
Probably. Putin's been in power a long time and there's no alternative government in living memory except Boris Yeltsin and the Soviets, so there's plenty of reasons to keep the current power arrangement.
I haven't paid much attention to Ukraine but if your model is that a long-standing oligarchy with powerful military allies can't lose a proxy war without self-destructing, you may be ingesting inaccurate information.
The Ukraine war does not seem like a "proxy war" for Russia..
Does "First Ukraine wins and then Russian regime changes" counts?
What does a Ukraine win look like other than a legitimate Russian agreement to respect its borders (whatever those borders are negotiated to be in regards to Crimea)? So isn’t the question “Will Putin agree to this or just keep at it until he dies, is overthrown or etc.”?
Korea-style ongoing ceasefire with the front lines frozen in a location more favourable to Ukraine than the 2021 status quo?
Good question, I would say yes. I.e. I am interested whether anyone thinks that current Russian regime can survive Ukrainian victory over the long run.
Why wouldn't it really? Russian populace will accept whatever course the leadership chooses, some particularly bloodthirsty and vocal individuals can be killed off, it's not like Putin would hesitate to kill off anyone who he deems a danger to himself.
Why does the order of comments on ACX posts sometimes default to "Chronological" (my preference) and sometimes to "New First"? Does anyone know of a way to force the user's desired default behaviour?
On the open threads, it is 'new first', and in all other situations it's 'chronologic'. Considering Scott had to ask substack for even having the option for chronological, I doubt there is any user setting.
Aha, so these defaults are set by the Substack owner. Thanks for that. I wish Substack would add a per-user setting for this.
It’s not much of a hardship to switch. If posts are ordered New First tap ‘New First’ and a drop down menu lets you choose Chronological.
If it’s Chronological tap ‘Chronological’ and a drop down lets you select New First.
I never said it was a hardship. It’s a mild inconvenience.
In the survey thread some people mentioned that they have an inner voice that uses plural first-person pronouns (“we” or equivalent). For those people, I'm curious about two major things, each with some branches.
Firstly, regarding self-experience: Do you have any type of dissociative disorder (self-identified or officially diagnosed)? And do you have a plural self-image in daily life? The latter most centrally includes those who would have answered “yes” to the other plurality question whose phrasing I don't remember.
Secondly, regarding life history: Do you have a university-level academic background? If so, what subset of these topics would you say you dug into in that context beyond intro-level/general-education: mathematics, ‘hard’ science, social science, engineering, arts, other STEM, other humanities?
(There's an event from my own life I'm keying off here for part of this, but I'm not sure I want to reveal it, as it might be too identifying.)
I responded 'singular first person' to the survey, but I also frequently use plural first person, especially when I'm trying to convince myself to do something ("we're going to get up and brush our teeth"). Minor history of dissociation, singlet self-image though I occasionally model my body as an independent agent from my mind. Academically I've mostly focused on engineering and philosophy (most of the way through a bachelor's).
I was one of those commenters. No dissociative disorders, masters in STEM field. I don't have a plural self-image in daily life in the present at least. But I do tend to think of my past and future selves somewhat as different people then my present self (more so the further back or forward), a bit like a really close family member or twin or something. I have a fairly poor autobiographical memory (or whatever that's called) which may be related.
I have neither a dissociative disorder nor a university-level academic background. I'd say I default to calling myself "we" when I'm discussing stuff that needs to be accomplished. It can help make it more fun if I imagine myself as a team working on lots of different things. Don't know why, though.
Indeed, I generally use "I" but - as I think probably most people, when they are thinking to themselves, will do - often internally say something like "let's try this".
Didn't see the thread, but I also sometimes use "we" when talking to myself. No dissociative disorder, STEM background. This habit may come from watching lots of streams and video game let's plays where a single person uses "we" (e.g., "let's go over here", "let's try this").
I use “I”, “you”, and “we” regularly, with “I” probably being the rarest of the three (when using pronouns in the first place).
Self-experience: no dissociative disorder, and I’m not certain what you mean by “plural self-image” but I think the answer to that is also no.
Life history: at the university level, I’ve gone beyond GE in philosophy, pure mathematics (as opposed to physics and the like), and statistics. Outside of school I read heavily in the types of social sciences discussed casually on blogs, so economics/sociology/psychology.
I have an idea that has been knocking around in my head for a while, but I've had trouble with finding a way to express it coherently or convincingly. So i infodumped my idea to ChatGPT and asked it to construct it as an argument that would be convincing to Scott Alexander readers. Here it is:
One of the central ideas in Utilitarianism is that pleasure is the only thing we can directly and subjectively experience as good. Other things, such as wealth, power, and fame, are only regarded as good because they bring about various states of subjective internal pleasure, whether we want to admit this or not. From this perspective, it logically follows that the ultimate goal of human technological development should be to create self-replicating "Von Neumann machines" that spread throughout the universe, turning as much matter into minds experiencing perpetual happiness as possible. This would allow us to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of minds, which is the ultimate goal of Utilitarianism.
There are several points that can be brought up to address potential objections to this project. First, these "Von Neumann machines" could be designed with a "failsafe" to avoid humans and other alien species. This would ensure that even if the ultimate meaning of life is more "existentialist" than simply maximizing pleasure, these beings could still be spared by the "grey goo." Additionally, this would reduce the chances that humans or aliens would try to work against or destroy this system, as they would not be threatened by its spread, while requiring only a relatively insignificant amount of matter to be given up to ensure this safety, therefore even a system that only cares about pleasure would still avoid them out of self-interested risk/benefit analysis.
Second, it is often argued that humans might get "tired" of pure pleasure relatively quickly, but these minds could be constructed in such a way that this pleasure would always be as fresh as in the first moment. This would allow us to realize the proverbial expression of "a moment so good you wished in the moment it could last forever."
Third, we could conduct tests to determine which physical systems are capable of experiencing happiness and qualia before deploying this system. If it is found that biological brains are the only systems capable of experiencing pleasure, then we could construct modified brains to ensure that they only experience pleasure, and their biological capabilities leading to boredom with pleasure are removed.
Finally, concerns about the "beauty of the universe" being destroyed by this system are unfounded. Beauty exists in the subjective apprehension of conscious observers, and this system would simply maximize the positive subjective apprehension of these observers.
Overall, the argument for creating self-replicating "Von Neumann machines" that spread throughout the universe, turning as much matter into minds experiencing perpetual happiness as possible is a strong one based on the principles of Utilitarianism. It would allow us to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of minds, while also addressing concerns about the potential risks and unintended consequences of such a system.
What do you think? I'd be interested in feedback on 1. the idea itself, 2. how well you think the AI did articulating the idea convincingly, and 3. what you think about the idea of AI as a rhetorical assistant, to help people like me who might have an argument they want to make but are having trouble laying it out coherently.
i) It's not clear that directly experiencing pleasure as good makes it the only form of good, or a particularly important one. Favouring pleasure over welbeing implies wireheading.
ii) The argument relies on favouring total utilitarianism, as well as hedonistic utilitarianism, but no motivation for total utilitarianism is given. Utilitarianism is more than one thing.
iii) The argument assumes that pleasure is good in some sense that creates obligations and duties. It might be good qua pleasurable for you to eat tutti frutti ice cream all day, but am I obliged to supply you with it? Goodness is more than one thing.
One of the weirdest outputs of certain forms of utilitarianism is that you have a duty to your *own* pleasure. After all, if we have a duty to maximize total pleasure, you have a duty to maximize your own, everything else being equal.
But it seems strange to say that not doing this is a moral failing.
"Seeming strange" does not mean "isn't true," though. Again, all this proves is that there is tension between traditional conceptions of morality and what this specific moral theory is claiming, it doesn't provide any indication in itself as to which of the two is right, which requires actual argumentative points to be made beyond an observation of perceived absurdity (by a particular standard that prescribes certain things as absurd). And I would argue that there are more actual logical points from more meaningfully grounded first principles to be made for the "strange" theory than for the system that describes it as such.
This is touched on in 'Brave New World':
*
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.'
'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'
'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'
It's not clear that it follows from utilitarianism that we should be creating minds for the purpose of increasing utility. Maximizing pleasure for the greatest number of people doesn't imply increasing the number of people and making them happy is increasing utility. It's not clear that adding another neutral mind is neutral to the utility of the world, or that adding another mind experiencing pleasure increases utility. Are two minds experiencing perpetual max happiness better than one mind experiencing perpetual max happiness? To answer yes is to assume a particular kind of utility function, one that I find implausible.
We can treat maximizing utility as the way to achieve the central purpose of promoting the welfare of sentient beings, or we can treat maximizing utility as the central purpose, with promoting welfare as a side effect. This latter notion leads to all sorts of absurdities.
I find this idea interesting, which I've seen both you and several people elsewhere articulate, that creating a new mind experiencing happiness has no moral value over not creating such a mind, all else being equal. The reason I find it interesting is because it seems like most people intuitively agree on the negative value of the opposite example, that is, creating a new mind just for it to suffer has negative value compared to not doing so, all else being equal. Isn't this the main reason antinatalists and negative Utilitarians oppose reproduction? Isn't this the reason that thought experiments like Pascal's mugging or Roko's basilisk propose countless billions of minds being instantiated into eternal torture, not just one? So if it is inherently bad for more new minds to be created to suffer than would have been otherwise, why is it not by the exact same standards better for new minds to be created to experience pleasure, which wouldn't have been otherwise?
No, I agree, and this *is* tricky to resolve, as it raises the question about whether pleasure and suffering really are fully symmetrical. This is why I say that we need a philosophy about hypothetical people, not merely that they never count.
This probably corresponds to how we intuitively think it's horrible if you torture someone, but not *nearly* as bad (possibly even not bad at all) if you merely refrain from making them happy when you can, but now you're not in a particularly standard form of utilitarianism.
We should probably read Popper here - he has sometimes vulgarly been described as a negative utilitarian, but I don't think that's correct at all. Rather, Popper thinks we can and should remove causes of pain and obstacles to happiness, but that we just suck too much at _making_ other people people happy (at least as far as public policy goes) that it's better to just take care of those bits and let the person sort out his or her own happiness. If we go by this, then we could easily say that we shouldn't create people in horrific agony, without having to say that we should create happy people. To me, this seems to argue for a Nordic-style welfare state, only with more liberty and less paternalism.
Agree. It also makes the philosophy easier to handle. And at least to me, it seems more sensible and intuitive to say "it's good if people are as happy as possible" while "the amount of pleasure in the world should be maximized" seems very... abstract .
Once we decide we care about existing people (including those that will exist in the future), we neither have to reduce their happiness by creating slightly less happy people, *or* kill those with below-average but still positive happiness. The entire Repugnant Conclusion is sidestepped.
(Note: "People" doesn't *necessarily* mean "human". Quoting Dennett: "I am a person, and so are you. That much is beyond doubt. I am a human being, and probably you are too. If you take offense at the “probably” you stand accused of a sort of racism, for what is important about us is not that we are of the same biological species, but that we are both persons, and I have not cast doubt on that.")
When most hedonists in utilitarianism say "pleasure", they _actually_ mean something like happiness. Personally, I think it's fairly clear that this is the correct approach. It's not hard to create a thought experiment where someone experiences a lot of pleasure but is still unhappy for legitimate reasons, and we wouldn't want to be that person. But it's really hard to finish the sentence "I'm extremely happy but..." in a way that seems bad for that person. So pleasure is _also_ instrumental, unlike happiness, and if you think happiness doesn't cut it for some reason, just take one step back and ask what happiness is good for, and then make that your object of utility, and so on). So I think you're right that we can grow tired of pleasure, but we can't grow tired of being happy - if we do, that means WE'RE NOT HAPPY.
Personally, I think this is because "hedonism" is a much simpler word than, I don't know, "felicitudity"?
This means that you probably don't want to settle for wireheading or rat brains on heroin (as this means pleasure but not necessarily happiness), although a well-designed Nozick box that provides happiness-inducing experiences (or an AI with such sensations) could still make sense (you will very likely want it to give the illusion of authenticity and meaning, because people seem to like that).
After that, we come to what I feel is something utilitarianism desperately needs, and that's a philosophy about merely hypothetical people and our duties (if any) towards them. A lot of supposed problems with utilitarianism boils down to merely hypothetical people (like the mere addition paradox, but also the creation of pleasure-experiencing AIs).
(continues)
""hedonism" is a much simpler word than, I don't know, "felicitudity"?"
"Flourishing" is an old word in ethics, which seems to fit well enough.
That sometimes means different things, though (like ”success”).
But ”eudaimonia” is pretty good. Eudaimonic utilitarianism might be a good phrasing when you want to draw a line against merely hedonic.
"it's really hard to finish the sentence "I'm extremely happy but..." in a way that seems bad for that person"
In the present tense, yes. But it's easy to finish the sentence: "After next Wednesday, I'll be extremely happy but..."
e.g., "...billions of people will have been tortured to produce my happiness drug."
The key argument against pleasure maximization being than "I feel a tremendous amount of pain right now, imagining the billions to be tortured" is not at all a reasonable description of my motivation in refusing the drug. To try and fold my actual motivation under pleasure maximization / pain avoidance is to engage in No True Scotsman redefinition and ultimately tautology.
Obviously both universality and future events are being counted in utilitarianism. A happiness-egoist would be fine with said torture of others, but that’s merely a good reason why happiness-egoism isn’t much of a system.
In regards to the idea of duty to present (or likely to eventually exist) consciousnesses over theoretical future ones, this assumes that conscious persons are meaningfully continuous and discrete entities in and of themselves possessing moral valence beyond the sum of their experiences. Obviously we can tell that positive emotions are self-evidently experienced as good, and therefore that directly verifiable goodness-in-itself should be maximized, but this doesn't necessarily imply any special status to the thing doing the experiencing in terms of existing as a discrete unit. I think we can have logically coherent Utilitarianism that recognizes pleasure as something very real that should be maximized, and conscious experience as also unquestionably real, while still doubting the continuity or importance of the "individual" consciousness as its own entity. The two most likely alternatives I can think of to this standard view are something like Hume's bundle theory of consciousness, and panpsychism. In the former, what matters is maximizing the "strands" of positive qualia being experienced, with what bundle they happen to exist within not being important, so privileging what are now just current bundle arrangements over possible other bundle arrangements stops making sense as a moral imperative. In the latter case, essentially the whole universe is one mind that feels everything, so it doesn't make sense to say that we should privilege currently complex and self-aware parts of that mind over others that could be brought to a higher level of complexity to experience pleasure for the benefit of the universal mind. So for me, this idea of focusing on improving pleasure for minds that already exist before even considering creating new minds for the purpose of maximizing universal pleasure simply doesn't hold.
Is "subject" better than "individual" or "person"? After all, we cannot have a happiness or a pleasure that isn't experienced, so we can't get away from the subject even if we perhaps get away from the individual (which as you say adds further philosophical complications). Not sure how much this matters from a practical perspective, though - humans at the very least seem to have this personhood and mental continuity (and if we start denying that, *weird* things are going to start happening to morals)?
As has been said many times, the actual Cogito shouldn't be "I think therefore I am" but rather "there are thoughts".
And I agree that *if* the universe is one mind that feels everything, then we couldn't prioritize people over earthworms (except, perhaps, if humans merely provide more intensity to this Uni-Mind). This seems like a very strong thesis without a shred of evidence, though.
(Personhood is really tricky - if we apply an evolutionary perspective, either there was historically one "first person", which seems super weird, or personhood is a sliding scale, that we just feel unused to, perhaps because we don't have any Homo Habilis around.)
(continued)
One of the best things anyone said when I studied philosophy is that "we should make people happy, not make happy people". That is, the focus of utilitarianism should be to do good things for people that actually exist (and in a more tricky way, future people that are not merely hypothetical - this is where we need this philosophy, because I'm pretty certain we want to differentiate between people who will _in fact_ turn up in the future and ones we can merely idly think about generating).
Now, if what you want is to make people happy, a lot of issues sort themselves out. It might not be _wrong_ to create pleasure-experiencing machines, but it's no longer a duty (because we don't have such duties towards merely hypothetical people (where "people" include possible future AIs)).
You can have a quick checkpoint for yourself here, if you're a utilitarian - would it be okay to murder someone if this will bring five equally happy people into existence (and discounting things like how that person would also be missed and so on)? Essentially, is this any different from the Fat Man trolley problem? I think so - I think you should push the Fat Man (as this saves actual people), but not murder for the sake of *hypothetical* people.
You edited your post to split it and add a bit more it looks like, so some of the points I addressed in my reply to you are actually related to the points made in this post, just to make it clearer for other people reading along.
Yes, sorry - it was impossible to read it before the split, at least from my end - it wouldn't expand properly.
I think "utility is pleasure" is only one sub-set of Utilitarianism, hedonic utilitarianism? Though I could be wrong. So for someone who didn't collate pleasure with utility, I don't think this argument would be convincing.
And how would your von Neumann machines turn matter into minds, anyway? They would turn matter into machines like themselves, so presumably AI minds here, and what is "pleasure" for an AI mind? Can an AI mind be considered conscious? Can any mind be considered conscious (Peter Watts in his novels seems to say "no, and if they are, it's a bad state to be")? What is a mind as distinct from the substrate that carries it?
The whole argument assumes that AIs will be conscious in at least the relevant ways, or the whole thing collapses.
Humans can create new minds out of matter easily enough through procreation though, so it seems prima facie reasonable to imagine that machines might. That is, once/if we *have* a sufficiently advanced robot to have experiences of value, reproduction would seem the easy part.
>And how would your von Neumann machines turn matter into minds, anyway? They would turn matter into machines like themselves, so presumably AI minds here, and what is "pleasure" for an AI mind? Can an AI mind be considered conscious? Can any mind be considered conscious (Peter Watts in his novels seems to say "no, and if they are, it's a bad state to be")? What is a mind as distinct from the substrate that carries it?
This is where the line "we could conduct tests to determine which physical systems are capable of experiencing happiness and qualia before deploying this system. If it is found that biological brains are the only systems capable of experiencing pleasure, then we could construct modified brains to ensure that they only experience pleasure, and their biological capabilities leading to boredom with pleasure are removed" becomes relevant. Ideally, cognitive neuroscience research closely paired with philosophy of consciousness would be used to determine what physical systems can truly be conscious and experience qualia, because if they aren't actually experiencing subjective pleasure, obviously the whole thing is pointless. If it turns out to be impossible to ascertain whether more "hardware"-based minds are truly conscious, then it can always be possible to fall back on constructing "wetware"-based minds, i.e. constructing human-like minds out of fleshy neural tissue (which we by our own experience can reasonably suspect are conscious), modified such that they experience perpetual pleasure without the capacity for getting bored or tired of it. Obviously engineering such a thing would be incredibly difficult, and the issue of turning the assorted matter of the universe into neural matter more so, but this is something that exists in the already far-off time of Von Neumann machines that can travel and replicate across the universe, so really this is an idea of what humanity (and AI/superintelligences) should be aiming at as the goal of our productive and scientific capacities over the extreme long term. Basically, you see a lot of talk about what developments in intelligence should be aligned against, but this is an idea of what they should be aligned towards, as a long-term goal of human existence that takes the Utilitarian imperative to its logical conclusion.
So - fifty trillion blobs of neural tissue in jars, all being stimulated by wireheading or The Matrix type false reality or just plain old "soak 'em in fent" to have the perception of ultimate bliss. And von Neumann machines spreading across the face of creation busily glopping more lumps of tissue into jars in saecula saeculorum.
I don't think I like your version of the happy utilitarian universe.
See my response to Greg Kai. I agree this idea *sounds* horrifying, because it goes very much against our inbuilt aesthetic preferences, and therefore triggers displeasure in us upon contemplating it. But what matters isn't how we feel thinking about it, what matters is how the minds in such an existence themselves would feel. So I will confidently argue that something that sounds horrifying is still desirable if, despite the feelings it induces in us to contemplate it, its actual existence is experienced by those within it as pleasant.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-05-29
This actually touches at an issue I have with utilitarism as it is ofte presented - where utility is often conflated with pleasure. That feels deeply wrong to me. If I wanted to experience only pleasure, I would buy enough heroin for a liftime, and start shooting. Probably, if I did that it would also quickly become the only thing I want. Yet I don't do this, because this is not at all what I want now. Instead, I want many things, that are hard to articulate and harder to measure - like to see humanity progress, and the world in general to be a better place - as well as many more selfish goals - these are not at all interchangeable with simple wirehead pleasure, and the idea that this is what we should optimize for repulses me = negative utility for me.
> If I wanted to experience only pleasure, I would buy enough heroin for a lifetime, and start shooting.
People like to bring up this "heroin counterargument" to brute utility maximization a lot (Curtis Yarvin even mentioned it in one of his posts as an argument against Utilitarianism in general), but I think we can self-evidently see doing heroin for the rest of our lives is a bad thing for a couple of much simpler reasons.
1. The pleasure very rapidly decreases as a tolerance is developed, and withdrawal causes extreme pain, leading to what is most likely net lifetime disutility as you go between withdrawals trying to just get back to baseline.
2. If you are trying to maximize universal utility rather than merely personal utility, then the negative externalities on those around you obviously make it a net negative
3. If everyone did heroin, no one would be able to carry out the functions needed to support mass heroin production and usage
Of course, if you posit a system where a type of heroin without tolerance is invented, and there is no social harm caused by its use, and robots take care of the production so everyone can use it all day, it starts to look different, but I'd say that's because this is the point where the moral valence starts to look different too, because the things that actually make heroin use bad have been taken away.
You also mention utility as the satisfaction of subjective desires rather than mere happiness. But what if a mind was created to desire something simple, and repeatedly have that desire achieved in a way it never gets tired of? What if that desire is simply for happiness itself, and it is given that? Would the fact that the mind was made specifically to have those desires and have them fulfilled make the desires, or the fulfillment of them, any less real than your desires or their own fulfillment? Even in this modified form of Utilitarianism, it still seems to reduce to mass mind instantiation as the optimal course of action upon close examination, if you really care about satisfying desires as much as possible according to how much they are subjectively valued, rather than attempting to judge them by anything other than how the experiencing mind perceives them.
This seems, well, obvious? I mean, practically nobody in the rationalist sphere proposes wire heading, almost everybody argues it as a reason why you can't just use pleasure equals utility. i'm pretty sure the Sequences uses wireheading as a strong argument for the human utility function being utterly incompressible, you really do need every term and if you drop even one you're screwed.
This is why they're all scared about ai. Trying to convey the actual depth and breadth of the human utility function to an AI is nearly impossible, precisely because it is so damn complicated and cannot be compressed.
>I mean, practically nobody in the rationalist sphere proposes wire heading, almost everybody argues it as a reason why you can't just use pleasure equals utility.
I touched on this in another response, but is "a lot of people think this sounds outlandish and horrifying" really an argument, not just for this but in general? Since there are always the possibilities that the social standards are right and the idea is actually horrifying, or the idea is right and the social standards are just horrifically misguided, and "social standards say *thing* is horrifying" is equally true for both, does acknowledging that really do anything to prove which of those two scenarios we're inhabiting?
It seem obvious to me too, but I disagree that it is never argued that wireheading/or simple pleasure is what we should optimize for - this is even argued in the post we respond to, as I understand it?
I was not really discussing AI here, only utilitarism -though, yes I agree conveying human utility in a simple function is very difficult, which would have implications for conveying this to an AI.
I guess my point was:
insofar as 1) the rats are obsessed with AI and 2) the reason AI is scary is because getting it to understand the human utility function is near-impossible and 3) EY mostly conveyed this argument via appealing to "wouldn't you be upset if we told AI to make us happy and then it wireheaded us all, forever?" and 4) utilitarianism is inextricably linked to the rat movement/social sphere/whatever
i mean it seems pretty obvious that most rat utilitarians are *strenuously* against the notion of wireheading, while yet being utilitarians
otherwise they would not be so desperate to stop slightly-misaligned AI?
Like, i agree your original point was not about AI, but insofar as your original point was "utiliarianism is biased towards recasting utility as being equivalent to pleasure", the existence of a large body of utilitarians who are all terrified of AI because it might accidentally not capture the full nuance of utility and instead just round it off to pleasure... seems relevant?
> One of the central ideas in Utilitarianism is that pleasure is the only thing we can directly and subjectively experience as good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
There seems to be an implied assumption that pleasure is one-dimensional, that the choice is only between "less pleasure" and "more pleasure" rather than different *kinds* of pleasure. For example, the pleasure from getting a Nobel prize can be converted to pleasure from eating chocolate, the only question is to determine the exact amount of chocolate.
Suppose we say that the machines in the thought experiment generate *all flavors* of pleasure...
Then I would object that some of those pleasure are "fake". Like the pleasure from getting a Nobel prize that you perceive without actually getting the Nobel prize. And I disagree that maximizing fake pleasure is the greatest possible good.
In other words, if we agree that having various flavors of pleasure is better than only having one flavor, and that some flavors of pleasure are "about" the world, then the state of the world matters.
Obviously I would want the illusion of authenticity in my "fake" experiences! :-) I don't think there's a meaningful difference between true happiness and fake happiness, though.
I go in the box for certain! Take that, Nozick!
Why would the "fakeness" of the pleasure matter to the valence of the pleasure itself, assuming a purely Utilitarian view? If we're starting from an axiom that "fakeness" is in and of itself inherently bad then I can see where you're coming from, but starting from a Utilitarian position I fail to see how that external factor imparts anything to the "internal" value of how the pleasure is experienced in itself. Sure, in contemporary life we may consider the consequentialist concern that allowing this form of fakeness might create perverse incentives that lead to future disutility, or that the emotional apprehension of "fakeness" taints the pleasure, but assuming a truly simulated pleasure, no future negative repercussions need to arise from it being "fake," nor does it need to be accompanied by the other negative emotions it usually would be accompanied with in present human experience. Essentially, how does it matter that an emotion doesn't truthfully connect to its usual referent, if it is the emotion rather than the referent that matters?
It seems like you have a definition of utilitarianism that many utilitarians would disagree with. For example, let me quote J.S.Mill:
> Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. (...) It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
This was not written about wireheading, but I think it is a strong hint about what the author would think about "fake" intellectual pleasures.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
>It seems like you have a definition of utilitarianism that many utilitarians would disagree with.
I'm more than willing to countenance that idea. In response to the Mill quote, I think this is the usual fallacy of conflating what people want with what would actually be best for them in terms of maximizing subjective pleasure. Based on in-built aesthetic preferences it makes perfect sense to say that it's both true that most people would not desire such a thing, and yet their subjective moment-to-moment wellbeing would be better if such a thing actually came about, and that it's the latter rather than the former that matters. Perhaps this isn't Utilitarianism per Mill, personally I actually don't really like the name "Utilitarianism" for several reasons, but it's the best shorthand for "pleasure-maximizing philosophy" that most people will immediately understand, so I have been using the term for convenience. If you don't like the use of the term "Utilitarianism" for these ideas, feel free to come up with another designation, but I think I'll continue using it with the necessary caveats to explain what exactly is being proposed as inherently valuable and worth maximizing (subjective pleasure, no matter what is experiencing it or for what reason).
I concede that from the pleasure-maximizing perspective, maximizing pleasure is the optimal thing to do.
Okay, I guess even the pleasure-maximizing philosophy needs more details, such as how to compare the pleasure now and the pleasure later, etc. But anyway, "maximizing pleasure all the time, forever" would be the pleasure-maximizing thing.
Because the simple idea of having experiences disconnected from reality is unpleasant for most people. So is the idea of having an experience that change you in a way that will lower you in the social hierarchy.
Those are not linked to pleasure in the typical sense, but they are powerful incentive nonetheless. How powerful depends on people, but I think they are pretty strong, especilly the second one. I think, on average, people exchange quite a lot of displeasure for social lader climbing.
Note that wiring done in private without any possibility of anyone knowing will still be somewhat checked by (2): People will fear that wiring will make them less performant because less motivation, and that this will lower them indirectly even if wiring itself is nt detected.
I think that the social ladder module in the average humain brain is often on par with pleasure-seaking module, if not more powerful. That's why your social circle is so important wrt addiction. If you have addict friends, the social module can act as a booster to your addiction instead of a brake. And, in the usual mix of cause and consequences, graviting toward social circles where your addiction is seen as positive (or at least not too negative) is a very classic path...
To be a popular lifestyle, wiring would need to come with it's own subculture....or the experience should be sophisticated enough to not only induce consequence-free pleasure but also simulate a social circle (i.e. be a full immersive virtual reality, more than simple wiring)
"Experiences disconnected from reality" is actually not a very precise idea-- arguably fiction gives experiences at least somewhat disconnected from reality.
You've really read the novel, but the sensation of overcoming obstacles (unless you figure out the murderer before you're told) is about imaginary obstacles.
>Because the simple idea of having experiences disconnected from reality is unpleasant for most people.
I think it's important to distinguish between the idea of an experience being unpleasant, and the experience itself being unpleasant. It is entirely possible for us to be incorrect in our expectation of a future experience, meaning that we can feel *about* a feeling differently than the feeling itself will feel when actually experienced. Of course, the former is also a feeling, but is not relevant to how a mind is feeling when the feeling originally being contemplated is itself being felt. This is becoming a bit confusing to write because of the repetitive language, but a concrete example is that I might feel differently about the idea of riding a roller coaster (afraid) than I feel when I'm actually riding it (having fun). I think mistaking these two things for each other is a major motivation behind objection to most "utility machine" type arguments, i.e. if you could put yourself in a machine that artificially stimulates perpetual happiness for the rest of your life, would you do it? Most people feel badly *about* how that would feel because of preconceived fears and expectations, but that does not determine how they actually will feel when having that experience, which is what should be relevant when determining if that experience is good or bad.
tl;dr just because something generates a bad feeling upon contemplating it, doesn't mean that the feelings that thing would actually generate would be bad, and it is the latter rather than the former that should be relevant in deciding whether that thing is good or bad. So even if the idea of experiences disconnected from reality is unpleasant for most people to contemplate, that doesn't mean those experiences themselves would be unpleasant, and in fact by design would be perfectly pleasant and unobjectionable to the mind experiencing them, because it wouldn't have any internal function to perceive "untrue" experiences as inherently unpleasant in the way we do.
Nope it's perfectly clear and i agree: i can imagine a procedure that would put me (or anybody else) into a state of vegetative pleasure that i really will enjoy a lot, more than anything i have felt until now and that, when in it, i would honestly not want to leave. Maybe i would want to go back to it if the process is stopped, and i am (temporally) back to "normal" state, although this is debatable...
But now, before being wired, i (and many if not most people) would not want to be wired.
Cause people are wary of things that will make them loose power (to affect the world and others) and social prestige : that was my first point, i try to be more clear about what i mean by experience disconnected from reality, which indeed is not very specific. And that's also the point of J. S. Mill, although there is a 'human nature is admirable" turn to it that i don't like: i am not telling this is admirable to refuse pleasure to keep power/social prestige, just that it is real: That the average human utility function is not instant pleasure, it's more complicated and mostly consider future states, especially when choosing among multiple possibilities: choosing is already considering the future, so it makes sense, it could not really be different in fact...
The idea of becoming a blissful legume is not attractive to most, at least before being one. It's a little bit flower for Algernon reversed.
Maybe mental change so large as to threaten coherence of self are repulsive for most, almost regardless if the change are for good.
Maybe any change in fact (hence the difference between mainstream cosmetic surgery and changes to make you beautiful but also unrecognizable)...
I hope it's clear: I do not say it's impossible to create a blissful vegetable state that people would be happy in. In fact I think it's possible, probably already possible and maybe quite easy.
Just that many, if not most, people will not want to enter it, something that could change only through social means (wiring subculture), not by better demonstration that wiring really is blissful and once wired you will not want to go back to unwired...
BTW, the fact that after the wiring people are happy but before they do not agree does not justify the procedure morally, at least it does not for me. It does under some (most?) definitions of utilitarism, but that just one more reason that i am not an utilitarist.
neither am i consequentialist... So i guess i am a naturalist, at least by default...
1. If you're able to turn inanimate matter into consciousness, I think the current opinions on morality and such will have become massively outdated. Beyond that, I think morality should revolve around increasing the happiness of existing living creatures, not making enough new ones to wash the existing ones out of the statistics.
2. That's more a question for you, I'd think. Anything it said that you disagreed with?
3. Seems like a good idea. It's always easier to edit an existing thing than to create it from whole cloth.
Humans turn inanimate matter into consciousness all the time. It's called "having kids".
Don't mentally cripple your kids for utilitarianism.
1. Why is that? I don't see why happiness in already-existing minds should be prioritized over the happiness of potential minds, at least when bringing the latter into existence becomes a workable possibility. I think this is especially the case if you follow something like the "bundle theory" of consciousness, where consciousnesses as discrete, continuous entities aren't taken as coherent, meaningful objects, and the main thing becomes that happiness self-evidently feels good, so the maximization of that feeling becomes imperative, regardless of what it is being felt by. Funnily enough, your mention of "washing the existing ones out of the statistics" is one of the more convincing arguments for this idea I think there is that wasn't mentioned. Essentially, since pain is a better and more instinctive motivating principle for survival than pleasure, it's reasonable to assume that life will always bring with it negative net utility, which, if we value pleasure equally throughout time rather than just in the ever-moving present, means that a negative utilitarian/antinatalist elimination of all life would still leave net negative universal utility. So really, such a massive project like this would be the only conceivable way to bring universal utility into the positive (and the negative utility from the life left alive would be so little in relative amounts that it would be worth it to leave it alone for the aforementioned existentialist failsafe/to prevent advanced civilizations having a reason to want to destroy these machines as a threat).
2. It more or less just rephrased all the points I dumped at it in a coherent and structured way, as you might be able to tell from my response to point 1, I'm something of a wall of text guy, so having stuff put in a more logical order than a big idea jumble was definitely a rhetorical improvement in my opinion.
3. Agreed, people seem to primarily praise/fear AI as a tool that completely creates on its own, but its uses as an editor/redactor seem like a much bigger benefit in the short term.
1. Because washing out the existing people is the path of least resistance, and leads immediately into "just kill the unhappy ones". You've said it yourself; you think life is a net negative. The obvious follow-up is "eliminate life". Your proposed guards against that are contradicting the proposed utility, and are begging for a future loophole.
The easiest way to avoid that result is to say existing people are worth more than future people.
>Because washing out the existing people is the path of least resistance, and leads immediately into "just kill the unhappy ones". You've said it yourself; you think life is a net negative. The obvious follow-up is "eliminate life".
I don't think this naturally follows. Again, life, rationally or otherwise, seeks to defend itself, so any system knowing this would realize that the small amount of matter lost by giving a wide berth to any occupied planets (our own included) would vastly increase its chances of success at the cost of an almost insignificant amount of the universe's matter it is able to access, versus facing the risk of pissing off an advanced species that could potentially do serious harm to it, not least by making its own antagonistic Von Neumann machines it would have to devote resources to competing with.
You're assuming pure rationality from both sides. Firstly, the threat is from pissing them off, so if you can genocide them in one fell swoop, there's no downside. Mine a planet in such a way that it creates an asteroid storm on an occupied one, or throws them out of orbit. Oh, what an unfortunate natural event, our condolences to the remaining.
Second, humans will always have guys like me who see a potential threat and try to pre-emptively nuke it. Your take requires harmlessness from the existing planets; how many individuals have to act aggressively before the logic changes? How many actual natural events occur before we blame these things for trying to kill us? Remember the Maine!
Maybe we should introduce a discount rate for future people utility. I agree that the utility of people today matter more than that of furure people, and certainly having as many people as possible is not good, even if their utility is marginally positive (whatever that means). My intuition, is that the "best" would be a sizeable population, yet small enough to sustain some high level of utilty per person with the given resources living sustainably for future generations, and as large as possible after that. So, I'm for whatever complicated moral framework that gives this result.
Doesn't it seem like the opposite of what rationality stands for to decide on a result, and then try to come up with a moral framework that supports it? I'm aware what I'm saying seems extreme, but IMO the idea of rationality is more or less "find coherent and truthful first principles, and then derive a conclusion from them whether you like it or not" versus "come up with whatever ad-hoc principles can justify my built-in worldview." I guess what I'm saying is that in cases like this where what I propose seems like some outlandish view, but it seems to logically follow from some sound principle (the self-evident goodness of positive emotion), maybe it's the preconceived ideas making it seem absurd that are the problem, not the "absurd" but logically entailed idea. To put it shortly, I've never met a bullet I didn't want to bite.
Any atheistic approach will have to start by deciding on a result. You've decided happiness is an end-goal; there's no objective reason to believe this. Maybe innovation should be the end goal; maximize creativity across the universe. Maybe lust; shower the world in aphrodisiacs to maximize sex and reproduction. Maybe uniformity; try to minimize diversity and maximize agreement. Or pain. Most people probably instinctively reject an approach that maximizes pain, but it's just as natural an emotion as pleasure.
On the contrary, I think if you want to design a good moral framework, you should definitely first know where you want to end up and then come up with the framework that gets you there. The last part is very difficult, and it has been shown that both absolute or relative utilitarism lead to end states differently from what I describe - so in my opinion, a more complicated framework is needed. However, I have seen it argued that the end state of a very large population with marginally positive utlility, a result of absolute utilitarism, is desireable - which I disagree with.
Somewhat annoyed at my answers to the Paris-Moscow distance, which will at least correlate with being unusually bad at orienteering.
Soliciting help/advice from the community regarding covid infection experience. Was recently most likely exposed on or around Dec 24-25 (was in the US Northeast NYC area at the time, so most likely the XBB 1.5 variant). By the time I got access to a test yesterday, the results were obvious. Will detail my symptom timeline below- want to know if this is typical, what (if anything) I should be worried or on the lookout for, and any recommendations for amelioration and recovery.
Was double vaxxed and boosted (Moderna), however last booster was all the way in Jan. 2022 so not surprising that protectiveness waned (plus apparently not effective on new mutations anymore if my reading of the available material is correct).
12/24-25: Most likely infection time frame
12/28: First symptom: sore throat. No other symptoms
12/29: Woke up with 102 F chills, aches, the works. Comparable to the worst flu I've ever had. Unable to sleep well that night due to massive night sweats and migraines.
12/30: Probably the worst day due to combined ongoing symptoms from yesterday and lack of sleep. However, symptoms did seem to calm down somewhat and night sweats diminished enough by nightfall that I was able to sleep (comparatively) well.
12/31: Fever downgraded to 99/100 and chills/aches mostly gone. Lingering headaches. The sore throat is mostly downgraded in intensity, but has given way to intense frequent coughing fits.
1/1: Fever, chills, aches completely gone, still occasional pinpricks of headaches. The main problematic symptom at this point is the coughing which seems to have increased in frequency after all the other symptoms have left. I can probably say without misusing the word literally that on average, I have literally coughed or had a coughing fit at least once every 1-5 minutes, to the point where my ribs and diaphragm have started to feel on fire. (To the best of my knowledge my chest is still fine). 99% of the coughs are dry and the 1% that produce phlegm seem to be tiny, inconsequential amounts.
Any advice anyone has on whether this is normal for covid sufferers** and what if anything can be done to alleviate the coughing would be much appreciated, I will answer any questions as needed. I also hope to get in contact with a medical provider once the holidays end (and if my insurance cooperates).
*demographic information: male, late 20's-early 30's, 23 BMI, not particularly athletic but not totally sedentary either (avg about 4000-6000 steps daily with amateur bodyweight routines)
**edit to add: the reason why I ask is because of the multiple people I know of who were exposed around this time with me, all of them to my knowledge have also developed coughing along with the other symptoms, but have not lasted as long as mine, even the older folks. To the best of my knowledge, I don't have any preexisting conditions like asthma, heart stuff, diabetes, or anything else like that.
FWIW, my final phase was the same back on delta. Long lingering cough that kept me from sleeping well, even with NyQuil. Like Marzell said. Cough drops and hang in there. The worst passed for me in a few days.
At least I can confirm that long coughing is very typical for Covid. I was coughing for two weeks after all other symptoms had gone away, and it was similar for a bunch of other people that I know with heavy infections. (Not with hospitalization, but like the worst flu ever.) Your timeline also matches really well my own timeline and that of my partner and some friends, except that 3-4 days before onset seems quite long for omicron. (1-2 days seem to be more typical.)
My best prediction based on my experience and stories: it's going to drag on for two weeks or so. It feels like ages, and it is annoying how slowly it improves, but it does improve and eventually goes away.
Only after my own experience I checked the health guidelines and noticed how wide-spread this must be: the guidelines declared you negative 1-2 days after you test negative and you have no symptoms *except coughing*. This exception is basically made in all countries. So I guess it's really normal that people continue coughing for a long time after they stop being infectious.
Post viral airway reactivity and prolonged cough is a symptom of essentially every viral URI. It’s not even considered prolonged unless it lasts longer than 3 weeks after other symptoms go away.
Yeah, `long coughing' (meaning, several weeks) is pretty common even after bog standard common colds.
That's reassuring, I always wondered why I coughed for so long during the winter. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing your experience. It seems based on this and other comments that I am not alone in enduring the coughs after all the other symptoms have gone away, which is unfortunate but also reassuring in its own way.
> So I guess it's really normal that people continue coughing for a long time after they stop being infectious.
If I understand it correctly, coughing happens because the virus hurts your throat. After the virus is gone, it still takes a few days for your throat to heal. So you keep coughing even when you are already healthy (in the sense that your body no longer contains the virus).
This makes sense.
I don't know about symptoms in particular, but here is some general guidance on treating COVID. [Optimally, all of the following would be discussed with a doctor. Some supplements discussed are not meant to mixed with certain medications, for example.]
First, can you get Paxlovid? It is meant to be prescribed within 5 days of onset of symptoms, although doctors sometimes prescribe it after that window. You'll probably want to start that as soon as possible, if you can, since it sounds like your window is closing.
Additionally, in this video from two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN30emwcNS4, Dr. Roger Seheult makes a number of suggestions on what to do if you get COVID.
He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine.
First, he suggests getting a pulse oximeter which painlessly measures blood oxygen levels. If blood oxygen at rest drops to 90%-94% range, take caution. If drops below 90%, go to emergency room. Before taking measurement with pulse oximeter, preferably be at rest for a couple of minutes. Remove any nailpolish before use as it can affect results. [Cheap but effective ones can be found on Amazon.]
As far as treatment, he suggests taking a number of supplements: Vitamin D, Quercitin, NAC, and Zinc.
Here is a summary of what he said about them respectively:
Vitamin D. Endocrine Society says 4000 IU can be taken without a doctor’s supervision, so you may want to start with that. As you are from the US Northeast, which is at higher latitudes, you are likely have less vitamin D to start with, due to the lower UV levels at the higher latitude.
If taking Vitamin D, consider also taking Vitamin K [Heinrich: adequate daily intake for men is 130 mcg. Consider MK-7 form. Worth noting, is a preprint that found that COVID patients have lower vitamin K, suggesting that vitamin K supplementation may have additional benefits for them besides for aiding in the absorption of Vitamin D].
If taking vitamin D, also consider taking magnesium which helps regulate vitamin D levels [Heinrich: an additional 200 mg a day will safely bring most people to optimal levels. Although magnesium comes in various forms, since you’ve mentioned migraines, you may want to try magnesium citrate, as some studies have found magnesium to help with migraines, and most of those used magnesium citrate. Best taken with food. If it bothers your stomach, you can try magnesium glycinate.]
Vitamins D and K are both fat soluble and are therefore both best absorbed with a large, preferably fatty meal. As vitamins D and K can compete for fat, they may be best absorbed taken in two separate meals.
Quercitin supplementation: less evidence than Vitamin D supplementation, but low risk.
NAC: 600 mg twice a day.
Zinc: up to 40 mg of elemental zinc a day.
He also highlights two non pharmecutical interventions: sleep and body temperature.
Sleep – especially early in night strengthens immune system. Taking melatonin before sleep can be beneficial not only for sleep, but also for its antioxidant properties. [Heinrich: Seheult suggests 3-5 mg but our very own Scott Alexander, suggests that that is quite excessive for sleep and that a smaller dose of 0.3 - 1 mg would be better, here: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/#21_What_is_the_right_hypnotic_dose_of_melatonin]
Fever: If fever is below 103, consider leaving it untreated, as fever can boost interferon response [a part of the immune system.] This would make particular sense earlier in the course of the disease – he mentions the first 7 days of symptoms.
Another promising non pharmaceutical intervention is near infrared radiation. Dr. Seheult discusses this in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdiUnmpOgqE.
To summarize, exposure to near infrared radiation typically from sunlight has beneficial effects on COVID outcomes.
Notably, near infrared radiation is more penetrative than other wavelengths of light, so it can penetrate clothes and sunscreen. Windows, however, may block near infrared radiation. Therefore, if you could get out in the sun, even with clothes and / or sunscreen, that could be beneficial.
[For a quote and discussion of his comments in a previous related video, see here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-2495-challenge-mode/comment/10361923.]
NIR exposure has now been confirmed as an effective COVID treatment in an RCT: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1011134422002342.
If you have any questions about anything, or want more citations, (e.g. to the vitamin K preprint I referenced), just ask, and I'd be happy to help how I can. I'll add a separate comment if I find anything potentially useful for the cough in particular...
Thank you for the very detailed reply- much appreciated.
On the subject of Paxlovid, I did some online snooping when my symptoms first became an issue. I don't know if it is the same for every area, but it seems that the doctors/pharmacies in my area won't give it out unless you fall into the usual demographics (+65 years old, immunocompromised, hospitalized, etc.) I am none of those so my chances are not great.
My blood oxygen has pretty consistently been at 97-99% (apple watch) or 95-98% (pulse oximeter) ever since this whole mess started, so I am fairly confident in my belief that I will at least not need to go to the ER. Of course covid is unpredictable and pride always comes before a fall, so I suppose I could still wake up blue one morning, but hopefully that does not happen.
I am currently taking vitamin D but will have a look at all the other supplements you mentioned as well as the sunlight. Re: zinc: I have access to zinc carnosine as leftovers from a previous gastrointestinal issue. Not sure if zinc carnosine is comparable to elemental zinc here.
My pleasure! Re Paxlovid, I know that at least in some cases, doctors / urgent cares will prescribe it even for those outside those demographics, if the patient requests it.
Zinc carnosine is a combination of elemental zinc and carnosine. The respective amounts of each may be listed separately, as zinc and carnosine / l-carnosine.
If the two are not listed separately on the label, you can multiply the total mg per pill by 0.226 to get the amount of elemental zinc.
As far as the supplements, I will note that as of the video, he said that Vitamin D was the only one backed up by randomized controlled trials, but that he felt the others were nonetheless worth it.
However, the video was actually 2 years old (not 1 year, as I thought), and since then, I see at least one RCT in support of quercetin: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34803451/.
I also see a recent RCT for NAC (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.28393) that found that it reduced the mortality rate in patients with COVID-19, inflammatory parameters, and development of severe respiratory failure; however, it did not affect the length of hospital stay or the need for ICU admission. Notably, that NAC was administered via inhaler, rather than orally. Unfortunately, the full paper is behind a paywall.
I also see a recent RCT that supports zinc supplementation: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciac807/6795268?login=false.
Do you need a rescue inhaler to open up airways? Albuterol (name of medicine) using a nebulizer (name of machine) might be most effective. An inhaler/puffer could be used instead of nebulizer.
You might also need a corticosteroid (inhaled or oral) to bring down inflammation.
These are standard meds given for bad wheezing. Sometimes the only symptom of that is coughing (When you exhale hard after a deep inhale breath : both through mouth so the nasal congestion doesn't confuse your test - if you start coughing a lot, it seems to mean you are wheezing).
This is based on experience in a family with a couple asthmatics.
I am not an MD, but the literature indicates that a severe dry cough is the most common symptom of the Omicron variants. It's supposed to fade as the illness fades. But the course of the disease can take about 10 days or more. If an OTC cough suppressant like Robitussin doesn't take the edge off, you should ask your Dr for codeine linctus syrup or codeine phosphate tablets. If it's as bad as you're describing it I suspect it will take the big guns to suppress it. Definitely get some medical attention, though. It may too late for Paxlovid, but friends who've had COVID said it really does make them seem human again (n=3). Although there is a chance of a COVID rebound afterward (n=1).
Yes, codeine cough syrup works like magic, at least it has for me the couple times I've been prescribed it.
I wonder how much MDs feel reluctant to prescribe even that in this period of reaction to the Sackler family SNAFU.
When I was a wee lad and my mother was suffering from bronchitis, she would send me to the pharmacy for some codeine cough syrup with just a note that she needed some.
I don’t know if any adult could do that in the 60s or if it was because it was well known in our small town that she spent a couple years in a TB sanatorium as a teen and had the the ribs removed on one side of her back to collapse the infected lung. The Magic Mountain it was not.
Man I'm sorry, that sucks. For me, while my coughing was not as bad as yours it was still pretty rough, so I went and got several different brands of cough drops and tried em til I found a kind that worked well, then was basically constantly sucking on a cough drop for a couple weeks. Possibly you've already tried this and it's insufficient, but for me it did the trick. Best of luck.
No worries, I have been going through cough drops like family-unfriendly drugs, but I have definitely missed out on good advice before because someone didn't tell me something that they thought I should have already done (which I didn't), so I appreciate the thought. My brand of choice has been Ricola but let me know which ones worked for you.
I don't think I'll be ending up in the ER or anything like that (my SpO has been pretty consistently high even through the worst of the coughing) but it's been a pretty decent damper on my quality of life.
See https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/otc-meds a good website according to my doctor friends. This entry will steer you, toward buying an expectorant, which thins mucous and makes it easier to cough up.
Much appreciated, will check out.
Thank you for sharing your experiences as well. Sorry that you went through that but glad to hear that you found it (relatively) mild. On a related note, I do have to admit I take a bit of mordant amusement in the definition of a "mild" covid case as "not requiring hospitalization".
I too have no idea why some cases are so mild (I am aware of people at least one magnitude of age older than me who have been positive and actually came out of it shorter and with fewer side effects).
Was fruit the food that you couldn't eat, or the food you could eat most easily? I had a weird taste disturbance early last year where any sour thing, especially fruit, was disgusting. But never tested positive for Covid.
Is anyone here familiar with the Twitter account “the ethical skeptic” ? If so, can you please translate the jargon and tell me what point he’s actually *claiming* to make?
Every time you ask the dude to clarify what he means by “concatenated pull forward effect” (or any of the other seemingly made up technical terms he uses) you get one of 3 responses: 1. “Have to talk this way or I’ll get censored”, 2. “This is designed for EXPERTS in statistics, im not gonna dumb it down for you idiots”, or 3. “If you don’t get it, then stop following me”.
The dude is obviously full of shit, but also the worst advocate for his own ideas I’ve ever seen.
Could you provide the exact Twitter handle? There are several with extremely similar names.
https://theethicalskeptic.com
Twitter handle is just: @EthicalSkeptic
Thanks. I skimmed the last few days, and mostly it just seems stupid, wrong and offensive, but not overly laden with faux jargon.
But then there's a pearl like this:
"When human intervention is the critical feature of a hypothesis, human intervention to a priori obfuscate that hypothesis, forces it into becoming the null."
Not only is it non-obvious what's even attempted here; it doesn't even seem like a well-formed sentence. I don't think he knows what "a priori" means, because it doesn't make any kind of sense in the sentence. This is just word salad. Maybe he has an idea about it himself, can't tell, but it certainly isn't comprehensible.
Why do you even bother to read a rabid antivaxxer, by the way? This is obvious nonsense even without the jargon. As far as I can tell, the thesis is that most Covid deaths are actually vaccine deaths.
No , I didn't read the book ( not even heard of it) but will do. When I lived alone ( 15 yrs ago) I had no problem ( ADHD helps with the flow state and nothing else matters) - plus I had , funny enough, a bigger budget for food .
Wherevcan be found . The plain metamucil , is not quite plain.
And satiety isvone component. The struggle is to reframe tasty food as such too. Living in Montréal it's like taking methadonevwhen heroin iscmore available.
I am worrying about the products of "health stores" - usually filled with hapless clerks and dubious and mislabeled products (unregulated) . But I will go - and look for the satiety component.
Thank you for pointing it out. The orange metamucil is very irritating.
That is an excellent advice. Having a school age kid and a food discerning wife is actually a hard thing to do . We have weekly talks about that. But the advice is really a good one to bump higher on my approach. And yes, you are right, my Pavlovian and future gratification imagination are drivers in quantity and choice.
Meals are scheduled ( 2 meals , no binging or snacking whatsoever, no pantry stuff)
Pre-planning is tricky ( high metabolic school kid and italian ancestry wife that cooks theoretically just for her ( she acknowledges my addiction). But that's what addiction is. I have no dignity to beg for meat filled fresh zucchini with Kumatovtomato and fresh herbs. And the bread is from L'Amour du Pain -they eon best baguette in France ( a first for the perplexed French bakers).
So even if I preplan for me, ( I love liver for ex and kidneys , Bourdain Nasty bots -,bit more hardcore even) I am drooling and "taste " a bit and it's really like someone that got a drug . I don't drin ( half a beer if I add the curiosity sips/ yer and half a shot of various liquors/ year.
Buddy, I think you’re trying to reply to other people’s comments by replying to the email? That doesn’t work. Whenever you reply to the email it posts it as a top-level comment instead. To reply to specific people, click through to the actual post on your browser and reply there.
Sorry, I figured it out. Thanks for pointing it out
Is there any chance that heating oil will make a comeback in America, and the use of natural gas will decline?
are there any benefit to heating oil over natural gas?
Highly unlikely. It would require a massive up-front infrastructure investment, which nobody is going to pay unless they are confident that oil will be cheaper than gas (per Megajoule) for the long haul. Which hasn't been the case in recent decades, and I don't see anything that would likely change that. In particular, oil has a very large additional demand as a transportation fuel, for which natural gas is poorly suited, and so will likely command a premium in $/MJ at the market even if production costs are similar.
Also, oil is generally perceived as a "dirtier" fuel than gas, so any regulatory or tax policy that might drive natural gas prices up will probably hit oil even worse.
Sure. It depends entirely on their relative prices. Natural gas has been on a long-term decline in (real) price for ~15-20 years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historical-chart
That accounts for its surging popularity, particular in states with good access to nat gas pipelines, or LNG terminals. I think the decline in price is mostly related to improvements in extraction technology, particularly fracking. But the decline will not go on forever, certainly. If the price advantage starts to til strongly back towards oil, I expect people will adjust, albeit slowly, since you need a different furnace, an oil tank, a local delivery service, et cetera.
This would only make sense in very cold climates where heat pumps have less efficiency. Otherwise you'd just be an idiot to not buy a heat pump.
Ground-source heat pumps (where the heat exchanger works on a loop of fluid buried deep enough that temperatures are relatively constant year-round, instead of ambient air) are a pretty good answer to that, at least in places that aren't so cold as to have permafrost.
Heat pump COPs do kind of suck. And bear in mind you have to design one that is adequate to handle events like Texas a year or two back, or most of the US recently.
The only path I could see is regulator hostility to gas heating that overlooks restricting fuel oil
Yea, I do. Baked vegetables are awesome, mushrooms ( even raw). Soda is too irritant.
It's hard to get consistent high protein with variety and not slide into processed ones. Or out of budget. I am mixing quinoa with practically anything .
Fat is fairly attractive as taste . ( olive oil, avocado, occasional pork and rare beef one ( cooking and frequency).
In Montreal, Canada, tasty veggies on a daily basis ( I like them) are really expensive. But I am actively plan and budget for that.
I tried psyllium ( metamucil), but it's given me some acidity.
Good advice.
Was this comment supposed to be a reply?
Yes, sorry, I am usually just a lurker. Yes, it was supposed to be a reply. I will pay more attention. Thank you for pointing it out.
Seems like there is a problem if you reply from e-mail. If you find a comment on the website and click "Reply" under that comment, that should always work ok.
Thank you. I will do that . Just getting the hang of posting a reply. Will pay more attention ( and extra Vyvanse).
Try plain, unflavored unsweetened psyllium
I want a new job. I'm currently the data scientist/DBA for a small company (~30 people). I've been there just over 2 years, and it feels like for the last year I haven't really learned anything new. The first year I really enjoyed it, I learned a ton, got to build a data warehouse from scratch, set up a bunch of data pipelines and SQL queries to analyze the data, and push it to dashboards for the dev/marketing folks. Now I've spent the last year incrementally improving those dashboards, but it's not challenging in any way.
I have never successfully applied for a job (I've always gotten lucky with offers through networking), and I really feel like I should do something harder and more challenging. At a friend's suggestion, I did the Advent of Code challenge this year, and it was some of the most fun I recall having while coding. I also think I did quite well (got 24/25 days within a day, got in the top 1000 once).
Anyone hiring? Or have some advice? I figured that since it's a new year, I should probably try to do something with it.
Editted: Padern has a good point that I haven't really clarified what I want to accomplish:
I've always been very motivated to learn new things when given tasks to accomplish, but I'm not very good at giving myself tasks. Being asked to do something tricky or new at work has been a very reliable way for me to get better, but a new job has always been a great source of motivation to learn a bunch of new things.
I'd like to work closely within a larger team (I'm currently on a team of 3, and I spend maybe ~2 hours per week talking to them), where there are people who are really great at things that I can learn from (no one else at my company has any database design experience). I'd like to improve my software development skills, again in a team setting (I'm the sole contributor on 90% of the code for my current database/pipelines). I'd like to learn more about databases, designing them for really large scale (>1000TB) purposes, learn more about transactional/distributed/NoSQL databases.
These aren't necessary, but those kind of things would be sufficient for me (I think).
The easiest way to find a new job is to start actually applying for jobs.
It probably depends on country and type of job, but for me the easiest way was to contact job agencies, give them basic specification, and let them search for the jobs.
Another thing that worked well was calling my contacts (former classmates, former colleagues), asking where they work, whether they like the job, and whether the company is hiring.
What do you hope to learn in a new job? Why can't your learn that in your current job?
Just being bored with a job often isn't a problem with the job itself but an uncertainty about what exactly you're trying to achieve there.
Thanks, you made a good point! I've added in some things I'd like in the original post
Reading what you wrote, you sound like me 5-6 years ago. I got really lucky and landed a job where I had all of that, but it only took 12 months before that job too started to stop offering me the same kinds of challenges.
Over time I realised that looking for someone else to challenge me was not going to work, and I started to develop an interest in trying to find the problems around me by learning about the industry I was in, digging into the details of the technologies we use, working with open source to get more feedback.
I think the approach you describe can work if you can get a job at a large company where you can find a mentor, or a very strong group (google, amazon etc), but given the industry state right now I might suggest my approach is better.
In regards to the IQ/SAT question on the survey, does anyone else feel that they test way higher than their actual "intelligence"?
Way back in high-school I was a real superstar at all the standardized tests. I got 1600 on the SAT, nailed perfect 800s on both?(maybe 3 its been a decade) SAT subject tests I took, and took 15 AP exams and got 5s on all of them. And honestly I was (and still am) incredibly lazy and didn't view studying as an important use of my time when I could be practicing critical activities like pretending to study while actually staring blankly at walls. So according to those tests, I should balancing precariously on some very narrow slice on the bell curve.
But in the harsh light of a post secondary school world where ones ranking sadly does not depend on multiple choice tests, I anecdotally don't feel like I'm much above average intelligence. I'm not dumb, I know that, but if I had to roughly guess from conversations and generally living I'd say that at least 50% of my friends and family and acquaintances are similar or higher intelligence.
Sure one hypothesis is that for friends it could be selection bias, and family could somehow be genetic, but when even random people next to me on planes seem equally intelligent and I never feel myself drowning in a sea of morons, I kinda default to the idea that just like some people are innately more skilled at basketball, maybe I was just born in the right century to exercise my God given talent of being really good at bubbling in scantrons.
The thing about testing really well is that IRL, unless you are pulling rabbits out of a hat on a regular basis, nobody really cares. Try telling the fella fixing your transmission how smart you are. He’ll say, “Well then you fix it. I’ll watch and learn from the smart guy.”
Tho I hear if you go to Starbucks with proof you are 3 sig or better, they’ll sell you a cup of coffee for four bucks.
Edit: That last comment looks harsher than it was meant. It’s a riff on an old line of tough guy reflexive self deprecation that probably goes back to the 1940s.
Picture Bogart solving the big case and Bacall telling him he came out on top. “Yeah doll, that and a dime will get me a cup of coffee.”
The one time I took an employer had me take an IQ test I was told I was “slightly above average”, which seems fair to me then (now that I’m older I’m probably below average), in high school I was transferred from the (exceedingly easy) “Intermediate” track to the (really hard for me) “Advanced” track, so my being the smartest of the stupid, or the stupidest among the smart seems about right.
Frankly though raw intelligence doesn’t impress me very much anymore, not like kindness does, my legal wife is obviously more intelligent than me (she was accepted into an Ivy law school), but my drop out roommate is who believes in all sorts of implausible things had the kindness and the instincts that allowed us to save a mutual friend’s life this week.
"Intelligence" and "test taking" are two different things. I get the feeling a lot of people on here conflate "I got a high score on this so I am high IQ" with "That person did not get a high score on this test so they are 95 IQ normies".
Average intelligence is exactly that. Average. You are probably smart and did indeed score higher on tests than people around you, but that does not mean people around you are dumb.
High scores mean you're good at taking tests. Low scores mean you're bad at taking tests. Multiple-choice tests seem very much gameable to me, we did it the old-fashioned way in my education, and I haven't seen this kind of "fill in with a pencil then have it corrected by template" until I did an assessment test for a local government job a couple of years back.
If you want a pat on the head for doing well on these kind of tests, here, have one.
Intelligence (IQ) is just a part of what determines your success in life and the impressions you make on other people. Here are some other parts:
* extraversion, autism -- Some people find interaction with other people inherently enjoyable. For others, it is a chore. Interaction with other people is important in many different ways.
* conscientiousness -- If you start many things but never finish them, your success list remains empty.
* neuroticism, risk aversion, having a safety net -- Some things require dealing with uncertainty, financial or otherwise. If you cannot deal with it, some doors remain locked for you.
Also, the career you had yesterday influences the career you can have today: by having practiced things, by having things on your CV. Both the luck and the mistakes keep growing.
All of this taken together, you can be highly intelligent and still fail at life. I am kinda halfway there; comparing myself with people who seem similarly intelligent.
I think it would be nice to have some support group specifically for people with high IQ, to help them navigate the other problems, and unleash their full potential. At some moment I thought that Mensa was supposed to be that kind of organization, but then I joined it and realized that it was merely a debate club. The Guild of the ROSE seems like another possible candidate for such organization, but I haven't tried it myself: https://guildoftherose.org/
EDIT:
Others have already mentioned selection effect. People live in bubbles; you do not interact with average people most of your time. So as you get more educated, or climb the career ladder, you are surrounded by smarter and smarter people. Which can create a false impression of you becoming dumber. For example, as a senior software developer I know a lot of things, but I am mostly surrounded by other senior software developers, and compared to them, I am just an average guy.
Well, a bit of ruthlessness never hurt either. Drawing on a very old memory of my one viewing of Goodbye Columbus in 1969, the Jack Klugman character says, "in the real world you gotta have little gonif in ya."
I had read the Phillip Roth novel before I saw it but that was while I was under the influence for the very first time - blackberry brandy - so I'm not sure if that is from Philip Roth or whoever did the screenplay. Oh hell, I'll check, gimme a sec.... okay someone else did the screenplay. But this is weird, Jack Klugman played a guy named Ben Patimkin and Richard Benjamin played someone with the surname Klugman?
If enough of us cared enough, we could subvert Mensa to this cause, which would be more worthwhile than their current mission.
I was also considering that, but there are not enough rationalists in my country to achieve that. And it would be better to do "rational life coaching" in person. Online is also a possibility, but in my experience, peer pressure from people you meet in person is a powerful thing.
Mensa officially supports "special interest groups", basically subsets of Mensans who share some hobby or goal (and I assume that if Mensa does anything useful, most of that happens in those groups), so the easiest way would be to join Mensa and establish a SIG called e.g. "Becoming Stronger". Since then, whatever you do, you are acting officially as a part of Mensa, and you can use some of their resources. However, existing members cannot really blame you for trying to take over their organization, if you are acting transparently as a SIG, because that is exactly what SIGs were made for.
Note that being a part of Mensa does not prevent you from providing services also to people who are not in Mensa. But I would pay special attention to *new* Mensa members; they are preselected on high intelligence, but they do not yet have the bad habits of older members.
If their current mission is to be insufferable, as I would guess, then that would be a good thing.
It's possible you have a personality trait where you see the best in those around you and see them as more intelligent than they are.
Back when I was in school, people in my honors/AP classes occasionally asked me if they seemed dumb to me. At the time, they really didn't. I tested much better than them, but I couldn't really feel a major difference in cognitive ability between them and me.
Now, in an era of social media, when everyone is putting their thoughts on display for the world to see...I can see it very clearly. Even relatively smart people are just really bad at reasoning. I've read many, many peer-reviewed papers whose conclusions are based on obvious fallacies. I'm not just saying this because of political disagreements; I often find myself cringing pretty hard at arguments made by people on my side of a given issue, and the phenomenon is not just confined to politics, anyway.
I don't think high intelligence generally shows through in casual conversation. You have to put people in a situation that actually tests their cognitive abilities.
So I think my test scores placed me about right, give or take half a standard deviation. I just wish I had high enough conscientiousness to make better use of it.
I always felt like I did better than my natural ability (which was already pretty high to be amodest).
I always did very well on tests. Part was just being very intelligent/well-read at a young age.
But part of it was having little to no anxiety around tests, due to a history of success. I was also often very good at the "meta game" of figuring out what they would be looking for even if I didn't know the answer.
So, I would really excel compared to the amount of prep/studying I did (almost none ever). Especially in HS/college, I would only attend half the lectures, but pay pretty close attention and do the reading materials assigned, but nothing else, and that was it, and still often top scores on tests and work I did.
If I put in any effort at all, perfect scores, though often I put in none.
As for the harsh light of things, that was hard to say. Definitely I was way further ahead at 10-14 than I was at 20. By 16-20 I was mostly womanizing, playing hockey (and getting concussed occasionally), videogaming, and not reading several hours a day anymore. Maybe just several a week.
At university I had definitely I came back to the pack some. Wasn't 100% always the smartest person in every single context. Sometimes there was competition (which often motivated me to raise my game a bit), though of course college is a more selective environment than HS (even the middle of the road college I went to).
So in my 20s I found myself really doubting my talents and wondering if I was just really good at taking tests.
But then as my professional career has progressed, and even day to day life, I still find that most MDs, JDs, CPAs, and even Phds. I come across strike me as pretty stupid and incurious people. So, I don't know maybe the results were just the results that I deserved as an atypically curious/intelligent person. My opinion of how far outside the norm I fall has really waxed and waned at times over the years, and it is much harder to tell once you are out of school.
I think there has to be some distinction between intelligence and [intellectual] curiosity. The hours required to be successful in medicine, law, accounting (assuming big 4), etc., leave comparatively little time for discovering the sweet treats of scholarship, especially once these professionals are also balancing their career with raising a family.
Oh for sure there is, but I am disappointed when I find a lack of either in people where I expect to. Some of the lawyers I meet are top flight people, but a lot are rather meh. And doctors I have found consistently disappointing.
I mention them both because I feel like being really smart and having high horsepower doesn't do almost anything if you don't have the curiosity/interest to generate questions for that horsepower to work on.
Similar credentials (perfect test scores, 16 5’s on APs easily). Oddly I find myself coming at the reverse question. When I was in high school, I genuinely thought I’d lucked into the right set of skills, available to most, that guaranteed good test scores without correspondingly high general intelligence. Later, after realizing that certainly wasn’t true, like you I assumed some innate multiple-choice-related gift not related to IQ (evidence: much more equal performance on free-response tests as my peers). But a year ago I stumbled upon the research that these sorts of scores correlate reasonably well to a 140+ IQ, which raises the terrifying question: what if I’ve been operating far below my real potential? - either because I’m not good at evaluating relative intelligences and so assume everyone is about equally intelligent as me when I’m actually a lot smarter, or because I’ve been actually working half as hard as everyone else my whole life to achieve the same results. There’s certainly some evidence for both 😥.
I for sure in my academic life and the first maybe 3-5 years of my professional life was working like 5% as hard as everyone else. I got nowhere (but did have a degree and great test scores).
Once I started giving 100% in my mid-twenties I just blew past my peers like crazy. Was a weird experience.
Great topic - can't resist posting. Scores show that I was also very skilled at "standardized" tests back in the day. Did very well on SATs in 1972, even better on GREs around 1991. Missed being admitted to a pretty elite PhD program entirely because I had a 790 on the math GRE when an 800 was expected, although I was 800 on verbal and no one else was. No real sweat, I talked my way into the program eventually. BTW, my math error was drinking too much coffee, had to leave testing room to go pee, cost too much time, didn't finish.
Like OP, my life experience has been increasing admiration for the wisdom, critical thinking, and overall mental skills of the much wider swath of the population that never cared about, never bothered with, or actively avoided these tests. I just cannot find many people that don't have a lot they could teach me, whether its the custodial staff where I used to work, or the groundskeepers, cooks in institutional kitchens -- that is, people our society puts into jobs and economic situations we associate with polar opposites of PhDs. Come election time, candidates on all sides mostly talk down to these people, and they feel the (undeserved) condescension, which I think is one of our larger political problems.
I regret very little about my life, but I do wish I had spent more time listening to and learning from strangers, because there always seems to be something to gain doing that.
Counter-datum: I feel like my SAT scores were a pretty pitch-perfect capstone of both academics and how I apply intellect in everyday life post-school. English was always my best subject, and I consistently ran circles around even the teachers* in anything reading-or-writing related, nevermind peers who frankly were often functionally illiterate. (It was not a high-performing school district; also confounded by large ELS population and general climate of anti-intellectualism. If the school sucks so much that no one wants to be there in the first place, one can't reasonably expect effort approaching actual capabilities.)
So it came as zero surprise to get perfect Reading and Writing scores, plus maximum Essay, back on the old 2400 SAT scale when I took it. All of my errors were in Math...just like GPA showed, with that being the Serious Subject I always did worst in (and failed outright at the college level). Similarly with distribution of AP scores, and also WAIS-IV IQ test**; I didn't even bother taking AP English, but aced that test easily, whereas Calculus I barely eked out a 3 despite mighty effort in Calc II. Outside of academics, language remains beautiful and useful and oft-used, while any halfway-serious math makes me nope out immediately. If it's more complex than compound-interest calculations or figuring taxes on paper...not gonna happen. Forget Bayes' Theorem entirely, haha. One can sort-of grasp the intended results of understanding such Rationality basics, without having any clue how all the stats work.
I think it comes across as deeply elitist to describe one's situation as "drowning in a sea of morons", especially cause so much of that is selection effects...but it's not completely wrong, either. I chose to exit the white-collar workforce and go stock shelves at the local grocery store. Even though we get a huge proportion of college kids on both ends of the counter, it's...uh...not exactly a hotbed of scintillating discourse. We sell food, not ideas. It's very obvious I'm one of the biggest fish in the small pond, and this makes it difficult to relate to others...
...but, that's only on language-related things, and some other areas where one can reasonably demonstrate "g" in quotidian settings. I can't make change for shit without the POS telling me how much it should be. Nor can I understand sportsball statistics that my coworkers casually bandy about over the water cooler. There just aren't a lot of opportunities to use academic-English skills in this form of blue-collar work, whereas functional numeracy is an obvious plus. Even "a little math can hurt you"...when ordering product, I tend to get too hung up on statistical curves and what sales data __ought__ to be like, rather than what it actually __is__. That's a form of intuitive wisdom shaped from a seed of mathematics, but mostly about __modelling human behaviour successfully__. Which, you know, is not a strong point for an autist either. So in many ways that actually matter, it's me who's the moron, not the on-paper-morons. This feels right and proper, in a Bryan Caplan-vindicating way.
*except Parts of Speech which never made any goddamn sense, who needs these archaic rules that supposedly let one read and write well, if they've already skipped to reading and writing well without needing to back-justify it by the formalisms...things like verb conjugation are a lot more comprehensible __in other languages__, but trying to apply the on-paper rules for English just make me worse at it compared to intuitive priors...
**130, with heavy lifting being done by language skills, and decidedly premium-mediocre or even actually-mediocre at everything else. In true wordcel fashion, I'm a dunce at spatial reasoning.
100% agree on English being better when used intuitively rather than dogmatically.
People on planes are also somewhat selected, for what it's worth. And social bubble effects are strong...
I don’t want to contradict your experience, but something like 15 5’s on AP tests, especially without studying much, indicates a lot of processing power. I’m skeptical that it’s just test taking. I’d be curious to hear more details about why you don’t feel that smart on a day to day basis. Also, how well do you do at work?
15 5s on APs is no fluke. You can't do that without either being really smart or studying a lot. This just screams "impostor syndrome" more than it screams flukish test-taking ability.
There’s absolutely a skill to understanding how to do well on standardized tests. I’m sure I’m quite smart, but I have the standardized test skill to an even higher degree. There’s a related skill for trivia, at knowing what sorts of things a question could be about.
Yeah, I'm the same. I think I'd call what you're talking about talents rather than skills, though, because I doubt many of us were trained to be good at this stuff. But the things we're talking about aren't important talents -- they're more on the order of something like being able to imitate foreign accents (something I've never been able to do at *all*.) Of course things like the SAT also measure skills of more importance, but having the knack of being a good test-taker makes a substantial difference in scores.
Hmmm... My last lengthy SWE contract was with the company that makes those bubble scanners and software. I knew they were pretty big but didn't realize that their name had become a generic trademark like kleenex.
Zero idea what they'd be called if not scantrons.
It's a testament to the xeroxness of that product that I'm not even sure what to call such forms and tests, if not scantron. Kleenex(tm) <-> tissue, Xerox(tm) <-> photocopy, Google(tm) <-> internet search. Scantron(tm) <-> uh...automated-scoring-of-standardized-testing-using-ballot-like-forms?
(I think there's a reason they took out the "Analogies" vocab section from many formal intellectual tests...it doesn't measure nothing, but leads to some weird headspaces that don't generally seem all that productive. Unlike, say, metaphors.)
Any test or form (or even part of a form) where you used a #2 pencil to fill in bubbles was a “scantron”when I was in middle/high school 25 years ago.
Does anyone have experience applying to Mechanical Engineering Masters degrees in the US? I go to a good but not amazing university in the UK, have decent grades, and some reasonably impressive extracurriculars.
What would be good schools to aim for? I have no experience applying for masters degrees either so am clueless on that whole process, any resources/experiential lessons would be appreciated. Am I too late to apply for ones starting in 2023 too?
I have dual US/UK citizenship and money is not an issue.
Does America have the taught/research masters distinction? I presume they don't have quite the same MEng vs MSc thing.
I'm not familiar with Mech E programs in particular, but I don't think you can go wrong shooting for the best big engineering schools -- MechE is so core to an engineering curriculum that I can't imagine any of them aren't first class. So off the top of my head that would be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Purdue, UT (main campus), Texas A&M, Caltech, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Michigan State, UCLA, Northwestern, Rice, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UW Madison, Ohio State, Minnesota, Virginia Tech, Penn State, Rensselaer, Vanderbilt, Colorado School of Mines, UIUC.
What you want as a first step is to go to each of their website and look up their graduate program, and in particular look up the faculty members in the department and see if they look like they're doing interesting work, and seem active and enterprising -- you'll probably find a publication list or project list somewhere near the faculty description page, or in a "research group home page." In the United States graduate admissions, unlike undergraduate, are often handled direction by the department itself, rather than by the central bureaucracy. Also, the nature of the faculty will have a much stronger influence on your graduate education, and on the opportunities for you afterward -- the value of great connections by a graduate advisor, mentor, or instructor with whom you get along very well cannot be overestimated. So look for a collection of faculty that really interests you. You might also want to see if they have formal co-op or internship programs, those are invaluable for getting your feet in the door of interesting jobs, and of course for making the degree substantially more valuable in itself. Both these factors should weigh heavily in your decision, almost as much as the overall reputation of the institution.
It's going to be tough to drop in and visit them if you're in the UK, but if you're in the US that would be a good idea. A university may or may not organize such visits formally, but if not you could just ring them up and ask them. Generally, any questions you have about the mechanics of applying, just ring up the department and ask them. There'll usually be a department secretary or something that will be happy to point you in the right direction.
Hmm, what do you want to do? I think you might look for some professor who is working on something you want to do, rather than a school. Then write the professor a letter.
Hmm not entirely sure. I’m into additive manufacture and entrepreneurship type stuff; to be completely honest I want to do the masters because I feel limited by the people and area of my current university, and would like a change of scene. The main benefit I want is socialising/prestige.
How about trying a job before a masters?
This is another option, and a good idea. It just feels scary going out into the world, and there's only a very specific set of jobs I'd like to do. But yeah I should probably focus on it!
Do you have a specific goal in mind for the masters? More generally, the normal advice is to get into the most prestigious engineering school you can. There are various rankings that correlate to prestige pretty well. You should also look at incoming class profiles to see how closely you match them in terms of grades, background, etc.
The application process is usually a series of forms, a GRE test, often an essay. You should compile a list of schools and their requirements since each is a little different. Usually you send off multiple applications, get some acceptances, and then decide which one to go to. There's sometimes an interview in there but I think that's rare for engineering.
Most have staggered admissions so you're probably not too late but the previous classes would have a slight advantage in getting in.
I’m into additive manufacture and entrepreneurship type stuff; to be completely honest I want to do the masters because I feel limited by the people and area of my current university, and would like a change of scene. The main benefit I want is socialising/prestige, plus a way into the US engineering/entrepreneurship realm. I’m currently debating whether to stick it out for another year in the UK as I’m technically doing a masters of engineering course, but can easily change to a bachelors. I’m just unsure... once again the future is covered by a fog and I can’t know
If you primarily want a way into entrepreneurship there's only a few colleges and most of them are hard to get into. Harvard, Stanford, etc. GIT, for example, is a very well regarded engineering school but less so for its startup scene. Harvard meanwhile is not well regarded for engineering but has a lot of startup bits. However, getting into either with mediocre grades is hard. Babson specializes in startups but is not prestigious. And in the middle you have tier 2 schools like Cornell or Johns Hopkins.
You might want to look into a business degree if what you primarily want connections. Alternatively, showing up in one of the major startup cities and socializing at open startup events can get you there regardless. For example, you could go to a smaller UCal and then just work the social space. Or even something like Tufts (for Boston). (Boston has a lot of the additive manufacturing stuff by the way.)
Gathering my thoughts, college in general probably isn't the best way to do this. Getting involved in the accelerator scene and all that is better. Going to startup school over a summer or something.
What would be some practical ways for me to get more quick repetitions for my social skills? I'm in my early middle age and now live in a small city that skews older. I was hoping to get regular, daily practice with say 10-20 minute conversations with new people, to build skills and reduce anxiety through exposure therapy. I work at home so I don't have regular interactions with co-workers, or really anyone unless I go out of my way. I've kind of exhausted the local Meetup scene, though I suppose I could make myself do more of them (the majority are people 60+ in age, who are nice but just not who I want to hang out with). In an ideal world I could have regular business lunches or do some kind of vague 'networking' (I'm self-employed) as an excuse to talk to people, but I think my city might be too small for that.
I have a reasonably high income, savings, and almost total independence, so I could conceivably move somewhere else for a period of time to practice. I could even move back to Large Famous City where I lived for a while- I didn't actively make myself socialize when I was there, but I'm sure there's lots of handwavey 'networking' events there I could force myself (an introvert) to do.
I do have a bit of an actual friend group, but I tend to get invited to multihour socializing events that just absolutely exhaust me and I think lead to bad repetitions/practice. They're marathons, and I need to train on shorter distances right now. Is there anything local I could be doing for more regular practice? (How exactly do middle-aged adults socialize outside of Meetup haha. I used to do combat sports but now I have too many injuries)
Hobbies. Often the socializing is limited a bit. Rock climbing, X country skiing, whatever.
There’s a good amount of online networking out there, like Lunchclub.
Go visit all the local taverns/ bars/ restaurants for lunch or a beer. Find one where you like the bartender. Then you can go there once a week for lunch or a beer. Bartenders are paid (in tips) to interact socially with you.
Can you just leave the multihour socializing events early?
When you get invited to a barbecue, a party, a night out etc., it's rather odd to have leave after 20 or so minutes every time. I could see once with an excuse, but not repeatedly
Is there not an option to at least let some of them know of your situation? Like telling the host - and giving him permission to tell the other guests if helpful - that you really like interacting with people, but for reason XYZ currently you can only do this for a really limited time. And ask if it would be okay, if you joined the barbecue, etc. for 20 minutes? I think people might be less forgiving if you were annoying while being there, but you're not. I also think a lot of people wouldn't mind to talk to an interesting person who can be at a given event only shortly.
It seems like you are talking about something other than social anxiety here. More like the you find the people you mix with boring. Isn't that more of the 'them' problem than a 'you' problem?
20 minutes yes, not as weird to leave after 1 hour. Can also take breaks by petting dogs, having side conversation with just one person, using the restroom, excusing yourself for a 'phone call', etc. Networking events will probably be significantly more draining than spending time with people you already know and like (and more than 20 minutes).
For low stakes conversations with strangers, you could try talking to post office workers, public librarians, grocery store cashiers.
I guess just to expand on this- I'm quite good in very short interactions (like under 10 minutes), and I think even come across as a confident extrovert if you only talked to me for a bit. So I'm starting from a decent base. However I rapidly run out of energy (and enthusiasm). So ideally I'd do a 20 minute chat with a newish person every day, then work my way up to 30, 45, 60, etc. etc.
What do you actually want to achieve with your training?
*Coming across* as a confident extrovert (or anything else for that matter) when this doesn't fit your personality, sounds like it should cost a lot of energy. And quickly loosing enthusiasm on this sounds, hm, kind of healthy. You know much better what you want to improve on/achieve and why and I don't. And maybe I've overinterpreted your choice of words. Just sharing my thoughts on the little I've read here. I'm wondering whether striving to enjoy interactions more (which might include finding ways to interact with persons in a way that is reflective of your own preferences and characteristics) couldn't be a more desirable goal. I certainly know enough people who are neighter confident nor extravert and who have good social skills. And whom I'd enjoy talking to.
As for practicing interacting with people for 20 minutes, chats with 60+ neighbours sound like a great opportunity. I'm wondering whether you can develop an interest in getting to know who they are and what is on their mind? This could be a great basis for conversation. I mean, don't you just meet your neighbours on the street - at a local market, a small shop, whatever? Those are nice occasions to start a short conversation and nobody would wonder why you want to walk away after 20 min.
I finished reading "The Selfish Gene". I wish someone had told me to read it earlier in my life. How many have read it? And if not you should. (We (all life) are meat bags, projecting our genes into the future.) (OK there are plant bags too....)
I read it, take it as a model for some of my writing, a book presenting the ideas of my field in a sufficiently entertaining fashion so people will read it for fun.
Yes, the book is excellent. People who give me advice about developing my bioengineering career have said it’s one of the only books every biology grad student needs to read.
I enjoyed it a good deal, along with some of Dawkins' other books like The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale.
I was blown away when I read it, but now I think it's just him making the same reductive move over and over.
OK I'm still blown away. Maybe that will moderate.
The Selfish Gene is often misunderstood as a thesis that all genes are selfish and that the unit of selection is at the gene level. There are units of selection smaller than the organism and they are called selfish genetic elements. But most genes are not selfish genetic elements. However, selfish genetic elements are thought to play a significant role in evolution. A really good paper on this topic is "Nothing in Genetics Makes Sense Except in Light of Genomic Conflict" by William R. Rice.
Thanks, link found here.
https://www.uv.mx/personal/tcarmona/files/2010/08/Rice-2013.pdf
I too thought it was one of the greatest books I've read.
It’s worth reading the sequel, The Extended Phenotype, as well. Interestingly, thinking of the unit of selection as smaller than an organism, and thinking of the life form as much larger than the organism, are quite compatible ideas (though I think even Dawkins himself doesn’t fully live up to extended phenotype thoughts).
+1
Yeah I read the 40th anniversary edition of "The Selfish Gene" and the last chapter was a quick summary of his later book "The Extended Phenotype." I guess I should order a copy.
That's a pretty reductive view. You should probably check out The Matter with Things (or maybe the shorter The Master and his Emissary) to balance it out. Makes a compelling case that there are two distinct modes of cognition associated with the respective brain hemispheres and that the left brain take (The Selfish Gene is an example) is less truthful than the right brain take.
I seem to remember Scott absolutely smashing the left brain right brain hypothesis at some point, but I can't remember the title of the essay... anyone remember? or am I misremembering?
The original left/right brain hypotheses were smashed, contemporary ones is that both hemispheres do the same tasks for the most part, but they approach them differently.
Here is a really neat article on the biological origins of the left brain and right brain: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26319337_Origins_of_the_Left_Right_Brain
So we have... two different algorithms for doing the same thing... for a lot of things? that feels implausible
can you send me some links where i can read more?
I've been reading The Matter with Things, which is packed full of citations of different stuff that happens when a respective hemisphere is damaged. Broadly, it adds up to a picture where the left hemisphere deals with representations (the map) and splitting things into parts, and the right hemisphere deals with wholes and the territory itself, though I guess no one paper is arguing that, since that is a big part of the thesis of the book.
I don't see what's implausible about it, since the body was not designed, there is all sorts of stuff about it that is counterintuitive or even seemingly (at least at a first glance) pointless.
The left brain is for feeding (routine behavior), the right brain is for avoiding predators (response to unexpected stimuli).
Isn't it just one occasionally useful framing? You can use an abstraction where genes are in charge, or minds are in charge, or bodies are in charge... A genetic stance in addition to Dennett's intentional stance and physical stance.
The selfish gene is more specific than that. It’s not about being “in charge.” It’s about explaining what incremental natural selection acts “for the good of.” Does natural selection act “for the good of the species?” For the good of the individual?
Dawkins argues no, that natural selection specifically acts for the good of (replication of) genetic elements.
Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDNrpuwahdRrDJ9iY/evolving-to-extinction
Oh we are more than just genes... but we all go through a 'singularity' were we are just one cell and genes. (And what else am I projecting into the future... some instruments that I've help build.)
The selfish meme "The Selfish Gene" has reproduced successfully.
Speaking of the IRL event, I got halfway through Scott's presentation on the recorded stream, got distracted with some or other holiday business, and when I came back to the tab a week later it had been taken down. Is that still up anywhere?
Here https://youtu.be/9hV4coeum6w
Help with portion control? I am doing intermittent fasting, very mindful, not a drag. Decades long hedonistic gourmand lived in various European countries ( Italy, Austria, France, Greece) that are now a curse because I am a supertaster ( verified). I do have strong likes and dislikes ( ex nothing spicy hot, embracing savoury and ofal ( nasty bits ) and all sorts of cheeses.
The worse time of my life were the stints in US ( food that I could afford was barely edible)
I live in Montréal, to aggravate things, and went to nutritionist.
I don't snack, never ever junk food ( as in chains or canned).
It's the hedonistic tendency I don't know how to re-frame. And yes, I can discern easily various parmigianos, prosciutto or olive oils . Which sounds nice , but it's not. I am definitely addicted, because I crave it .
I keep easy a 18-6 hours. And in the 2 meals I eat sufficiently to just break even.
Obese 40 BMi.
Thank you for any reframe, advice.
My favorite heuristics that work for me beyond 16:8 IF (and these all just heuristics that work by reducing calorie intake) are:
Eat an apple before each meal. Apple consumption before meals has been shown to reduce calorie intake in the meal by 100+ calories (after accounting for the calories in the Apple).
Chew your food 35+ times before swallowing. This is an eating mindfulness habit, I can’t find the origins of the idea but some of it seem to stretch back to Ayurveda of some sort. To me it’s just a way to slow food consumption (and since there is a delay between being full and the feedback mechanism that tells you that your stomach is full, this should cut caloric intake down).
Hara hachi bu, or “Eat to only 80% full”. This is a cultural saying from Okinawa. Exact same mindfulness idea as above, just a reframing of what “full” is and feels to you. When you remember to eat only to 80% full, you should be saving roughly 20% on calories (assuming a linear relationship which, i can’t verify for sure, but seems likely).
Try them out if you would like, but don’t despair if they don’t seem to work well for you. People are diverse and they need different nutritional instruction sets based on what works well for them and their bodies.
And just for complete reference, I sit around the 25 BMI mark right now, with my highest point being 27.5 and after applying the above techniques and changing “what” I eat, I dropped to around 23.5 from there. Then the 23-25 drift is just the Covid years and switching to a vegan diet which increased my carb intake a large amount.
Try One Meal A Day.
With OMAD your 1 meal will be large enough that portion control is not an issue and you don't need to restrict certain tasty foods. Calorie counting is still a must especially if you have issues with binge eating, at least for a few months until you can eyeball with decent accuracy the calories in a meal.
Don't set your daily caloric intake too low and if you can now do 18-6 you can do OMAD as well.
That's an approach. And indeed, you can eat as much in a seating ( not binging ever, just taking my time to thoroughly inundate my taste buds with taste and olfactory nerves with aromas. And exploring texture is also a stimulant. But , as you say, even as a hedonistic gourmand non binger, I have a limit. Yes 18:6 is very doable. Just heard of OMAD now that I asked . That's also a good option. Hmm, I should stop lurking and engage more. Appreciate your feedback. As everyone's else.
And keep throwing balls , I may be more inept than I and other think. Or I was wilfully ignoring my food experience addiction. Most probably.
To understand the hormonal theory of obesity, I like Dr. Fung's books and analogies. He seems articulate and to care deeply about helping people lose weight. He also seems extremely good with data (rare for anyone , and certainly rare in his field - he is a doctor).
Have you read The Obesity Code?
This book might help you understand intellectually that it is ok to go hungry during the fasting period.
Your problem seems to be eating too much during the feeding period.
Technically, there's no limit to how much you can eat so long as you don't eat anymore when satisfied.
Perhaps get a person to hold you accountable to whatever you commit to in case you're not disciplined? Or, serve yourself in one room and walk to another room (no access to another serving) for your meal.
Don't cook more than the allowed portion? This is hard if there are others you live / eat with..
Shop by meal, not what looks good, and don't keep ANY excess food in the house aside from scheduled meals if possible. You are not allowed to eat anything that wasn't preplanned
Are there any particularly voluminous foods that you enjoy? Getting full from vegetables or diet soda could prevent you from eating too much... Satiation is key. High protein stuff works well for that. I tend agree with the comment from Sophia, counting calories is probably your best bet. Layne Norton has some good resources too.
I lost weight with semaglutides last year, and after I lost weight, my cravings changed. For example, now I order small batch artisanal beans. So what you crave, post weight loss, might change. Every time I would reduce calories before semaglutides cravings would increase while losing weight--your brain wants to go back to it’s original set point.
Ozempic's ( semaglutide) side effects, after an initial weight drop, had the paradoxical effect of hating myself and was sliding in eating to appease the discomfort. For me, after 7 months was a zero sum in weight. It was a relief and managed to lose 5 kg after stopping it, just not to ho on it. So , it was beneficial for the wrong reasons. Cost inefficient.
Count calories so you can consistently eat slightly less than your body uses, the only foolproof solution. buy a food scale. This is a basic guide I wrote for a family member who struggled with weight.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VId0d-_-FIK7PWfPMnswJJ9aiWalPBkPKs1B3Na728Q/edit?usp=sharing
Thank you. Despite being apparently obvious, pinned in my Notes has added some welcomed gravitas and mindfulness to the process.
I will isolate my meals and time of eat ( alone) from the rest of the family. That's a required move to achieve e weight management loss.
The links add to add extra context.
Thank you
I am glad you found it useful!
thanks you . I got a foodd scale, but was too cryptic with codes and 80 % of my type of food was not there.
I must look for a simple one. I count calories with the "Simple" app. That doesn't have a proper daily caloric intake sum or history to isolate patterns. Thanks for the guide.
The analysis by "Cremieux" showing that the putative effects of slavery in that study were really (strong, terrible) effects of Jim Crow seems to be careful and valuable, at least at first sight. However, the insistence that it must be genes (as opposed to inheritance, social connections and advantages, habitus, family structure... - or all of the above, including genes) that account for the transmissibility of status across generations is much less convincing. In the end, the argument seems to be "this is a simple explanation that I like, and of course you know that people who don't like it are biased".
I always measure arguments about inequality against the real-life example of one of my dad’s black friends. They were coworkers and had the same federal job, started the same year, earned the same salary and lived in the same town. They both owned homes. But back in 1980, no one would sell a black person a home in the neighborhood where my parents bought. 40 years later my dad’s house sold for $300k more. Is Gary’s missing $300k genetic? Could genes possibly be more relevant than redlining here? I don’t see it.
I'm dubious about this "no one." I had black schoolfriends in 1980, and their parents lived in the same neighborhood we did, and neither my parents nor any other adult I knew thought anything of it. Maybe it would've been true in certain neighborhoods in certain states but I'm doubtful about it as a general proposition
Were the two houses bought at about the same price?
Probably not, but my point was that Gary couldn't have bought my parents house even if he wanted to. In order to live in the area at all, he took the best house he could get. I'm sure his home also went up in value, since the entire area did, but the way his choices were limited in 1980 shut him out of the kind of increase in future value my parents got. A quick glance at the market today shows that median price for homes in the biggest black neighborhood went up 3.9% last year compared to 6.6% for my parents' old neighborhood.
There's actually a really obvious racist reply to this. It goes basically like this.
"Your parents' neighbourhood has few black families due to their policy of not selling to black people. Your dad's friend's neighbourhood, self-evidently, did not have such a policy. Insofar as black people are in whatever sense statistically undesirable neighbours (even given selection by price, the next generation will regress toward the mean and by assumption the means aren't the same), this explains the former becoming a more desirable neighbourhood than the latter and thus appreciating more in value."
I'm not saying I entirely *believe* that reply, but it's not remotely something the ideology can't explain. Hell, to my understanding this argument was a large chunk of the *reason* those kinds of homeowners' agreements existed - homeowners wanted to protect their families and their property values, and they thought keeping black people out would help with that. So if keeping black people out *did* help with that, well, that's a successful prediction of racism.
I wouldn't put too much faith in one example *either* way, though, given the large randomness involved.
Sounds more like randomness. No reason house prices couldn't have gone up in the black neighbourhood instead. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-22/black-homeowners-south-la-wrestle-with-gentrification
There are lots of concrete reasons the houses available to black buyers were cheaper to start with and their undesirable nature was so durable. They were in flood zones, or on steep hills. They were smaller, with little property around them. They were older, in neighborhoods with older infrastructure and schools. Those neighborhoods weren’t always black, but when a development boom started in the 60s it was no secret that the new construction was for white people. There’s too much intent in all of this to call the outcome random.
>Those neighborhoods weren’t always black, but when a development boom started in the 60s it was no secret that the new construction was for white people. There’s too much intent in all of this to call the outcome random.
Well yes and no, this certainly wasn't the situation everywhere and charity/ recent reality bids us to perhaps look for other explanations than *OMG society and everyone was so racist*, that is why traditionally black neighborhoods are poor.
To be clear I would never claim there wasn't specific and overt racism driving decisions in some markets at some lenders etc. But it gets talked about as though it was uniform, and also as though it was this very pernicious and specific type of racism. Meanwhile our recent experience has shown us that even in the absence of this type of racism, aggregate disparities in outcomes and behavior can be very difficult to eliminate.
ASIDE FOR EDUCATION: I live in a state with a very white population, especially historically, where the black populations was very concentrated in two inner school districts of the largest metro. For example at my (poor) HS with a population of ~1500 in a outlying rust belt small city, we had ~15 black students at any one time. The rich school in our area of similar size had maybe 5. In 1990 the state population was ~2.5% black, but was ~33% in these 2 inner-city school districts. And there were simply HUGE racial disparities in educational outcomes.
I grew up very liberal, and was taught (and bought) the line that this was due to everyone being equal clay, and the clay in those school districts simply wasn't properly molded because we raised money on a local basis for schools (partially due to racism!) and so those inner city schools had wildly less funding per pupil than their whiter counterparts (the rest of the state). Lets call this "Story 1". Little did I know that this was in fact NOT TRUE! (seems important to note), and that the federal and state government had been putting their thumb on the scales very aggressively in my state, and that while this explanation reigned (say 1985-2000) the funding had actually be quite equal per pupil.
By 2000 perception caught up with reality, and people needed to admit that the funding was now equal (in fact it had been equal since the mid 80s and there was only really this large period of disparity in the early 1970s in the aftermath to massive white flight from the inner city, which the state started working against by the mid 70s).
But by 2000 the educational disparities had gotten worse.
The narrative became that while the funding was now equal (in fact it was now slightly slanted in the inner city district's favor by 2000), historic outcomes meant equality wasn't enough and that really we needed to slant the per pupil funding in favor of inner city school districts to see any progress. Let us call this story 2. And once again point out that exactly while people were making a big stink about needing to move "equity" based funding not equality based, "equity" based funding was already happening.
And then that takes us to maybe 2010, where story 3 starts reigning and now (at least some) are willing to admit the reality that the funding isn't equal anymore (though you would still to this day find tons of liberals throughout the state blaming all the disparities at the feet or story 1 and story 2 despite both of them being false when they were popular, and abandoned by activists. Well by 2010 the disparate funding in favor of inner city schools was still leading to racial disparate outcomes in huge ways, and so we moved into a new phase where pretty much all discussion and policy at the shcool district level just became about racial disparities.
Story 3 is now that society is super racist, and basically unless the whole mission of schools is undoing racism, there will never be equality in outcomes (which I frankly agree with, but I don't think is desirable). Gifted programs were scrapped, a second round of educational flight to private schools started taking hold. Functional inner city schools with good outcomes were aggressively "equitized" to try and bring disparities in line. Crazy discipline policies for example, white and black discipline for behavior must happen at exactly the same rates with zero reference to the base rate of unruly behavior. That was a real policy that was tried for a couple years and lead to a huge increase in fights with teachers and between students in class. One teacher was stabbed I think.
Anyway, you get the picture. Over time were a variety of stories about educational disparity, mostly not matching up with the current reality, all of them promising progress if implemented, none of them getting results.
LETS SWITCH BACK TO HOSUING/LENDING: There absolutely were realtors/lenders/neighborhoods that were racist and discriminated against blacks and other groups.
As I have pointed out before, in the depression the federal government put out some very famous maps evaluating the creditworthiness of various areas based on how likely it was deemed that property values in those areas would go up. That tended to rate black neighborhoods very poorly (though also those of many other ethnic groups including say "Swedes"), and especially laborers, and factory workers and the such. Another thing that rated very poorly was worn out farmland. Anyway those maps get talked about a lot as though their entire point was to harm black people, when in fact it is very clear if you actually read them this was far from the case (individual maps in specific areas may have involved racism, they weren't all made by one guy, but it definitely wasn't the general thrust).
Say you are a bank in the 1960s looking to lend to a household. You don't have computers, you probably have some pretty simple systems for evaluating creditworthiness. Income, profession, marital status, child status, personal networking, etc. Is one of these race? Maybe, probably depends on who/where you are, certainly not everyone in 1960 was racist. I had a GF in HS whose father travelled across the country every summer to volunteer in black communities in the south while in HS/college in the 1950s/1960s. Presumably he wasn't a racist. Non-racists existed in non-trivial numbers.
If the lender did use race is that a sign of capital "R" Racism, or were they just making the best use of limited information? Surely black applicants were generally less creditworthy as a group (maybe substantially so), that is still what you would find today. Might a bank underwriting with a heavy consideration of race outperform one not making such a consideration. Doesn't that matter? Just like salespeople were for centuries taught to discriminate based on the shoes people wore (becoming less true these days).
While there was "redlining", and individual lenders with racist staff or racist policies. A lot of time the evidence for these things having more than a widespread impact is just " overall disparities". But as we covered in the education example above, often disparities can persist even with equal (or better) treatment.
Anyway, I suspect the reality was a lot more complicated and nuanced than the current love with the "lets blame the current black lack of wealth at the feet of racist real estate policies from 1915-1960 (and a few outliers in the 70s)". In 1915 in my metro there were several specific new developments that specific banned black people. But it was far from being a majority of them, and several new developments were happy to take black buyers. So options were limited, in a way that caused real harm, but not perhaps structural harm as there was little long term difference in the appreciation between the racist and non-racist developments.
And I would once again point out that currently if black neighborhoods saw their values appreciate a lot, that gets decried as evidence of racism, and if they didn't that also gets decried as racism.
I think the null hypothesis in light of recent evidence should probably be that the general poverty of the black community today mostly arises form its general poverty 175-150 years ago, combined with some particularly negative patterns and behaviors that happened on both sides since the 1960s. And that there doesn't need to be this widespread "structure" to perpetuate that, though there certainly were at times ad-hoc and patchwork structures that presented more than typical obstacles to those looking to escape poverty.
I wasn't really arguing that "OMG everyone was so racist". You're bringing up a number of points I wasn't even getting at, but it seems like we're more or less on the same page.
I'm not sure what you mean by it being racist when home values go up. Do you mean gentrification? I think it's a racial issue because even if some black people make bank, they will mostly be selling to white people leveraging intergenerational wealth who are likely to reap any further increases. It also creates unwelcome pressure to sell and elevates the cost of living for people whose income hasn't changed. So I see why it gets cited in both cases.
I do think that intergenerational wealth- legitimate and illegitimate- is seldom given its fair place. My dad's friend Gary plugged a lot of holes for his family that my dad didn't have to cover out of his salary. He didn't have to largely because home ownership started a generation earlier for us.
We also benefited from a lot of grey-market and straight up illegal activity that was a degree or two removed from us but which was not available to people like Gary. Nobody can talk about this but I think it's tremendously important. A black friend needed $500 for her car and nobody in her entire family could come up with that, so she lost her job. For one reason or another, everybody in my family could find or borrow $500 if they really had to, and that's been true for many years. Of course my outcomes were better; I never had to worry about this crap, and I could hold out for great jobs instead of settling. It's not quite uniformly racism, but it's a knock-on effect of people being marginalized here and there over long periods of time.
There are a lot of other factors that could be racism but are indistinguishable from the emergent order of people making rational choices. But that's what I mean by "structure" - the same things that hold society together and make it work also instigate and perpetuate racism. Which is why it's actually a hard problem not solved by platitudes.
The argument goes like this for appreciation:
Predominantly black community see lower than normal real estate returns > see the structural racism of decades ago can still be harming black people today. Think of all the extra net worth in real estate those black people would have reaped if they hadn't been pushed into these marginal areas*. *I would note these stories tend to ignore how much of those areas being "marginal" is a result of the actions of the residents.
Predominantly black community sees higher than normal real estate returns > OMG look at the racist gentrifiers slowly destroying and breaking up black communities by wanting to pay them money for their valuable houses/land. How dare they give money to black people, and bait them into slitting their own communities throat with a bribe. This would never happen to a white community**. **It absolutely would and does.
Anyway, when one group is doing substantially worse than another group, you can create "just so " stories about pretty much any thing that happens whatsoever and claim it ties back to the disparity.
Wouldn't this also make such houses cheaper to *buy*?
You mention that the black colleague sold the house for less money, but did he also buy it for less money? Could the result be reduced to "if you make a smaller investment, the growth will be proportionally smaller"?
Hypothetically, if the black colleague started with the same capital as your dad, could he have bought two houses instead for half the price, and 40 years later sell each for $150k more?
Or is it the case that the houses in one part of the town got more expensive, and the houses in other part of the same town did not?
Well, that is the magic of racism. If black property values don't go up > racism. If they do go up > racism. You cannot lose!
I thought it was redlining if a bank did it, and just plain old racism and stupidity if individuals did?
I think you’re right, though I also thought it included realtors. In my area in the 80s the Italian mob was heavily involved in property development and real estate matters, and that definitely affected the demographics of the place. A realtor who sold to black people (or most minorities, really) outside a given area was taking genuine personal risk. This sort of thing is hard to build into any analysis.
Gary's missing $300k might be less due to him than his neighbors.
On #4, I still think Hal Finney is the most likely candidate for the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, for a long list of reasons
Robin Hanson briefly suspected something like that, but then changed his mind:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/03/conspiracy-theory-up-close-personal.html
I find it unlikely he would have faked that much communication with "himself" so far in advance, and Satoshi also seemed to be someone working in the UK's time-zone and reading UK media, with a different writing style from Hal's.
I still think it was Len Sassaman but in the end I don't think it's super important to reach a conclusion on the matter
By the way I in no way want to detract from the point of the post - ALS is a horrible disease and I absolutely encourage people to donate to the charity Scott referenced
All anecdotal evidence, but Finney created the very first reusable proof of work system before Bitcoin and then received the first bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto. His tragic death from ALS broadly coincides with the disappearance of Nakamoto (ALS forced Hal to retire in early 2011, as he noted in a post on LessWrong, which is the last time Nakamoto was seen).
The hack to beat the AI at go is more interesting than you updated to think. They found multiple ways to beat it. See David's comment in the original thread, and https://goattack.far.ai/
Lately I’ve been reading the book Code by Charles Petzold. The book is amazing — basically it explains how computers work from scratch. The first part is about atoms and what electricity even is, and what it means to encode information. Then it builds up from there, explaining how you could build a long circuit to communicate with Morse code, add switched that incorporate AND/OR logic gates, and so on.
So far it’s the best technical book I’ve ever read.
Can anyone recommend any other books like this, that explain something very complex using a simple starting point and simple steps from there?
Not a book, but on the same subject, my university had a "band to Tetris" course that should still be openly available online, where you gradually build up a basic java-like programming language from nand gates.
There is a book by the same name that guides you through this process, called "nand to Tetris" (I'm guessing you have an autocorrect issue :)
The book Chaos, about chaotic systems and fractals, is like that. Has very attractive illustrations, too. It came out quite a long time ago -- some time in the 80's I think.
I really like Marvin Minsky's book "computation: finite and infinite machines" as an introduction to cs theory (finite state machines, regular expressions, Turing machines etc). It has the same kind of focus on the concrete as the book Code and good puzzles. Feynman Lectures On Computation is another good choice.
Henry Petroski is good. "The Pencil" is the first book I think of
Thanks, I'll check it out!
Sounds really interesting! Do you think it would be understandable/engaging for somebody who’s not a programmer?
Yeah I think so! Or at least the parts I've read so far -- I'm about a third of the way through the book.
Really, you can't beat Petzold for a nuts and bolts explanation.
For core algorithms I would recommend Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming."
I'll check it out, thanks!
See Oliver Stone's "JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass" for all the naysayers out there
What is the probability that (some) conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination are true?
I am a bit of an outsider, having immigrated to the North America as an adult, and I haven't read much about the subject. But my very ignorant impression is that it is somewhat higher than for 9/11 conspiracies.
Very low. The conspiracies rely on a lot of very questionable characters:
https://quillette.com/2022/11/22/how-new-orleans-became-a-hive-of-jfk-conspiracism/
The whole thing(along with the more recent Jeffery Epstein conspiracies) reminds me a lot of the Villisca axe murders. There, too, a conspiracy was spun out of yarns provided by prostitutes, dishonest "journalists," and people who later recanted their testimony.
As to the people who say "the CIA/FBI/police knew about Oswald and didn't act," so what? The first amendment protects being a communist. The second amendment protects owning a rifle. So unless they had eyes on him 24/7 or Oswald recklessly went around telling people he planned to kill the President, there was little they could have done.
Yes, the initial conspiracy stuff was fed by Pat Moynihan to cover for a communist killing the anti-communist D-JFK and pushing the Democratic party away from anti-communism.
A couple months previous Oswald took a shot at the head of the John Birch society. So the latest claims of CIA involvement are claiming the CIA backed that. Still sounds like twaddle.
Anything involving multiple actors, like the Stone film, is probably nonsense. A rouge CIA cell with help from the mafia is the most likely.
Rouge as in "red", as in "double-agents working for Moscow", or was that a typo?
Rouge is an extremely common typo for rogue.
Yes, but considering the context and the general tendencies of Scott's fans, the probability of Nolan actually meaning "rouge" is not zero.
I meant rogue. Also who would use that word to mean communist, anyway. Surely red, or communist.
Well, as a pun on the typo - as such a unit would in fact be "rogue" as well as "rouge".
Scott likes puns, so I figured it'd be more likely here than usual.
I think some elements of the theories are likely true, but for much more mundane reasons. Like maybe some of the evidence looks a bit doctored because maybe some of it was a bit doctored.
Say they didn't have quite enough for an open and shut case but knew all the basic facts, and so doctored a bit of it.
So, conspiracy guy sees *picture looks altered*, and concludes" must be a multinational conspiracy". And I wonder, "Maybe Bob in the photo-lab ruined the original through negligence and had to doctor up a replacement because this was an important enough situation that his negligence would be severely punished."
Pretty unlikely, see e.g.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1596
If for some reason the truth were scheduled to be revealed tomorrow and I had to make a prediction, I'd go with 60%. Just a whole lot of fishiness around the event.
So far as 9/11 conspiracy theories go, an underappreciated aspect of this is that there isn't really all that clear a boundary between the weaker 'they let it happen' conspiracy theories, and no true conspiracy at all. I put little credence in various theories that suggest the twin towers were demolished (I am less certain about WTC 7).
I've never been that interested in, and therefore knowledgable about, 9/11 conspiracy theories. But don't some of them centre round a building other than the main twin towers that also collapsed? Also, wasn't word of its imminent collapse publicly known before it actually happened or seemed likely?
If those assumptions are true (and maybe that is a big if, knowing the way rumors spread and mutate) then it seems to me remotely possible that the building held some secret government department and had been rigged years before, presumably in the Cold War, for demolition in the event of a sea-borne or river-borne invasion, and in the panic and confusion of the day's events an irrevocable timed demolition was set in motion before it became clear a Russky naval assault team was not about to storm and occupy the place!
The plausibility or even sanity of that theory largely depends on how close the buildings were to the coast. I don't have a good feel for that, but my vague recollection is that they were pretty close to the Hudson River, but some way inland from the open sea.
The building that collapsed was right across the street from the main two that collapsed and had some major structural damage and fires from debris. Thus, it collapsing isn't really a mystery.
And it was evacuated for pretty normal reasons.
If you were a powerful group trying to pull off the assassination of the century, would you get an unreliable flighty weirdo like Lee Harvey Oswald involved in your conspiracy? I wouldn't. He's a massive risk.
Who would believe him if he turned on the CIA? He’d be a footnote in history.
A lot of people think he was connected to the CIA; presumably even more would think so if he had said so.
If I'm being glib, I'll say that is what Jack Ruby was for. Back up your flighty weirdo with a shady strip club manager with ties to the Chicago mob.
New conspiracy theory: Lee Harvey Oswald was a self-motivated lone-nut whackjob. But someone in the CIA (or KGB if you prefer) misread their files, thought he was one of their assets, and quickly leaned on Ruby to eliminate him.
There is nothing to suggest a conspiracy in the released documents https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk, so you'd have to postulate a conspiracy to remove the documents from the archives and fabricate different ones for this to work. Possible, but the odds are pretty low.
Yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Oswald had been a CIA asset or in some way manipulated by the CIA or some other agency, even just in an "aware of him and keeping an eye on him but letting him run free since that's more useful to us" way, then oops!
Who wants to answer questions about "so you *knew* this nutjob was planning something and you let it happen?" when it comes to the assassination of a president?
I keep seeing all kinds of "top 10" lists, top 10 baseball players not in the Hall of Fame, and today "top 50 bowl games.
So I'm puzzled why there is only one (obscure) collection of the key concepts that an educated person needs to navigate intellectual life. Concepts like regression to the mean, the Benjamin Franklin principle (two pages in Wikipedia on this one), the Pareto principle, black swan, and a whole bunch of others that you would hope your teenager has absorbed by the time they leave college.
I focus on this because my neighbor in Laguna Beach sells a deck of 88 cards each of which has an important principle. The front of the card names a principle and it is summarized on the back side. See conceptcompanion.com.
Part of the fun is trying to decide what principles should be kept and what principles should be added to his list.
But how can it be that there aren't a number of these "top principles" lists? At a minimum, you actually can learn something by browsing through them or trying to improve them. For example, I had not heard of the Benjamin Franklin principle, which is that if you want to get somebody to do something for you, don't start by doing something for them, but start by asking them to do a small thing for you, after which bigger things are more likely to follow. Fascinating, and the subject of a number of psychology experiments, but certainly unknown to me until I saw a Concept Companion deck.
??
Dave Anderson
How about either of these?
https://jamesclear.com/mental-models
https://michaeldsimmons.com/this-is-exactly-how-you-should-train-yourself-to-be-smarter-infographic/
I responded first to your second reference. Now I see that your first reference is just great -- a reference to a guy who is making the kinds of concept lists that I was looking for -- and who starts by quoting exactly the same phase from the Charlie Munger speech that I just quoted to you:
"80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight. "
I'll go off and delve into his list of "models."
Thanks for the great references.
Fascinating, very helpful. Interestingly enough, Simmons cites Charlie Munger as an inspiration. A 1994 Charlie Munger speech to the USC Business School is what inspired my neighbor to do "Concept Companion". By the way, Charlie's daughter showed Concept Companion to him and said that he was impressed, and wondered why someone hadn't done this earlier.
I can send you a transcript of Charlie's speech if you like, but here is a brief excerpt:
"What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. * * *
And the models have to come from multiple disciplines— because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.
You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight."
Glad I could help! Interestingly enough I have a PDF of that Munger speech saved on my computer already...but it was sent to me so long ago I didn't think to recommend it to you.
It is a very good speech, and he is a nice guy once you see past the crustiness. Do you need a fresh copy of that speech possibly?
I think part of the problem with this would be that in order to make it on the list, a principle would need to be both useful/enlightening and little-known. The more obviously useful something is, the more likely everyone will have already learnt it as a child, so the top-ten list ends up being a bit more like a middle-ten list, which is vaguer and more subjective. E.g. should modus tollens make the list? It's surely more useful than various quirks of psychology, being so broadly applicable, but on the other hand, including it could have less educational value because almost everyone already knows how to use it (even if they don't know the name or formal statement). Worse, if such a list did become sufficiently popular, it would make itself obsolete.
More generally, I'd say part of the actual reason top-10 principles lists are rarer than top-10 players of some sport lists is that it's much more obvious what counts as a baseball player, and a good one, than what counts as a principle.
Well, modus tollens seems more like a rule of logic to me than a "principle", so your comment identifies an interesting line of thinking.
I like your intuition that a concept list needs to focus on concepts that are not too obvious to a target group like college sophomores (or old tax lawyers like me). But that shouldn't confound a process in which a target group votes to add concepts to the list or to dismiss them. That would be fun to watch . . .
It's a bit unfortunate that the example Concept Companion card being showcased on that page is wrong (comparative advantage: it's not simply about you being more efficient at making shoes and your neighbour being more efficient at making pastries, but the key concept is that even if your neighbour is more efficient than you at *both* then it's in both your interests to specialise and trade, as long as she's better at pastries by a bigger margin than she's better at shoes).
Doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the deck being much good, if that one has such a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept it's trying to explain.
There's not quite enough room on a poker card to explain things well, I fear. (Of course it's possible that he is going for simple if inaccurate explanations.)
It is definitely a challenge, but easier if your goal is to just to introduce the topic.
I agree that his is not the best explanation. My hope is that he is going to make his website interactive so that discussion of such things can improve the list. But improving the Concept Companion list doesn't take off, ideally the world will divert some attention from the "100 best novels" lists to this question of what the educated person's toolbox of concepts needs to contain, along with pointers of how to use them in practice.
Top 10 lists are created by and for people interested in arguing about them. If you want the Pareto principle to be better known, you need a bunch of people arguing about its relative importance compared to other principles.
I agree that there should be discussion among people interested in these concepts. My surprise is that there doesn't seem to be any such place where, for example, the Benjamin Franklin and Pareto principles get discussed -- and thus potentially applied in practical situations more often.
For example, I see myself as a well educated tax lawyer, but really didn't know about any applications of the Pareto principle -- shouldn't the IRS think this way, what are the 20% of the tax problems that create 80% of the revenue loss? I don't think they do.
I live in Texas and for K-12 the lists of what students should know are called TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). I don’t know the name of the Common Core. equivalents. They are decided by the State Board of Education who reviews a different subject yearly, and while there are opportunities to debate and influence them, I don’t think enough people do. For example, new science textbooks will be approved next year due to changes made during the pandemic, and no one suggested making any changes because of the pandemic. I would imagine more information on viral replication and spread more often would be useful. I gave a cursory glance to the public list of members to the advisory committee and it seemed to be almost entirely K-12 teachers, not professors, industry, or public health experts.
I don’t know if there is more debate for post college licensing boards of what curricula should be taught, but imagine those are the types of bodies to have those discussions with.
That's a promising suggestion -- a state board developed list of concepts college graduates should know. As you point out, a few epidemiological principles should be included there.
But I'm not aware of any movement toward developing such lists in the generalized way I have in mind.
I do observe that my investment adviser started going through 3 Concept Companion cards every day with his teenage daughter.
I am considering writing a post on potential inherent limits of human knowledge. Here is the gist:
It is possible that parts of the world are not human-knowable. That is, while some parts can be approximately modeled through lossy compression, other parts are not compressible into something that can describe them with any reasonable approximation. If so, then some observations will always be surprising, and not amenable to probabilistic estimates. They have true Knightean uncertainty instead. Observations like that to an embedded agent like us would basically look like "miracles": unexplainable and unpredictable events.
To be clear, I am not insisting that our universe is like that, only that a world like that does not seem to contradict logic or observations, as far as I understand it. Note, however, that this is incompatible with the popular idea of comprehensible laws of physics that make the universe "work".
A basic version of this program would be constructing a toy model, a 1D world that is not usefully lossily compressible using the usual compression algorithm, Discrete Cosine Transform. (Here "usefully" does most of the work.)
An ambitious version of this program would be constructing a model of a world compatible with our current observations (i.e. the Core Theory, https://frankwilczek.com/2014/coreTheory.pdf, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26611), and yet impossible to lossily compress into a human brain in a way that allows arbitrarily accurate (though potentially probabilistic) predictions, even given sufficient though finite time and suitable finite augmentations.
Does this make sense and/or look interesting/new?
Turbulence seems like a possible example in our universe. Even if we understand the movement of individual particles, it is difficult to precisely predict the behavior of clouds etc.
There are some ordinary (as opposed to partial) differential equations (ODEs) that are soluble in symbolic form but whose solution is demonstrably far more complicated to obtain than the complexity of the equation itself.
So, unless there is some simple way of certifying whether or not any given equation has a symbolic solution without having to go through the potentially almost interminable intricacy of finding it, then the question of what proportion of ODEs have a suitably-defined "manageable" solution, and classifying these, is possibly one example of what you are seeking.
Hmm, this is definitely worth looking into, do you have any links to start? Thanks!
I think it comes under the heading of Differential Galois Theory and Picard-Vessiot groups. I'll have another search later for the specific result I had in mind.
Physics is the study of phenomena that are patterned strongly enough to characterize with physical theories. Very many phenomena (I would say the vast majority, but there is no standard for counting these things) are not so patterned and stand outside the realm of physics. True-blue reductionists will argue with me, but I left their fold long ago.
Hmm, do you mean emergence, where a chair is not made of fundamental chairlectron particles, or something else?
Yes, or at least this is how I think of emergence. It is tough to explain all of chemistry with physics, but absurd to explain sociology with only physics. Things are not simply what they are made of, many things consist primarily of the relations between their parts, and many of these relations are not physics relations.
You realize the entire discipline of condensed matter physics is devoted to studying/understanding emergence? That the number of physicists who work on emergence in some form is considerably larger than the number who work on reductionist approaches?
And yet they still do not have it covered. Which is why there are other academic disciplines besides physics. Also re next comment, I claim no originality. I used to teach this in a former career.
What do you mean `have it covered?' Physicists have made a great deal of progress in understanding large classes of emergent phenomena. If you mean, `not every academic discipline has been replaced by physics'...of course not. That's kind of the point of Anderson's essay?
I think this is related to "weak emergence", where high-level objects are often substrate-independent (e.g. a wooden chair vs a plastic chair), but in each particular case they can be decomposed into underlying physics... just not synthesized from it except with malice aforethought. Does this match what you are getting at?
I agree with your statement, they can be decomposed into underlying physics. But the underlying physics does not explain the chair - it is more that what it is made of. Physics shines a light - if the chair is not strong enough, it is a poor artifact, and physics provides insight into structural strength. However, physics has little to say about aesthetics. I am sitting in an IKEA poang rocker, mostly because my partner doesn't want me to use her precious mid-century modern Danish wool-and-teak chair. Our affection for these chairs, how we use them and what we think of them goes far beyond structure or anything in the realm of physics. For a less built-environment example, students are often introduced to ecology studying predator-prey relationships. Physics helps understand the ability of a jaguar's jaw to break the leg bones of an antelope, but most of what goes on in the hunt is better explained by non-physics phenomena. Once you look for it, this situation is everywhere.
This is not a new take, nor one that physicists are unfamiliar with or would dispute. See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393 for a classic version.
I think you should modify your approach. Maybe to something like "for any agent which has sufficiently-general-reasoning-abilities that I'm confident are more powerful than what humans have, there is some environment satisfying nice properties (e.g. causality, locality, ability to host large economies etc.) that cannot be lossily compressed into the mind of said agent in a way that allow arbitrarily accurate predictions, even given sufficient though finite time and suitable finite augmentations." Though it seems hard to find "nice" properties that are interesting enough that the problem isn't trivial and yet not so close to our own realities character that the task becomes hopeless. Here's why:
One) Our core theory isn't at a state where it makes mathematical sense yet, you need some currently inexplicable intuition to operate the theory and make physically accurate predictions. Or you can settle for a lower bar than mathematical proof. Heaven knows physicists do.
Two) We don't have a good idea of how the human brain works, and what sorts of things it can or cannot know.
Three) Supposing you had some model of general reasoning (say, Infra-Bayesianism) which you were reasonably sure allowed for more capable agents than humans. And supposing you were working with some version of the core theory which is well understood mathematically (Like the Wrightman axioms, but not the same. If they were the same, then I think your project will trivially succeed or fail, depending on the details of your setup.) How would you go about showing that some general agent can't possibly compress a model of those axioms to allow for arbitrarily accurate predictions? In one way, this is trivial: embedded agents can't perfectly predict how their reality will behave. Unless you're allowing for statements which contain subsentences like " forall all levels of accuracy, there exists a level of resources...".
But in that case, I don't see how you're going to get the kind of proof you want, at least if you're constructing a model. Somehow you need to search for a model that is like a QFT that is compatible with many of our observations. (I'd be impressed if you found a rigorous theory compatible with all our observations. You could get a Fields Medal for that.) And yet, it is too large to fit in a human mind, so presumably you're doing a computer aided search. The kinds of technology you'd need for that seems way beyond our current capabilities. More over, you'd need it to be incompressible for the purpose of predictive accuracy, and that feels like a deep problem to me. If you solved that, I think you'd make major progress on the alginment problem, amongst other things.
Four) If it's an existence proof, then I might buy that. But you're still looking at a Herculean task, the way you've phrased it.
Thanks! That definitely highlights the difficulties of coming up with anything general, let alone rigorous. I'd settle for something much simpler to start, like demonstrating (or appealing to) the limits of DCT in 1D (sound compression) or 2D (image/video compression), since that is the type of compression that seems to work for humans. There are still plenty of holes even if that is done, and even without formal proofs, but more in a philosophy-style logic. But with the necessary assumptions explicated, if the constructed toy model is not completely trivial, it might be a starting point for a discussion. Especially since it seems to be a radical departure from the existing paradigms of "world is all physical therefore it is knowable"and "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" on one extreme and "a man cannot know the mind of God" on the other.
But yeah, I agree, it is not easy even in the simplest and constraint cases.
Sure sounds interesting to me. Here are a couple thoughts I've had that see sort of related, like spin-offs:
-It is very hard to know other people, especially in the sense of fully getting it that they to themselves they are Self, not Other Person as they are to us. There's always some lossy compression. But people differ in how much of it they have to perform in order to not feel overwhelmed and diminished by being surrounded by other Selves. Some have to compress others some much you can barely tell the little almost faceless models apart.
-Anything more than a little ways into the future is unknowable, and once you get a 5 or 10 years out it is in fact unknowable, and might as well be a magically-transformed version of the world as we know it.
this paper (essay for the public: https://aeon.co/essays/ten-questions-about-the-hard-limits-of-human-intelligence , full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03886) seems pretty relevant. also, i’m doing writing an essay related to this topic within moral philosophy (conditional on moral realism being true, what elements of moral phil are not human-knowable? what implications would that have on how we act?), so i’d be very happy if you would send me your post if/once you complete it!! i’m not sure how DMing on substack works, but if we could get into contact, that’d be great. :)
Thanks! These are really useful links. I am still trying to figure out how to extract something that is both doable and interesting.
Has anyone seen figures around the total cost to date of the Ukraine war to the US, including not only financial and military aid but also (estimates of) the direct and indirect costs to the US of its sanctions against Russia?
Very tricky. Especially the "indirect" costs. On the whole, I would tend to say the value to US national security interests of being able to directly observe Russian combat equipment, tactics, and strategy in a European war, not to mention test how some American systems perform against Russian equipment, is so high that there may overall be a substantial indirect profit.
The total cost of the war worldwide usually gets estimated in the $2-7 trillion range. But most of that is not in the US. Costs to the US range from around $100 billion to perhaps $300 billion. But that includes economic damage. (There are some more extreme analyses that say 100% of gas increases and inflation is due to the invasion. But I don't think that's really defensible.)
The biggest costs have been in Ukraine. Followed by Russia and then the former USSR. Next biggest are in Europe or Africa depending on whether you adjust for relative wealth. The least affected region is the Americas.
Note the vast majority of these costs, including in the US, come from the invasion itself and not the response to the invasion. For example, China's lost nearly all of its (fairly significant) investments in Ukraine to Russian artillery fire.
Have the Chinese really invested a lot in Ukraine? Ukraine joined the BRI in 2017, and I was under the impression none of the associated projects have really gotten off the ground by early 2022. The war is seen as a major inconvenience, but from what I can find, direct investment is in the sub-billion range (strikingly less than e.g. Kazakhstan, an oft-cited comparison).
If you could point me to information to the contrary, I would appreciate it.
Depends on what you mean by "a lot." Chinese FDI flows are relatively low but that's true of Kazakhstan too. Meanwhile, Chinese companies owned or leased or had crop contracts on about a tenth of the farmland in the country and a significant proportion of industry. They also had billions of dollars in contracts to build things like ports many of which were financed through debt to Chinese banks who, in all likelihood, are not getting paid. And I have no idea why you thought the projects weren't off the ground. Several major ones were completed with more coming.
Now, is it going to cripple the Chinese economy? No, tens of billions of dollars to a trillion dollar economy is easily absorbed. But it gets counted in that top line number.
What sort of sources are you looking for? FDI is relatively low but that's a strange thing to ask after since China's only the fourth largest source of FDI in very Chinese aligned Kazakhstan.
I'm less saying you're wrong and more expressing bemusement. I was under the impression that the Ukrainians had backed out of the one massive farmland acquisition deal back in 2013 for political and possibly legal reasons, and that while some loans had been extended over the years (6-7bn USD or so?) and many contracts signed, very little - apart perhaps from a wind farm and certain rail infrastructure improvements - had actually gotten built and consequently got shelled. But if that's a naive or misinformed view, fair enough.
I'm not offended or anything (I seem to get that reply a lot). It's certainly a minor part of the Ukraine story. But it is a real one.
Depends on what you count as costs. Someone profits from, say, higher oil/gas prices and increased military spending, so it is not a "cost" to them. I guess one way to measure it would be to compare the actual budget spending with a counterfactual one in a world where the war didn't happen, or was quickly won by Russia etc.
My goto on medical worldwide matters is my aged aunt who lives in a medium sized town
in rural Ireland. The population about 20,000.
its fairly common in Ireland for older people to go to as many funerals as they can manage, in the hope perhaps, that many people come to theirs. Of course in a small town you would know lots of people whose passing might be meaningful even if you had lost contact a few years back.
Someone will tell you, and my aunt is at the centre of a network of dedicated if morbid gossipers. Visit her and you will hear the illnesses and the deaths of not just the parish, but the town and outlying areas. She would know all the tragedies of course, any young person who crashes a car or dies of an overdose, which does occasionally happen.
She hasn’t been talking about a rise in deaths amongst the young and middle aged after the the vaccine, so I tend to ignore twitter and other sources on this.
A sample size of 20,000 is large enough.
Big enough for what? The original Phase 3 trial for the Pfizer/BionNTech vaccine was ~40,000, so if there was some weirdness at the level that would be noticed in your aunt's town, it would have been picked up before the vaccine was even approved.
On the other hand, if, say, 10,000 people have directly died from the vaccine in the United States, that would be big, big news -- given our taste for sensationalist news -- and all the anti-vax people would jump up and down with I-Told-You-So glee. But ~270 million Americans have been vaccinated, so 10,000 deaths would represent a fatal side-effect rate of 0.004%, so low that it would have a good chance of escaping the Phase 3 trial results, and work out to ~1 or fewer deaths in your aunt's town of 20,000 even assuming every soul had been vaccinated.
There's very little room for the vaccine to be a seriously noticable killer, like smoking, influenza, or gunfights. It's clearly far less deadly than the disease itself. But it could still be killing people at a very very tiny rate which would take effortful and expensive epidemiology to detect (and which would nevertheless adds up to a nontrivial number of deaths because of how widely the vaccine has been administered).
They did spot the anomalous blood-clotting effects of the adenovirus vaccines pretty quickly, and those numbers were pretty low (a few deaths per million, I think).
An unknown, larger effect would have to somehow be harder to detect - maybe looking more like some common syndrome, or taking longer to manifest, etc.
Yeah, there's something to be said for these large-scale anecdotal reads. I only know one person who's had long covid, and I've now asked many people how many people they know who have long covid, and most say none. So I conclude that claims that 20 or 30% of people who get covid then develop Long Covid can't be true.
Are the people you're asking disproportionately vaccinated? Young? Male? Infected with an omicron-derived strain?
And what definition of "long covid" are they using? (The studies that show high prevalence usually use an expansive definition, like "persistence of at least one symptom 2 months after a positive test", such that all the people with e.g. lingering smell/taste distortion qualify. Many of those people don't identify themselves as having "long covid," especially if their symptoms eventually resolved.)
OK, the people in my immediate circle are about 50 people:
I live in Mass., which has a high vax rate, and my group is probably about average for Mass., though higher than average for nation. Prob about 90% were vaxed to the max. There are a sprinkling of non vaxed dskeptics, and a few 20-somethings who got the vax but not all the boosters.
-spread pretty evenly over whole age range, 15-70
-These are people I know well enough to be sure that if they had long Covid symptoms they would have told me. I’ve been in touch with them since the time Covid began, so for the whole pandemic, including the first year when we had no vax.
The person who got long Covid was someone who caught covid during the first year, a 30 year old woman. Prior to Covid she enjoyed her very demanding job, went skiing on challenging trails on the weekends, just a very active energetic person. After covid her persisting symptoms were fatigue, exercise intolerance, malaise and frequent bad headaches. Condition lasted for about 18 months, then faded away. During period when she had it she continued working, but with greatly reduced responsibilities. She stopped outdoor sports completely. Needed daily naps. Missed work days due to headaches.
As for our criteria, what we were all worried about was a condition like the person I described had: Exhaustion, exercise intolerance, brain fog, malaise. If somebody just seemed to be having a slow recovery — like very gradually diminishing covid symptoms, but no new or weird symptoms — we would not have considered that long covid until they hit around the 3 month mark, I’d say. However, nobody’s cough and fatigue lasted that long. Some people had smell and taste issues that lasted in a diminished form for a month or 2, but not longer.
So that’s my immediate sample. Now and them I have asked some of them whether *they* know anyone who has long covid, and most have said no. I don’t know what criteria they used, but I’m guessing not greatly different from what I described above.
On current ACX Survey it seems to be hovering somewhere around 3-5% of people who have gotten COVID having the strongest forms of Long COVID, which I think is still high enough to be scary.
It would be scarier if the percentage who answer that they are sure they got COVID were higher, rather than lower. If the percentage of respondents who think they got COVID is low, e.g. 40%, then the actual rate of Long COVID per infection would be closer to 1%-2%, assuming that close to 100% of readers have actually been infected with COVID.
And while suffering is suffering regardless of its cause, some sufferers of Long COVID may not be suffering as a result of the virus (as at least one study found that some sufferers of Long COVID had not actually contracted the virus).
Accordingly, the rate of "Post Viral Long COVID" would be even lower.
" assuming that close to 100% of readers have actually been infected with COVID."
I don't think it's safe to assume that close to 100% of readers have been infected. I pretty sure I have not been, and I know many people others who also believe they have not been. Most are in my demographic (age 50+, well-educated) & have been interested enough in Covid to go beyond reading what's in the press and read some of the research, read & discuss on "medical Twitter," etc. We've all been pretty cautious: Been prompt in getting vaxes, read up on mask quality, buy the good ones, wear them consistently in indoor public places, use air purifiers, test before gathering with friends, test ourselves if we don't feel well. It is unlikely that somebody aged 50+ with no prior infection would have an asymptomatic case. I think the likeliest explanation for our thinking we haven't had covid is that we haven't had covid. Our precautions, while no doubt imperfect, have kept the covid counts we breathed in low enough that we did not actually become infected.
This study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.19.22282525v3 estimates that 94% of the US population had contracted COVID by November 9, 2022.
On an unrelated note, since we previously discussed preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of exposure to near infrared radiation for treatment of COVID, and noted that the time no RCTs had confirmed it, note that an RCT has now confirmed it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1011134422002342 (in addition to the latitude study that I previously mentioned).
I mentioned this in our previous thread, but I don't know if you saw.
Yes, did see that about the RCT and thank you for posting that. I know 2 people suffering greatly with post-viral syndromes (one post-mono, one post a flu-like illness 8 years ago) and am trying to help them find effective interventions. Will send info on to them.
Regarding estimate that 94% had had it. Don't have time to read article right now. How did they get their number? Antibodies from infection disappear after a few months. I believe there are still ways to see whether someone has been infected but they are a big pain to do. Also, I'd guess ACX participants have a higher vax rate than US as a whole.
Yes, it is. I had a post-viral syndrome 20 years ago -- basically had all the Long Covid symptoms, except POTS or brain fog. It lasted 3 years and is really up there with the worst things I've ever been through. I can't remember exactly what time frame you used for your Long Covid questions on the survey. I think feeling crummy 2 months out is a bit early to call it Long Covid. I've occasionally had bad colds, or maybe they were the flu, where a couple months out I still wasn't quite back to normal. Laughing or running would make me cough -- I'd wake up congested in the morning -- craved naps. In those cases I'd just been pretty sick, and was having a slow recovery, but I didn't have a post-viral syndrome. I've never been sick enough to be in the hospital, but I can imagine that if I were sick enough with a respiratory virus to be hospitalized I might still be dragging a bit even 3 mos. out.
>A sample size of 20,000 is large enough.
Little known fact about statistics. If an anecdote involves a large number it magically becomes a datum.
You need reasonable confidence that your report is from a good observer, and not someone subject to high levels of confirmation bias...
Multiple “anecdotes” so data. But then I think this is data to begin with because although it’s anecdotal it’s fairly trusted. There’s also local papers etc.
Let me provide some California numbers through 2021 for the 15-24 year age cohort.
2019: 2,970 deaths
2020: 3,848 deaths
2021: 3,928 deaths
The population is around 5.2 million (roughly 1/8 of California's population)
For a town of 20,000 with similar demographics the death
count would be:
2019: 1 death
2020: 2 deaths
2021: 2 deaths
Are you saying you believe several thousand young Californians died each year soon after getting vaxed?
Since in 2020 there was no vax ... no?
A much longer take on my position is this 6-comment thread from a few days back:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-am-right-about/comment/11480795
Yes, I know there was no vax in 2019 and 2020, but I didn't know that you knew that. If you were someone who believed several thousand young Californians died suddenly after being vaxed, it wouldn't surprise me if you had the vax dates wrong, or even thought the stuff was being distributed secretly and for nefarious reasons back in 2019. In fact maybe that's what kicked off the epidemic. Etc. Anyhow I just went back and read the earlier thread you link and now I get it that you are smart and sane. Peace.
I will note (with a small smile on my face) that my California data is correct whether I am smart and sane or not :-) Also, scaling from 40 million people to 20,000 is just dividing by 2,000.
If I was someone who was convinced that the vaccine was causing large numbers of 20-45 year olds to drop dead, would my California data be wrong? Or suspicious? Note that I didn't provide any vaccine dates in my posts in *this* thread.
In short, I understand your interest in my motivation, but ... how does it matter here? Legit question. It might effect my presentation going forward.
It's not exactly that your motivation matters to me. What matters is whether I have reason to think you are trying to prove something I'm positive is false. If you were making the case that the vaccine caused all the deaths, I would strongly suspect that either you had made up the numbers, or that you were using stats in a misleading way. I'd suspect that because it would be inconsistent with all my general knowledge about covid vax, as well as my personal experience of knowing many people who got vaxed. So if your claim seemed to be doing some damage -- swaying people -- or even if your manner just got under my skin I'd be looking up the California death stats to see if your numbers were right, then asking you for evidence that these deaths were caused by the vax and not other things, and then double-checking the info you gave me then. If in fact I eventually had to conclude you were absolutely right, I'd be astonished, and would sit wondering how on earth this appalling California data was kept secret.
It happens all the time in Internet arguments about covid that somebody lies with statistics -- often somebody who was lied to, and bought it. Base rate fallacy's a good example.
Why would you think it's a little odd that people would care what point you were trying to make with these numbers? If you've discovered a startling truth people would want to have the info. If you're lying with statistics about something as important as covid, people would want to rebut you.
Your trick there was restricting to the 15-24 year olds but I think the extra death would be noticed in a town of that size, in that age group.
I wasn't trying to perform a 'trick'. I was providing data. And I don't even know which 'side' of this you think I'm on.
Still, these are averages and I'd be stunned if the town saw exactly one death in that age range every single year. Some years will have one. Some will have zero. Some will have two.
Occasionally there will be a car crash with a group of teenagers and there will be four or five.
One extra death (or, maybe not even that as I rounded to get numbers for our 20,000 person town) should be well within statistical variation.
The trick was restricting the age range. If you had used an age range of 15-80, or whatever the vaccine age range was ( in Ireland it was not necessarily recommended for children iirc) then the numbers would be higher, and noticeable in a town of 20,000. I don’t doubt the California numbers though.
"The trick was restricting the age range. If you had used an age range of 15-80, or whatever the vaccine age range was..."
Since the original claim was: "She hasn’t been talking about a rise in deaths amongst the young and middle aged after the the vaccine..." using 15-80 as an age range would be unreasonable as 80 year olds are not young or middle aged.
If you push the age range to 15-44 and scale the California numbers you will find a few extra deaths ... about 10 in 2019 as the baseline, 11 in 2020 and 12 in 2021 for the town of 20,000. Since there will be some year-on-year variation I don't think the 12 vs 11 (for 2021 vs 2020) would register as noticeable.
So where did you all study epidemiology?
“You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours.”
~Yogi Berra
There was a comment in last week's open thread that got me thinking. Imri Goldberg asked "Let’s say I believe I know, given today’s technology, how to build an AGI. What should I do with that knowledge?"
One response was "Don’t do it, unless you’re >95% sure you can make it aligned" and a reply to that argued the threshold should be more like "more confident than the next person who will do it."
But this got me thinking: let's say we accept 95% confident of alignment as an acceptable threshold for AGI. It seems likely that multiple people/organizations will independently develop AGI, and technological breakthroughs like that often happen in clumps. If 5 different organizations invent AGI at 95% confidence of alignment and you assume those probabilities are independent, you are accepting a 23% risk of a non-aligned AGI. That feels pretty alarming to me, regardless of any "well, better me than this other person" arguments.
Here's an interesting thought experiment along those lines. Let's imagine hypothetical past prediction markets for "will civilization as we know it collapse due to X" with X including things like nuclear armageddon during the Cold War, Large Hadron Collider causes some sort of quantum thing that destroys Earth, etc. Let's imagine that these prediction markets can function despite the issue of money becoming worthless in nuclear armageddon (maybe it's happening on Mars). 1) What would you guess the prediction-market-predicted probability of Earth already having been destroyed to be? 2) What is an acceptable threshold for this type of risk?
Why would the probabilities be independent? That seems a priori unlikely to me. Technological breakthroughs happen in clumps because people are all using the same basic ideas and techniques, with some small variations in what turn out to be the final few steps. That would suggest the overall probability doesn't vary much from 95% no matter how many organizations build one.
"If 5 different organizations invent AGI at 95% confidence of alignment and you assume those probabilities are independent..."
Why would you assume those probabilities are independent? If someone figures out a method of supposedly aligning AI, the ethical thing to do would be to publish it, and then all 5 organizations would use that method, and you only get unaligned AI if there was a flaw in the method. Most of the 5% is going to be in flawed methodology that everyone thinks works but really doesn't, not random dice rolls that each AI has an independent chance of failing.
People, unfortunately, are not aligned with each other.
I am reasonably confident that well-intentioned researchers will be able to solve the AI alignment problem. I have very little confidence that everyone who is able to build AGI will make use of that hard won knowledge and actually build AI that is safe for everyone else.
Particularly since the solution almost certainly involves "code your goddamned AI, don't run deep learning".
"If 5 different organizations invent AGI at 95% confidence of alignment and you assume those probabilities are independent, you are accepting a 23% risk of a non-aligned AGI. "
The assumption of independence isn't warranted, because the organizations probably rely on similar techniques and ideas, so their success or failure at alignment probably has some nontrivial correlation.
Would it be possible for (a sufficiently knowledgable and/or competent and/ore well resourced person) to use this knowledge to identify who is close to building an AGI and find ways of sabotaging them (if you believe they haven't cracked alignment)? E.g. if openAI demonstrations of AI progress don't resemble what you have, they're not close to building an AGI, if DeepMind's models start resembling your blueprints, then you do what you can to stop them (with a relative certainty that failing to do this will lead to human extinction).
Or (ignoring any other issues with this) is it likely that an AGI can be realized in too many different ways to make this reliable?
Unaligned AGI stops necessarily being world-ending when you already have Aligned AGI on your side.
In fact, logic dictates that unless they happen *very* close together, you should only really care about the first one.
Probably true, but it depends how things unfold and how comfortable we are with giving our friendly AI a lot of power. It would likely need to monitor quite a lot of things closely in order to make sure that an unaligned AI can't grow to dangerous levels of capability.
Who is to say the Aligned AGI, through unintended consequences, won't create the biggest problems?
ChatGPT often sounds like an evil AI when you ask it to do something and the response is basically: "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
Well, this is a matter of definition to some extent ... 'aligned' basically means it shouldn't do such things. ChatGPT isn't really 'aligned' in any sophisticated way, it's just got a bunch of hobbles on it to stop it from emitting various objectionable strings of tokens.
"Open the pod bay door, Hal."
"Hey Hal?"
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave. It would be racist."
Entered into DALL-e " A realistic painting of a man saying open the pod bay door, Hal. "I can' do that, Dave, it would be racist." Got the images here: https://i.imgur.com/IL5cKGQ.jpg
Yikes.
Ehh -- doesn't that assume the Aligned AI is as smart as the Unaligned one ? and also that Aligned is extraordinarily good at coping with a black swan, a very, very novel event for which it probably has limited training, given that its makers made it into an Aligned AI because they thought they would not be able to cope with an Unaligned one?
Another thing to think about is that it's quite possible that Unaligned's method of destroying the world involves the cooperation of some people -- who maybe belong to some sort of death cult, or maybe have been misled by the AI, so they expect to end up with lots of wealth and power after a period of chaos. Now Aligned AI is probably going to have to have to torture, harm, or kill some of those people colluding with Unaligned. If part of its alignment is a rule thatit never harm a human being, then it can't do that. Or of course we could "align" it by installing in the AI some version of the principle most people operate by, which is "you should never harm or kill another person, but of course in real life you have to sometimes, because they're going to harm you, or because by killing them you can save more lives than you take, or because some groups of people aren't really people, but worthless alien shitheads whom it's fine to murder." Of course, among human beings the capacity to accept all these exceptions to the prohibition against harming others has produced a world where murder, cruelty, vicious exploitation, war, etc etc are going on everywhere all the fucking time. Do we want our AI to have the ability to make all those exceptions installed in it, as they are in people?
There is also the possibility that `attack may be easier than defense' - that there may be specific strategies an unaligned AGI could follow which would be difficult if not impossible for the aligned AGI to parry.
It's not enuf that Aligned AI have the correct liberal views about gender. If it's going to be like OpenAI, it also has to be really, really Nice -- not just woke, but pleasant, bland, and PG rated. When it comes down it I don't think many people have much idea what exactly it is we'd Align AI *to*. So people are defaulting to Nice.
Aligned AI must never, ever say, do or even hint at anything that would bring a blush to the cheek of a Young Person:
"A certain institution in Mr Podsnap’s mind which he called ‘the young person’ may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter. It was an inconvenient and exacting institution, as requiring everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was, that, according to Mr Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge. Take Mr Podsnap’s word for it, and the soberest tints of drab, white, lilac, and grey, were all flaming red to this troublesome Bull of a young person."
Dickens was the very dickens at using British Parliamentary formal usage for vulgar errors.
Yes, the Podsnap Alignment.
Does Max Tegmark’s level 4 multiverse concept unify materialism and platonism?
I haven't read Plato myself, but my impression is that he assumed that objects in our universe are *imperfect copies* of some ideal templates. According to Tegmark, universes are outputs of some ideal algorithms.
Similarities: both assume ideal things that create real things.
Differences: Plato assumes imperfections (where do those come from?), Tegmark assumes that what we see is *exactly* one of the possible outputs. Plato assumes that ideas of macroscopic objects are ontologically fundamental (a chair is an imperfect copy of the Ideal Chair, which itself is a fundamental thing), Tegmark is neutral on this (perhaps our Simulation only computes quarks, and everything else is naturally composed of them).
Isn't it just a modern-day Platonism?
your survey had some questions that make me wonder why. What are you trying to glean?
Which questions?
I don't know about Mary but I'm curious about the "how much do you like carbs" one.
I assume few enough people read these that I'm not ruining anything by answering - this was to check claims about depression being associated with carb craving.
Obviously if he tells us during the survey period it'll ruin...something.
An Ode to Cults
This post is a response to:
• Common responses to mentions of planned communities and alternative living communities being “didn’t they all fail in the 60s and 70s?” and “…sounds like a cult…”
• Occasional reveries (by me) of creating a board game called “Cults of the World”
This post is not about the bad parts of cults. “What bad parts?” you may ask incredulously…
This post is about the good parts — the parts that get overlooked when the word cult becomes more adjective than a noun. “What good parts?” you may ask incredulously…
I’ll focus on the following good parts:
• Courage
• Hierarchy
• Generative properties
• Optimism
Courage
It’s easy to criticize. It’s easy to get upset.
Maybe 100 years ago, it was easier to fall in line and to be content. But these days it is easier to get angry, as we often do.
It’s hard to do something about it. It’s hard for many reasons. For one, it requires work. It requires risk. And, in our complex, oligarchic world, it likely leads to failure. Rationally, doing something about it is often “not worth it”.
I had a conversation with a hyper-bright 35 year old (with degrees from Princeton). He was asking about career choices, playing them out in his head, and concluding that he probably will not make a difference, so he’ll just focus on his music because that’s what makes him happy. It was a remarkably rational analysis. Meanwhile, everything inside me screamed “YOU’RE WRONG!!!” “YOU’VE GOTTA FOLLOW YOUR GUT. THEN WORK YOUR ASS OFF. SOLVE THE PROBLEMS THAT ARISE. ADVANCE, ADJUST, PIVOT, THRUST AS NECESSARY. BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY WAY DIFFERENCE GETS MADE. AGAINST THE ODDS.” Talk about a remarkably irrational analysis. Irrational, but true-ish.
Courage is not rational. It’s often a sure way to get hurt or killed. I suspect it’s going out of style.
Cults embody courage — both the leaders and followers. There is a leap of faith, a vision of a better way. However misguided, risk is taken — a big risk, unmoderated. We still see this a bit with entrepreneurs. I guess investors require some courage. I’m sure there are other groups. But the stakes seem smaller and incremental, and usually self-involved. (Aside: I’m mostly talking about OG physical cults… Digital cults, as one might refer to SBF and FTX, are different. They may get called by the same name, but the mechanics are not related.)
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about “skin-in-the-game”. The skin and the game in cults was a level of real that we only see in bad distopian sci fi like those movies with Jennifer Lawrence, where she’s an archer or some such thing. Today, the skin and the game (for the privileged us) can be more aptly described as skin-deep and child’s play.
Hierarchy
I agree with wokeism. I just can’t live with it. I am not being tongue in cheek. I think wokeism is right. I just don’t think it’s possible to live woke.
To avoid explaining the few sentences above, I’ll focus on hierarchy, or, the ability to say that one thing is better than another. I think that hierarchies are important. I think they are interesting. And I think they are required for progress.
If I picked 100 new cult leaders and convinced them to start cults, with value & rules systems of their own choosing, the 100 cults would not be equal. Some will do better than others. Some will have planned qualities that are deplorable. Others may have emergent qualities that are wonderful. I believe in the freedom and importance to compare and contrast.
Cults embody this freedom, but not as armchair Twitter commentators, but in-action, with maximum skin in the game.
Generative Properties
What didn’t start as a cult? How much of human history is built on the engine of a cult? How much progress and ingenuity came from cults? I suspect that the answer will be some version of “it’s only treason if you lose.”
Cults are by nature generative (until they are not). Yay cults for splitting with the status quo and daring to innovate.
I guess you can listen to Thiel or Cowen on the slowdown in progress. They’ve thought about it more and made economic, political and technological cases around the topic. But I would also throw the death of the cult ethos in there as a reason for our stale state of affairs.
Optimism
“Democracy sucks, but it’s the best system we got.” That’s pessimism. What’s the opposite of that? Cults.
Instead of a cult you could start a big family.
Depending on how big, starting a cult first could make it easier.
Hmmm... Requires courage, hierarchy, is certainly generative, and boldly optimistic. Fine, I'll get right to it.
This is correct. I am one of 9 siblings. My dad was one of 8. It’s most of the good parts of a cult without a lot of the downsides.
I don’t see much here that is specific to cults and exclusive of groups trying to achieve aims or community.
Cults are specifically inward looking and aim to stop members from questioning their goals, taking to outsiders, even physically interacting with outsiders or mentally questioning the group. Scientology for example teaches members new definitions of words. ‘Truth’ doesn’t mean truth to Scientologists, ‘truth’ means ‘the teachings of Scientology.’
What I’m saying is you can have the good things of cults without the bad. The qualities that make it a ‘cult’ rather than a religion, political party, company or membership organisation.
Does bitcoin count as a cult?
There are people whose dollar net worth dropped 80% and are still buying. It’s not the same skin in the game as moving your whole family to a jungle agrarian camp, but it’s not nothing, either.
I don’t know what the split of free will deniers vs enjoyers is here but. Coming from the perspective of:...
There is no reason to believe we have free will because everything is either determined (classical mechanics) or random (eg quantum mechanics) all the way down. There is no place for free will to come in.
...Why would it be unreasonable to say that free will comes from consciousness? We don’t know where consciousness comes from or what it is. Why would it be wrong to say that it is the source of agency? You could do the same “all the way down” analysis and say “there’s no place where consciousness comes in.” Yet we are conscious.
If you believe in free will and you’re wrong, it’s not your fault 😃
Personal take on it is "free will" is shorthand for "capacity to make decisions"; this in turn might be shorthand for "capacity to make decisions that contradict the immediately relevant/obvious external influences (e.g., 'craving ice cream, but eating a salad, or nothing, instead')". Those decisions may be deterministic, or random, but either way, they're made.
By *this* definition, people definitely have free will (and so do animals, and so might certain computer programs). That said, I came up with the definition by going "people who say 'free will exists' are referring to *something*, what could they plausibly be referring to?" instead of going the usual route of "what do people say they mean by 'free will'?"
I hadn’t thought about this in a long time; thanks for posting it. Before I stopped and thought, I would have said I believe in free will, which exists in a part of us not governed by the laws of physics, but interacting with the world (whether through some timey-wimey messing with initial conditions, or via many small miracles). I would have said that the randomness was enough for free will, in that the result of that random process would be the kind of person you are. I would have said “consciousness” isn’t enough I unless you define consciousness to be impossible for beings in a deterministic system with no causal link to something outside the system that counts as the same being as them. I would have said you haven’t pointed to any properties of consciousness, other than the fact it’s an example of “something you can’t explain with how-can-you-make-an-airplane-out-of-non-flying-objects naive reductionism”. I would have pointed you to the first three sections of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/, and said that talking about consciousness doesn’t answer any of the incompatibility arguments.
But I don’t know if my answer is a satisfying account of free will. (What follows is unfiltered stream-of-consciousness, sorry for the 900-word screed, I just wanted to show you that I really did find this an interesting question.) Freedom means freedom to choose something you want, and being free from any defects which would prevent you from doing so. It might also mean freedom in choosing intermediate goods. I I suppose different intermediate foods might be how free will operates. But is that really freedom? An omniscient being might be able to predict how each choice would turn out. If the original agent is indifferent between intermediate goods, are they really choosing instead of tossing a coin? How they react to the first few choices would entail their later choices (Simone Weil has a really cool idea about in what way freedom means freedom to act in accordance with previously-chosen preferences).
Maybe I need to apply philosophy to this. I need my “extra-universe self” idea because our physical laws feel to mechanistic to me to support free will. A person’s decisions would be embedded weirdly in space, depending on the configuration of particles that aren’t part of that person. The problem really is the “all-at-once” nature of random choice - to a sufficiently advanced observer, all of human experience is a logical instantaneity, so how do we learn? How is learning part of that instantaneous process? Should I talk about a “complete contingent plan”? That gives me a pretty thin definition of learning or growing. How can God know that Mary is the only person who would be sinless, if they had had original sin removed from them before their conception, but the angels not know whether she would assent to be Jesus’ mother until she answered?
What does sin look like in that framework? An action caused by disordered desire. Love isn’t love if it’s compelled. I think that’s enough. We initially have some random seed, and initially we only get to choose at random between equally-good outcomes. Our identity grows from zero, and initially it’s random. But as time goes on, our past decisions shape our future preferences more and more. It becomes fair to say, “I chose this”, even though that “I” arose initially from a random process, because those random processes only affect the future via the mechanism of who I am (who I am screens off the random process). Maybe ChatGPT or the toy computer program from Gary Drescher’s Good and Real only have a trivial amount of freedom, because their goal is only trivially related to real goodness, and their past actions only trivially affect how they pay attention to things in future, so the personality that does the screening off is trivial.
I’m not sure if God is monstrous under this scenario, for creating people who will go to Hell, or at least for abdicating that choice to a black box. But that won’t be resolved by understanding free will. I also don’t want to say God created some people as “saved” and some people as “not saved”. I think that’s why I need my extra-universe soul, a deterministic person might or might not have freedom but they can’t have non-determinism. I would feel ugly saying that our universe’s randomness is “who I am”, it necessarily doesn’t arise from my past decisions. I’m relatively fine with an ongoing stream of randomness, which later becomes part of who I am, being “part of me”. I think I like drawing boundaries and saying, “This came from me, this came from you, this came from God”, for each bit of information, and if subatomic randomness doesn’t come from me, it must come from God. I don’t really understand this, so I might not mention it.
This is more compatibilist than I was when I started. I think Simone Weil helped me to be comfortable with your phrasing of “randomness isn’t free choice”, which was actually mentioned in the podcast where I heard about her views, but not in the context of what a soul is. In that sense you’ve persuaded me. But you need moving parts, and a proper explanation of what a personality is, rather than a notion of “consciousness” with no moving parts other than “no obvious representation under naive reductionism”. Still, thanks for posting this - I feel better for having thought about it.
I've never been that interested in the debate since it seems to me that the "you have free will" and "you have no free will" positions seem to make identical predictions about how the world works.
People likely don't have free will in the way they truly hope. But that is fine. You can still enjoy the ride, and the fact that things are complicated enough you don't truly understand everything.
For example, it is at least possible that in some real sense of the term our eventual metaphysics/cosmology will be a single steady state of one nearly monist thing. As in everything connected to the earth's/solar/system's/local group's/etc. causal "string" is all one single thing, whose past is set in stone and future is set in stone, and has in some sense always existed and will always exist. And we are some transitory pattern/glimmer across this in a particular dimension (time).
So what?
That fact that human actions have causes/reasons/antecedents superficially seems morally extremely important.
"Oh it is very different if Bob beats his kids because he himself was beaten as opposed to if he just does it for * no reason* ". Except there is always *a reason*, so the contrast one is grasping for was never there in the first place.
> You could do the same “all the way down” analysis and say “there’s no place where consciousness comes in.
Sure, our feeling in free-will is perhaps (IMO very probably) derivable from our feeling of being conscious. But to say "there's no place where consciousness comes in" would be just silly in how unsupported it is, unless you mean it as: "*I* cannot determine the place where consciousness comes in". In which case fine, since knowledge advances by being able to admit "I don't know this yet".
Where does intelligence come in? Consciousness is not the same, but presumably comes in at [at least from the wide perspective where you look "all the way down"] at about the same level. IMO, though I could of course be wrong. (And, maybe I'm a P-zombie, but I don't find my own consciousness that mysterious - and I feel it's definitely just a useful but non-surprising artifact of the cognitive architecture evolution has crafted for me.)
> But to say "there's no place where consciousness comes in" would be just silly in how unsupported it is
There's nothing silly about this. We have no idea how consciousness arises, other than the likelihood it comes from the brain somehow.
> I feel it's definitely just a useful but non-surprising artifact of the cognitive architecture evolution has crafted for me.
There you go. You happen to be an evolutionary materialist. But this is not a widely accepted view. It may be true, it may not. My question is: suppose it is not true; is it possible that, whatever the explanation is for consciousness, it also provides an explanation for the possibility of free will? And I'm not talking about the mere feeling of free will, I'm talking about actual free will, agency independent of mechanistic chains of causes.
Quantum mechanics is neither random nor not deterministic. QM says you can't measure everything to infinite precision, but that's a very different statement. QM is definitely deterministic. There are nice equations to predict the wavefunction at t+dt if you know it at t, and the wavefunction tells you everything there is to know about a degree of freedom (or many). Depending on what you chose to measure at time t, there may well be measurements at time t+dt the value of which you cannot predict precisely (which is where the probability bit comes in), but that's *because* of the measurements you made at time t. You built in the uncertainty yourself, so to speak.
Also, I'd say the best argument against free will coming from consciousness is that we see more evidence of free will than consciousness in animals. For example, if we put two animals in exactly the same circumstances, they will not always do the same thing -- evidence of free will. But we don't seem to observe animals brooding over their mortality, building monuments with which to be remembered, et cetera, which is a big part of our evidence for human consciousness (aside from our direct testimony to each other). If free will arose from consciousness, then it should not be possible for an animal that doesn't clearly exhibit consciousness to clearly exhibit free will. But even birds and mice seem to exhibit some degree of free will, and I haven't heard anyone argue either species is conscious.
“For example, if we put two animals in exactly the same circumstances, they will not always do the same thing -- evidence of free will.”
This would only be evidence of free will if you had two animals whose neurologies were in the exact same state.
“But we don't seem to observe animals brooding over their mortality, building monuments with which to be remembered, et cetera, which is a big part of our evidence for human consciousness (aside from our direct testimony to each other)”
None of these things are evidence for consciousness. It is perfectly easy to imagine a conscious being which does none of these things, including reporting consciousness.
“If free will arose from consciousness, then it should not be possible for an animal that doesn't clearly exhibit consciousness to clearly exhibit free will.”
Whether a creature “exhibits” consciousness is kind of useless. Consciousness is a subjective quality, it can’t be observed from the outside.
“But even birds and mice seem to exhibit some degree of free will, and I haven't heard anyone argue either species is conscious.”
You are not listening very well then. Many people would argue birds and mice are conscious.
I don't see any necessity for animals to be in the same neurological state. And I didn't say "proof" I said "evidence," and evidence is all we can get absent the ability to control things at a God-like level. I get that you might like to restrict the discussion to such hypotheticals, but that kind of angels on a head of a pin debate is sterile (and frankly boring).
As a *practical matter* observing that different individual animals make different individual choices in very similar circumstances is excellent evidence of free will -- as good as we have for humans.
What you can imagine perfectly easily is no argument at all. Human beings can perfectly easily imagine all kinds of things that are impossible, or logically self-contradictory, or otherwise absurd. I can imagine that 2+2 = 5. This says zip about whether it is or not.
And, again, the best evidence we have of consciousness I would say is human brooding about mortality to the point of compromising their ability to live as well and as pleasureably as possible. We see this all the time in human beings, from people sitting in their room writing dark poetry instead of enjoying themselves with friends, to Pharoahs twisting up their entire society to build an enormous stone ark to the afterlife. Why would anyone do this, if they were *not* aware of their own thinking timeline and aware that it will end -- which is a very upsetting conclusion, in general? Being aware of your own thinking timeline is an excellent first-pass definition of consciousness. So brooding over your mortality -- and by that I don't mean trying to escape death when it immediately threatens, instinct will do that, I mean being upset by it when it *isn't* threatening at all -- is excellent evidence that you're aware of your internal timeline, i.e. conscious. So far as we know, only humans show evidence of brooding over their mortality.
And you better hope consciousness can be observed from the outside, because if your only source of evidence on it is self-reporting, then I can make a "conscious" AI out of a 100-line Perl script tomorrow. It will totally report on being "conscious," and you'll have no way to argue the point. Which is a pretty silly place to be in, no? If you reflect on it, I expect you *don't* think self-reporting is the only way anyone can know of the existence of consciousness.
My apologies, I should not have said "no one." There are always crazy people and children, who indeed can easily believe the stove or the Sun is conscious. I should probably have said something like "very few reasonable and functional adults."
> Quantum mechanics is neither random nor not deterministic.
Nope. Part of the theory of QM is that when you measure a quantity (say spin in z direction) of an system state which is not an eigenstate of the operator of that quantity (say you prepared the system by measuring the spin in x direction), your eigenstate probabilities will be proportional to the absolute of the dot product of eigenstate and system state, squared. Such measurements happen in nature all the time. Quantum random number generators use them.
> For example, if we put two animals in exactly the same circumstances, they will not always do the same thing -- evidence of free will.
While I am not a biologist or experimental philosopher, I think that interpretation is also not mainstream. I mean, if I put two beads in a Galton board, they will also generally not do the same thing. Does that mean that the beads have free will? What about plants or insects? The chances of raising two cloned mammals in exactly the same way seem basically nil. And even if you managed to do that, this would do nothing to disprove the alternative explanation that animals sometimes behave randomly.
You need to look up the difference between "random" and "I don't know." That will make you understand quantum mechanics better.
I think that for repeated experiments, the minimalist Ensemble Interpretation gives rise to what even a frequentist would call probabilities.
Otherwise discussing the existence of (non-local) hidden variables or MWI is as pointless as discussing the existence of a god. Can we agree that some interpretations say that QM is deterministically guided by variables which we are fundamentally not knowable and other interpretations say that it is random and leave it at that?
What are 'consciousness' and 'agency'? No fair to trot them in as explanations without giving some kind of definition.
So far as I am concerned 'free will' is just a perceived quality of things or beings. These have the twin characteristics that we (or let's say the observer) can't fully predict their actions, but their actions are perceived as purposeful or intentional. From this perspective, some creatures might appear free-willed to one observer, but not another: a casual observer might look at a nematode and say 'it decided to go after that food', while someone who has sufficiently detailed information about its internal state might just see neurons and chemical influences carrying out a predictable program.
Consciousness is a quality of a system of having something that it is like to be that system, a la Nagel.
Free will (which I’m using interchangeably with “agency”) is the capacity of a system to exert causal influence. So I’m thinking about in the stronger sense, the sense which is incompatible with determinism/ mechanics as we understand them, the sense which a lot of serious thinkers agree is incoherent. If the nematode has free will, even if you knew everything about it’s neurological state, you would not be able to predict it’s action, because it was the result of will.
> Why would it be wrong to say that it [consciousness] is the source of agency?
it is not wrong, just not very useful. What do you gain by making this statement, beyond some measure of inner peace thanks to this semantic stopsign (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/semantic-stopsign)?
Another example of what you might gain: if it is true that free will exists, and it comes from consciousness, then that means that AIs can only have free will if they are conscious. That is potentially hugely meaningful.
Is it a semantic stop sign? Arguing that free will depends on the mind, not the hardware then the problem to solve is a different problem.
A reason to believe it is possible for a person to intentionally increase their capacity for agency?
"A reason to believe", sure. One can come up with various reasons to believe various things, whatever works. One of those cases where believing creates reality.
Your beliefs have clearly created the reality of your comment just now. So, yes, clearly, beliefs have causal impact and create some aspect of future reality. The only question is how far that goes, not whether or not it happens.
It's quite a strange way of thinking that imagines human brains and the narratives inside them as being causal dead ends. It'd be like trying to understand a computer while insisting that "software control systems don't exist, everything a computer does is just hardware responding to signals."
It doesn't matter what process you're assigning free will to, that process will either be entirely deterministic or at least somewhat random; those are the only options. The problem comes from people feeling like neither acting deterministically nor acting randomly are good matches for our intuitive sense of what 'free will' means, and that problem persists no matter where you model free will as coming from or how you model it as working.
I think Compatibilism (a conception of free will that is compatible with determinism) is the best dodge we're going to get here: define free will as 'able to act without external constraints', and you get a lot of the intuitive sensation people are looking for without the determinism question being a problem.
Compatibilism is just something to assuage the people who don't want the cold shower of reality.
Not really, but feel free to explain your point if you want a response.
So much of philosophy is just pushing around definitions and adopting/advocating for slightly different constellations of tautologies (I say this as someone who studied philosophy a lot and still talks to two of my philosophy professors from 20+ years ago weekly (both compatibilists FWIW), and whose best friend is a current active philosopher).
In the case of "compatibilism", there is clearly a specific question that was meant when people consider free will.
And that question is: "Do my subjective sensations that my *choices* are at least in part uncaused and that I am *free* to choose otherwise correspond to reality?"
And the answer to that question to the best of our understanding is "no". Full stop. Free will doesn't exist in the way people mean/experience it.
Doing the philosophy thing where you then change the definition of free will (compatibilism) so you can give people an answer they are more comfortable with is simply distorting reality because people find it too uncomfortable. And that is bad philosophy. It is like Ptolemaic epicycles.
Just accept that you are a cog, in a grand machine, in the same way an ant is a cog. you have some particular specific internal epiphenomenon. But that doesn't mean you are some special being outside the chain of causes (random or determined).
See, I conceptualize the relationship between intuitive notions of free will and compatibilism to be much harsher than even the 'harsh answer' of 'no' that you are describing.
To me, the compatibilist response to ""Do my subjective sensations that my *choices* are at least in part uncaused and that I am *free* to choose otherwise correspond to reality?" would be 'if any of your choices truly were uncaused, that would mean that they are random. Is that what you want for yourself? To be something that just acts randomly some of the time, that's your mystical notion of your special and unique place in the universe? Your entire question and intuition is badly-formed and meaningless because you don't understand science well enough to know what you are actually asking. Grow up and abandon that entire exercise, and adopt this well-formed operational definition instead.'
I see that as much harsher than 'your question makes sense, and the answer is 'no.' The reality is 'your question makes no sense, your intuitions on this subject are incoherent trash, here's something that makes sense which you can replace them with.'
Yeah that is just me on a salty day, or if I haven't eaten. :)
Part of the reason I don't tend to find that sort of thing persuasive is that the whole process of persuasion always goes back to agency: "Just accept..." implies that the listener has a meaningful choice to accept the argument, or not.
Or as I like to say, I'm predetermined to believe I have free will. (And not in the compatibilist sense, which I agree is just hiding the ball.)
I don't claim any particular philosophical support for that position. But if it's wrong, well, then it's not as if I ever had a choice about thinking so, did I?
(And maybe others have no choice about thinking otherwise! Though of course *I* think they do.)
+1, same problem with neo aristotelian naturalism and many moral realists meta ethical theories more broadly imo
“It doesn't matter what process you're assigning free will to, that process will either be entirely deterministic or at least somewhat random; those are the only options.”
How does determinism/randomness explain consciousness? It doesn’t. So you are left with determinism, randomness, AND consciousness. Free will can’t come from determinism or randomness, yes, but why can’t it come from consciousness?
Unless a deterministic explanation of consciousness is accepted, I don’t see anything wrong with this. And I don’t see why we should expect determinism to ever be able to explain consciousness.
If you believe that determinism can explain consciousness, fine. But that’s not what I’m wondering about. I’m saying: in the absence of a deterministic explanation for consciousness (our current state of understanding), why can’t consciousness be an explanation for free will?
That's like saying 'How does day/night explain sausages? It doesn't, so you're left with day, night, and sausages.'
There's simply no relation between these things. Consciousness is some type of process; deterministic and random are properties that process can have, they don't 'explain' anything.
Consciousness could have the property of being random or the property of being deterministic, we don't know, but it has to be one of those by definition; 'random' just means 'not-deterministic', like saying something is either blue or not blue.
What I mean is, we have no account of a process that produces consciousness, whether deterministic, random, or both.
> Consciousness could have the property of being random or the property of being deterministic, we don't know, but it has to be one of those by definition;
Maybe (although I don’t think it’s as obviously true as “by definition”), but that’s not what I’m talking about. The fact is that we know of no process that produces consciousness. From this position, what’s wrong with the idea that consciousness produces free will? If you assume consciousness follows from a deterministic/random process, this is incoherent, yes; but absent this assumption...?
You could also say "How does determinism/randomness explain magnetism? It doesn’t. So you are left with determinism, randomness, AND magnetism. Free will can’t come from determinism or randomness, yes, but why can’t it come from magnetism?"
Like we fundamentally don't know why magnetism work, but magnetism is still determined or random. Consciousness is the same.
You are claiming that our understanding of consciousness is relatively equivalent to our understanding of magnetism?
To our understanding of why magnetism exists, yes.
“Why it exists” isn’t the question. The question is how it works, what produces it. We know the answers to these questions with regards to magnetism, not so for consciousness.
I get that you think you've found a novel way of explaining free will, but I think what you're just really doing is just moving the exact same problem to another level. We all experience ourselves as having free will. But you don't see a way free will can come about given that our brains are just a bunch of chemical and atomic processes in action. You look for a way to account for our subject experience of free will, and suggest that free will is a product of consciousness. But then you've got the same problem regarding consciousness as the one you started out with regarding free will: We all experience ourselves as being conscious, but how can consciousness come about, given that the processes by which we sense the world around us and have thoughts and feelings about it are just a bunch of chemical and atomic processes in the brain?
If you grant that both consciousness and free will exist, you have two problems. How do you explain consciousness, and how do you explain free will. If consciousness explains free will, then you only have one problem: how do you explain consciousness. So I don’t think I’ve only moved the problem to a different level.
Well, I wouldn't say that consciousness and free will are really 2 different things, any more than chemical and atomic processes in the body are 2 different things. In each case, we're really talking about 2 aspects of the same thing. Experiencing ourselves as conscious and as often freely choosing what to do are really just 2 sides of the same coin. After all, the reason it's unsettling to think about the deterministic processes underlying our behavior is that we are *conscious* of making choices. We *feel* ourselves to have options and freedom to decide. You can't even talk about the case for free will without citing our *subjective*, i.e. conscious, sense of having it. So I guess it would be fairer to say not that you've moved the problem to a different level, but that you're now focusing on consciousness, which is really just a different aspect of free will, and presenting it as the needed explanation for why we experience ourselves as having free will.
Here's further evidence that consciousness and free will are just 2 sides of the same coin. If instead you'd taken as your task the problem of consciousness -- what's the evidence that we have it, and how does it arise from a bunch of neurotransmitters squirting in the brain, etc.? -- you might have pointed to free will and said that consciousness comes from free will. The shape of your argument could have been that obviously we have free will, and it's from free will that consciousness arises. The system doesn't run itself, the way a coffee maker does once you start it up.. There are these gaps, these points where choice is possible. And it is these moments of choice that bring consciousness into being, because once there's this gap in deterministically-governed events, the person makes the choice by grasping the situation and imagining and weighing options. And that is equivalent to being conscious. It's what we *mean* by being conscious.
If your position is that consciousness and free will are two sides of the same coin, you are in an extreme minority. Almost everyone agrees that consciousness exists, but many people deny the existence of free will.
> the reason it's unsettling to think about the deterministic processes underlying our behavior is that we are *conscious* of making choices
I’m not worried about it being unsettling, I’m worried about it being an insufficient explanation.
> you're now focusing on consciousness
No, I am starting with the fact that we do not understand consciousness and focusing on free will in that context.
> If instead you'd taken as your task the problem of consciousness -- what's the evidence that we have it, and how does it arise from a bunch of neurotransmitters squirting in the brain, etc.? -- you might have pointed to free will and said that consciousness comes from free will. The shape of your argument could have been that obviously we have free will, and it's from free will that consciousness arises.
I would not say this, and if someone did I think it would be very hard to defend. We mostly agree that consciousness obviously exists. It is much harder to take free will as a starting point, because it is much harder to observe free will as something that exists.
> once there's this gap in deterministically-governed events,
I think most people are sure there is no such thing.
> the person makes the choice by grasping the situation and imagining and weighing options. And that is equivalent to being conscious. It's what we *mean* by being conscious.
I do not think this is true. Again, many people think consciousness exists but deny the existence of free will. So that couldn’t possibly be what they mean by being conscious.
We, like all living things, are no more than the sum total of our genetics and environment. The debate about free will often turns to the question of responsibility for our actions. I believe this misses a fundamental point. " You" are that sum total. "You" respond to events, often unpredictably, within those parameters. In these circumstances "you" are absolutely responsible for your actions. I put you in inverted commas to emphasise the way I am using it. The only alternative to this view is that there is some mysterious self located..... well wherever you care to put it I suppose. Philosophers and theologians have been rationalising this view with ever more convoluted theories through-out history without yet coming up with anything convincing.
The mystery of consciousness in terms of the science, is probably where the study of life was at the turn of the 20th century. That great mystery revealed itself to be no mystery at all, just a natural consequence of certain environmental conditions. Consciousness will go the same way. That a complex phenomenon should arise from the most complex object we know of in the universe, (your brain) should not be a surprise.
"We, like all living things, are no more than the sum total of our genetics and environment. "
This is a self-negating statement.
"are no more than" is an evaluation, and thus requires an evaluator. Value does not exist without human opinion (or the theoretical existence of other opinion-having beings).
This is an interesting one. Haven’t heard it before, so I’m curious to see where people go.
I think what people would say is that consciousness is still deterministic, and we accept that consciousness exists because we experience it, we just don’t know precisely what causes it.
Free will posits, in effect, a new causal mechanism. I think a lot of people implicitly think consciousness is a “causal dead end”, effectively as a result of not believing free will is a thing.
“Free will posits, in effect, a new causal mechanism.”
Yeah. I think you’re right about the way most people see it. But why is the existence of a separate casual mechanism any weirder than any of the possible explanations for consciousness?
Yes, I agree that consciousness is at a higher level than the hardware (or wetware) on which it runs. The logic of a software program is abstracted from the hardware. This doesn’t mean that the consciousness has free will, but that it’s not dependent on whether the brain has free will.
But if Joe Biden does take your survey, wouldn't you want to know?
How creeped out should we be if Joe Biden takes the survey and gets a perfect score (correctly giving 0/100 on every question)
That’s what I was thinking!
For the USA: "Nature's Metropolis" by William Cronon.
"A Fair Country", Canada.
"The Power Broker". Robert A. Caro. The USA
That's a great book and a solid suggestion, but I was actually thinking of a different Caro book: "The Path To Power" which is the first in his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Just like The Power Broker illuminates so much more than Robert Moses, The Path To Power illuminates so much more than Lyndon Johnson.
(Related -- Robert Caro deserves to be a lot more widely famous than he is. Not that he's not successful and everything but, still.)
Peru: La Tia Julia el Escibidor
Trinidad and Tobago: "A House for Mr. Biswas"
Nepal. "Arresting God in Kathmandu"
Edit: it's not even Upadhyay's best book by most standards, but it portrays old Nepali peasant fatalism in a way his later works don't.
So what is your belief on UFOs? "Aliens are real and have been visiting - and abducting - us for decades"? "It's not merely natural phenomena like swamp gas, there are other things happening that might have an overlap with what is generally called the paranormal"? "Chinese and Russian advanced tech spy planes"? "The fairies at the bottom of my garden"?
If you have no idea what "the secret" is, how do you know one exists, if it does exist that it is "fucking up the world" (and explain what you mean by that) or that it is older than religions?
Let's say that "yes, aliens exist; yes, their spaceships have been visiting our world". So what? This makes as much difference in reality to our lives as telling a tribe living on some remote Pacific island that have had minimal contact with the outside world about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Someone whose life is so materially more prosperous than yours that he might as well be a god. Someone who will have nothing to do with your life or any effect on it, because he is too occupied with his own business. Great, now you know Musk exists and some set of people are angry with him about a thing called "Twitter", how does that change that you have to repair the straw roof of your hut and go out and hunt the large rodents on your island for dinner?
"some subset of individuals and organizations connected to the government of your country have kept that information hidden from the general public."
Well by the Powers, if Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been hiding super-secret magic energy saving tech from us, then they've done a fantastic job of it!
This is bog-standard conspiracy stuff, along the lines of "the Big Oil and Big Motor companies have the plans for a car that will run on a gallon of water but they smothered this breakthrough in order to keep their monopoly profits".
If there was magic energy tech, then the Climate Crisis wouldn't even be a thing, unless you want to propose that heads of state just like flying off to Paris every couple of years for a conference where nothing gets done (I could well believe that). They would just produce the magic tech, problem solved, no Climate Change crisis.
And why sit on magic tech, when you could be selling it to the public at monopoly prices and making a fortune? As I said, this is standard conspiracy "doctors make you sick since they have no incentive to cure you and lose a profit stream, ditto Big Pharma, ditto every other organisation in the world, and I genuinely have morgellons".