You are suggesting. We're do you have to be in life to get something different? I understand and then it doesn't matter. I just wrote something without thinking about any of it. I never want to say anything in person or typing. I never wanted to sound like anyone because I am only what I think. I could sit around and beat myself up of make myself feel bad because someone had a thought. When it comes to needing to be aware of what I'm going to say. Words on earth will always be followed with more words. Say something good to someone today or don't. It's like asking me if a tree falls in the woods.....? I would stop you right their and tell you i wasn't there so why would you celebrate sence with something so common.
$10 nope, $1 maybe. Most of that maybe is because I don’t like subscriptions. If it were possible to get into the epistemic state where I believed that paying $100 would mean I only had to listen to single-digit podcast ads in the next decade, I would gladly pay it, but it seems unlikely I could reach that epistemic state even if the product actually existed.
Per this idea they in fact are (in the sense of having qualia subjectively experienced by their constituent matter in a manner determined by and inextricably linked to its current physical state), they just aren't self-aware. Arguing against the proposition that everything is (to some extremely primitive degree) conscious by rhetorically asking "why isn't x conscious?" is begging the question, wouldn't you agree?
Does anyone know how, exactly, the use of semaglutide as a weight loss drug got popularized? Scott started writing his article on it before Elon Musk endorsed it, so it isn't Musk, first and foremost.
Perhaps imprecise phrasing on my part. I meant it as "I thought you might be interested to know that...". Considering that the article in question is in a field of study a bit far removed from the remit of this blog.
Historically, how many places have actively advertised for immigrants? I know that Texas did when it was part of Spain and Mexico and when it was an independent country (not so much recently tho). What other places have?
I don't know if this counts, but some of the railway companies in the US advertised (and subsidized) some immigrants from England and Scandinavia to move to the plain states and be given farmland near their railroad lines.
They wanted to ensure there was adequate demand along the newly constructed lines, to help them become more profitable more quickly.
Back in the 19th century, Canadian authorities were very keen to settle the prairies with Europeans so the area wouldn't be de facto claimed by the US. They even hired agents in Europe who persuaded whole villages to emigrate to the New World en masse. I expect in the course of this campaign they published plenty of advertisements.
Rhodesia after WWII also went out of its way to attract white settlers.
Doug Saunders' *Maximum Canada*, which strongly influenced Matt Yglesias' *One Billion Americans*, goes into a lot of detail about Canada's ambivalent attitude towards immigrations in the 19th century.
I've been talking about the importance of teaching adult literacy for a long time, and it seems like I'm talking into a blind spot, as though people generally believe that if you didn't learn how to read in school, it's hopeless.
I wanted to say hello. I have been traveling in my whole life to get here. Impartial, I would like to place 5% of the blame for my being late on opinions. If I had a dream it would be. May opinion never get between us. We are all faced with with the daunting task of coading and decoding information in the real world experience. I believe the unhealthy opinion is born when we are so quick to want to say something. Not speaking toward any one here. Just speaking for my life. When I take information from someone I fuses it or reject it by what I am receiving from the person. I tend to not want to say anything. Except I always want to engage in the opinion when it comes to just. That right there needs to be destroyed. I can't act that way. I seem to find myself in some what of what top gun is about. Just as dangerous due to I'm the pilot and the aircraft. If you crash their is no coming back. I understand that I have disorder when it is coming from crowd that doesn't see it that way. Wow it's a wonder their are not as many names for disorders as their are people. Wait they give us names at birth. Since we run out of names the number we have is the our disorders indentation. I truly try to be a better me than the person I was yesterday. I tried to stay the same but as each day I pass threw I can't be like anything that who I believe I want to be. I'm guessing that is why we say love by the code. Love is only a word. How will you know it if all you do Is hear it. If I say die do you die? I say live it goes off and dies. I just do what I can when I see it. I speak positive and I try to be respectful by smiling and staying quiet when it comes to those who are people to take from. My everyone live one way or other. See you on the Battle field of. Fight well. Who ever you may be. Be it. So that we may always see where you are.
You know, Carlos, it's really quite possible that this person does have schizophrenia. It's not a rare disorder. If it's a bot post, what would be the point of sending the bot here? The post is not at all offensive, and is way to disorganized to be an effort to convince us of anything. And I don't see any jokes or references to ACX topics, which if present would probably indicate that someone is pulling our leg. So I'd say your post is in fact offensive. Sort of like "hey, buddyt, did you get your head shaved or are you having chemo.?"
Well, I wanted to engage with it due to its bizarreness and couldn't think of anything else. I don't think there's a polite way to ask someone if they have schizophrenia, and I am curious.
Do you believe there is little time left before transformative AI? Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Apparently, you can win big if you do:
because markets are not expecting transformative AI any time soon, meaning there are absolutely massive inefficiencies to exploit if AI timelines are as short as some are predicting. Some are even expecting a phase of explosive GDP growth (30% per year). I don't think I buy that, because it seems to me there is too much inertia and complexity for the market to transform that quickly in response to any tech, but that's just an uneducated intuition. I may throw some money at the funds indicated in the article, if only to save the world: if I win on those, those would be the first successful investments I ever made! The odds of it panning out strike me as miniscule, so the fact I'm considering investing like this maybe indicates the reasoning in that article (and by extension, that of the AI safety community) is shoddy.
Can there really be heaps of gold lying on the ground right now? What do you think?
Are there analogous eras when a new invention was 1) fascinating to those paying attention, but error-prone, unrefined, and not widely used; and, 2) on the verge changing the economy, as we know from hindsight?
If so, you could compare with financial markets at that point in time.
In recent living memory: personal computing and the internet. You could have made a lot of money buying companies like Microsoft at the right time. On the other hand, there was the dot-com bubble, where you could have lost a lot of money buying the wrong companies.
The difficulty is that "changing the economy" is step (3). There is a step (2), "some companies succeed at commercializing the invention and some others try and fail, stocks go up and down while people try to figure which companies are which".
The EA forum post linked above cuts through the difficulty of picking the right stocks by suggesting that one should bet on the real interest rate, instead. I am slightly unconvinced of their plots because (a) the interest rate data they have goes back only to early 1990s (real) or 1950s (nominal), so it misses some of the big transformative changes that could guide our intuition, and more importantly,
(b) in my layman's understanding, interest rates and GDP growth correlate in quite complicated ways, so plotting one against other may be less informative than one would think.
I have a friend who's suffering from depersonalization / derealization disorder (DPD), the persistent sense that oneself / the external world is not real. DPD seems to be inherently poorly understood, and I'd be grateful for advice from anyone who has successfully treated or cured this condition, or could recommend a therapist in the Boston area.
Here's what I've got so far in terms of a bro science treatment protocol. I don't think there are any miracle cures or One Weird Tricks, but it seems like there are many bits of applied common sense that could plausibly help and are unlikely to hurt:
- Achieve brilliance in the basics of sleep, diet and especially exercise.
- Proactively limit and manage stress.
- Go outside, get as much sunlight as you can, quite literally touch grass.
- Engage in physical hobbies such as crafts, gardening and the like, that involve a lot of multisensory integration and not a lot of high-level thinking.
- Socialize IRL, especially in comfortable, low-stakes social situations.
- Limit screen time.
- Keep a journal of symptoms and note what aggravates or ameliorates symptoms but don't otherwise obsess over them (spend, say, 5min/day on journaling).
- Avoid sitting alone in your room pondering the nature of reality or otherwise ruminating.
- Try reciting common-sense mantras / affirmations ("The world is real. My name is X Y. I am sitting in a room right now" &c) if helpful but do not obsess over them.
- Engage moderately in your religious / spiritual tradition if applicable but do not attempt any week-long kundalini benders or whatever.
- Check for and address feelings of inadequacy / excessive self-criticism / low self-worth through CBT, talk therapy, or similar. (For some reason this seems to be a common co-morbidity of DPD,)
It seems that episodes of DPD often resolve spontaneously, but I think it's worth trying to resolve it as quickly as possible and limit the chances of future relapses. Thanks in advance for any breadcrumbs or advice.
DPDR is *very* unpleasant. I had it myself when I was undergrad after a bad drug experience. I did not seek any treatment, in fact for some reason did not even think of it as an illness, and it eventually faded away after about 6 months. I'm a psychologist who treats OCD. I think DPDR is a form of OCD, or at least a close cousin of it. Somebody with regular OCD might check that their door is locked over and over again -- people with DPDR keep checking over and over again to make sure they and the stuff around them looks and feels "real." Of course doing that makes it feel less real, because they're staring at their hands, at the picture on the wall, etc., looking for a feeling of realness -- which is a weird activity that makes everything you're looking at seem sort of arbitrary and peculiar. It's like saying a certain word, like say "mosquito," over and over til it sounds like an arbitrary sequence of sounds, instead of like a familiar word. I think what keeps DPDR going is that the person harbors a belief that if they did not do this perpetual checking for realness, things would feel even *less* real, and the idea of them feeling any less real is terrifying.
The best approach to dismantling the mental checking is to do less and less of it. When you do, you discover that things don't feel less real because you're not slaving away at trying to make them feel real. However, it's not possible to make yourself not think about realness. It's really not possible to not make yourself think about anything that you crave to think about. What you can do, though, is to spend time doing things that capture your attention so much that there's not much room left in your mind to obsess about realness. Something like skiing, or any thrill sport or really any active sport is excellent for capturing attention. So is dancing. Outside the realm of vigorous physical activity, what captures somebody's attention depends more on their personality, but there is almost no solitary activity that is likely to work. Here is a random scattering of things that are pretty engaging for people who have a taste for them: Tutoring a small child; helping a friend move or repaint their kitchen or put together Ikea furniture; clicker training your cat; gardening; playing music or singing with a group; fancy, complicated cookingl
I noticed in the comments here somebody recommended the Reddit sub for DPDS. I actually do not recommend it. In online forums for people with health problems, people with severe and/or incurable cases are way overrepresented. There are a sprinkling of people in the process of getting better, and a very few people who have recovered and are sticking around to help others, but the reader's overall impression is likely to be that once you get this illness your are stuck with it for life. I'd recommend instead that you or your friend do a google search for stories of recovery from DPDR. I'm sure there are some out there.
If your friend decides to see a therapist, I'd recommend looking for one who describes themselves as a specialist in either OCD or DPDR, and says they use CBT (using other approaches in addition to CBT is fine, but CBT should be on this list). You can find OCD specialists at iocdf.org. Boston is probably the best town in the country for finding OCD specialists, because the OCD Institute is there. There are many therapists who have lots of good training and lots of experience with OCD and related disorders. The only bad thing about the Boston psych scene is that most specialists in private practice do not take insurance. If your friend has a kind of insurance that allows them to see what's called an "out of network" provider, they can probably get reimbursed by insurance for about half of what they've paid. If your friend doesn't have that kind of insurance, it's worth coughing up the cash if they possibly can. Treatment of DPDS is not a long process -- should be doable in 3 months or so. I do not think that having DPDS is grounds for believing somebody needs a complete psychic overhaul via years of therapy. It's an anxiety loop that the human mind can get caught in, and treatment that focuses on breaking the loop, without searching at length for some reason why the person was vulnerable to it, works well. There's a therapist in Lexington named Jim Vermilyea whom I recommend highly. He's in practice with some other people who are probably also very good, because he wouldn't have let them join his practice if they weren't.
I'm sure there is a recommended drug treatment for DPDS, probably some SSRI. However, SSRI's aren't magic bullets, despite what the drug companies would like us to think, and they often interfere with sexual pleasure and cause weight gain, so there's definitely a downside to taking this road.
I am so glad you chimed in here. I was especially concerned seeing a subreddit recommended, since visiting mental health forums is usually a terrible idea (for the reasons you mentioned). Treatment for OCD can be so counterintuitive and a lot of things that seem like common sense will just make it worse.
Yeah, I'm in a weird spot where I haven't actually had DP/DR, but it's one of my OCD themes. Just reading the articles on that site helped me better understand what it actually is and helped me come to acceptance with it.
There’s a DPDR subreddit, which might be of some help.
A lot of New Agey traditions have things like “grounding exercises” to help counterbalance the weird mental states their other techniques conjure. Things like standing barefoot in the grass, naming the things around you, exercise, breath techniques, etc. The kundalini subreddit has some good examples in their wiki
As I understand it, this is largely an anxiety symptom and has some elements in common with OCD. This site is a good source of info: https://www.dpmanual.com
Do you know of any religious, philosophies, or ideologies that correlate (positively or negatively) with DPD?
My guess was that DPD might correlate positively with religions which teach the concept of "philosophical realism", the belief that the words we use should refer unambiguously to discrete entities (possibly material, but often to an atomic spiritual essence of an entire named kind of material thing, as in ancient Greek myth, Aristotelianism, or many Native North American myths) which has a clear and firm boundary or definition. Some teach that these discrete real entities exist (e.g., Christianity); some teach that they don't (Hinduism, Buddhism).
Buddhism in particular seems to teach acceptance of DPD as its core doctrine.
People who believe in philosophical realism in the modern world should logically either deny that realism, embrace something like the Buddhist concept of emptiness, or conclude that the external world isn't real. So possibly this isn't always a mental disease, but can be caused by having the mental acuity to actually believe your metaphysical "beliefs", or to comprehend their consequences.
Certain cultural and religious or family behaviors: Some people may develop DPD due to cultural or religious practices that emphasize reliance on authority.
To answer my own question, Sartre's famous novel /Nausea/, which is often cited as the best existing explanation of existentialism, sounds like an extended description of DPDR. For instance, read this famous passage:
<<<
Black? I felt the word deflating, emptied of meaning with extraordinary rapidity. Black? The root was not black, there was no black on this piece of wood—there was . . . something else: black, like the circle, did not exist. I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black? ... I had already scrutinized innumerable objects, with deep uneasiness. I had already tried—vainly—to think something about them: and I had already felt their cold, inert qualities elude me, slip through my fingers. ... And the hand of the Self-Taught Man; I held it and shook it one day in the library and then I had the feeling that it wasn’t quite a hand. I had thought of a great white worm, but that wasn’t it either. And the suspicious transparency of the glass of beer in the Café Mably. Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn’t pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real red, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart. That black against my foot, it didn’t look like black, but rather the confused effort to imagine black by someone who had never seen black and who wouldn’t know how to stop, who would have imagined an ambiguous being beyond colours. It looked like a colour, but also . . . like a bruise or a secretion, like an oozing—and something else, an odour, for example, it melted into the odour of wet earth, warm, moist wood, into a black odour that spread like varnish over this sensitive wood, in a flavour of chewed, sweet fibre. I did not simply see this black: sight is an abstract invention, a simplified idea, one of man’s ideas. That black, amorphous, weakly presence, far surpassed sight, smell and taste. But this richness was lost in confusion and finally was no more because it was too much.
... The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity [presumably a reference, but to whom?]. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being [God]. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float,
– (Sartre 1938, transl. Lloyd Alexander 1949., the third Monday, 6:00 pm; from Google's scan of the New Editions 2013 printing, which lacks page numbers)
>>>
Sartre describes his nausea as being due to realizing his own "contingency", which is philosopher-speak meaning that he wasn't necessary to the universe--that it would have been possible for him never to have been. In Platonist philosophy, this means that he isn't real, as every Real thing is eternal, not temporal and contingent.
Sartre probably learned to consider temporal existence unreal from Hegel, though perhaps not directly. Hegel wrote in The Science of Logic, "The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in the recognition that the finite is not truly an existent" (that which exists only temporarily, was never real).
Yeah, really agree. I read Nausea after I'd had my own 6-month episode of DPDR, and not only did I recognize right away that Nausea was about the same kind of stuff, but I actually found Nausea quite disturbing to read. I felt afraid it was going to trigger another episode of DPDR. It didn't, though.
I had much the same experience as you as an undergrad (drugs exacerbating latent dpdr /existential vertigo), I couldn't put Nausea down even though I thought it may be an info hazard.
Camus' Myth of Sisyphus was the antidote for me, at the time
It seems to me that DPDR is one link in a giant web of problems induced by Western philosophy. It begins by taking mistakes of Plato as foundational. Foundationalism itself is one of those mistakes we get from Plato--the belief that you need to start with some certain truth, and then build on it deductively.
In foundationalism, the foundations can never be questioned. When the foundations are wrong, as in Plato, those errors can never be fixed. Instead, they propagate through belief networks. The initial error about X, E(X), leads to some obvious contradiction further down the line involving Y; but this can't be resolved by questioning E(X), so the contradiction is resolved by instead believing something wrong about Y, E(Y). This in turn leads to a contradiction with Z, and a compensating erroneous belief E(Z). So we see Western philosophers performing worse than random at even easy questions, like, Does the material world exist? Is life desirable? Is pain good? Is pleasure bad? Answer one of these wrong, and you'll likely answer the others wrong as well.
In this case, we begin with Plato's assertion that the Real consists of pure, eternal, transcendental, absolute Forms and Truths. This mistake leads to the belief that our lives ought to have some transcendental "purpose" or "meaning" derived from God--the second mistake.
The second mistake causes us great dissatisfaction with the messiness of reality, a distaste for life, and sometimes even a feeling of ghostliness--DPDR.
To get past DPDR, Camus proposes in the Myth of Sisyphus that we must acknowledge the absurdity of our lives. This seems to me to be the third mistake: the wrong belief that we should live with contradictions. We make this third mistake to protect us from the consequences of the second mistake.
This "third mistake" is quite common in the history of Western philosophy, whether it's to embrace contradictions (as Camus says), or not to acknowledge or even look for them. Other examples include:
- the development of the concept of "mysteries" by the Catholic Church, which teaches that it's necessary to be able to believe contradictory things at the same time (notably about the Trinity and Christology)
- Hegel's "dialectic", which teaches that contradictions need never be resolved, but should be welcomed and synthesized into a new wisdom formed by accepting both branches of the contradiction
- Kierkegaard's critique or parody of Hegel's dialectic, which I don't understand, but it definitely involves accepting things without understanding them
- the use of phenomenology by the Nazis to reject the validity of traditional values, empirical data, and non-contradiction, in favor of subjective feelings, "lived experience", and "authenticity"
It's found especially in totalitarian regimes, which must teach their citizens to hold contradictory beliefs–or rather, not to believe or disbelieve, but merely to accept. In fiction, this is "2+2 = 5" from 1985, "there are 5 lights" from Star Trek: TNG, and Plato forbidding the citizens of his Republic from studying philosophy before age 50.
I don't think all the different instances of it arose from the same chain of wrong beliefs (the Real is eternal > the temporal and contingent is unreal > we must be able to hold contradictory beliefs). There's a web of basic philosophical questions common to most philosophies, and whenever the answer to one of these questions tells you something about the answer to others of these questions, accepting a wrong answer to the first forces adoption of a wrong answer to all the others. But you can take those other nodes of the web in any order, with the consequence that there are many possible paths from any of the foundational beliefs to any derived belief.
If this continued indefinitely, a well thought-out and self-consistent belief system which began with a foundational error would eventually converge on pure error--an ideology of nothing but wrong or incoherent beliefs. The "third mistake", that we should reject reason, is necessary both to avoid renouncing the mistakes already made, and to stop the propagation of mistakes before the system becomes so wrong that it ceases to function.
The one I knew well was pretty anguished. He absolutely hated it. Along with his sense of being unreal, he had developed a habit of watching his breath, and a fear that it would stop if he did not make sure he was breathing "right" -- fast enough, deep enough, with just the right amount of attentiveness to the sensations. He was afraid to fall asleep because he felt like loss of consciousness was = loss of the little self he had left, and what if when he woke up he could not find that little bit again.
I mean I for sure find hard manual labor something that prevents existential maundering. But yes I am also grinding an axe. Someone who is having serious difficulties because they worry themselves the world isn't real needs to as the kids say "touch grass".
For example the past few weeks I have been spending evenings doing maintenance on a public skating rink as a volunteer. Dozens of hours shovels snow and dragging/holding hoses, often in sub zero temperatures and one night with a -45 wind chill. Maundering doesn't come to mind because you got too many other pressing problems.
I am half convinced a lot of modern "anxiety" is because the human mind is wired for a general level of day-to-day anxiety, and so when we have have constructed a life/society with so little actual need for it, people find stupid shit to get anxious about.
If someone goes to a Buddhist retreat for some intense meditation over days or weeks and they can’t turn off ‘monkey mind’, the severe form of background narration that happens when our mind isn’t ‘doing something’ someone will help them out by putting a broom in their hand or have them do dishes or any repetitive mindless tasks to get things to quiet down so the hapless meditator can get a start.
I have always experienced a lot of anxiety and I know that mowing the lawn or re-staining the deck or as you mentioned shoveling snow will always help me settle down.
Shoveling snow is especially appealing. I like to wait until the snow stops completely and go out after dark. The temperature usually drops, the night sky clears and I usually have the neighborhood to myself. It can take on the aspect of a mystical sacrament at times. A bit like making the sand mandalas that the monks carefully create and then immediately sweep away. A visual aid to appreciate the concept of impermanence.
Just like the mandalas, my tidy driveway and sidewalk will soon be covered with new snow.
I agree with your point about modern anxiety. Something I often think about is that a century ago, people understood far more about the everyday objects around them:
Anybody can understand reasonably well how a horse pulling a wagon works, or an ax, or a staged play or concert, how a fire warms a room, etc etc. But most people understand very little about about the modern equivalents: Cars, jets, electronic entertainments, etc etc. It affects your feeling about your life to understand so little about basic elements of it. And I'm sure the cave man in all of us feels anxious because he knows that if it all breaks, we wouldn't be able to come anywhere close to reconstructing it ourselves.
I had a similar thought the other day. When humans were primitive, our habitat was the natural world, in the sense that survival consisted primarily of interacting with things that exist in nature. That habitat was understood in terms of magic -- we created myths to explain natural phenomena and ascribed mystical properties to natural things. However, we developed extensive practical knowledge of those magic phenomena -- we could manipulate fire, and predict buffalo herds' grazing patterns.
As humans civilized, human artifacts came to play an increasingly large role in the human habitat, yet those artifacts -- by virtue of being the creation of human minds -- were not magical. While we could not explain the physics of how a bow shot an arrow, the component parts were visible and we understood their various functions and how they worked together. This remained the case for the bulk of human history, perhaps even through the start of the Industrial Revolution.
As human artifacts came to dominate our habitat (e.g., cities, themselves a human artifact), natural phenomena both played less of a role in daily survival and became less magical. The Scientific Revolution began to explain natural phenomena in non-magical terms, and while those explanations remained inaccessible to ordinary people, people accepted that nature operates according to laws rather than magic. Daily survival increasingly consisted of navigating a habitat composed of human artifacts that were generally comprehensible to the average observer (a loom, a hearth, a mill).
However, with the advent of modern technology and the rise of a post-industrial society, daily survival consists of navigating and manipulating human artifacts about which the average person has extensive practical knowledge but no scientific knowledge. This is both because human artifacts are increasingly complex and because the division of labor in a post-industrial society permits the average person to be ignorant about their complexity. I spend 10 hours a day on a computer but know nothing about how a computer actually works. We understand these artifacts are not magic, but we cannot explain them ourselves.
So we are reverting to a state of understanding of our habitat similar to that of primitive man - we know how to manipulate our habitats in order to survive, but we cannot explain our habitats. The difference is that primitive man at least thought he could explain his.
Yeah, and primitive man thought gods or magic were running the show. That's a lot more comforting, thrilling and special than thinking that Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerberg are in charge. They are a truly tiny and nasty stand-in for gods. Eww.
I dunno. I feel like anxiety issues have gone to the Moon just in the last 50 years. Young people in my kids' cohort seem signifinicantly more anxious than I or my friends were at their age decades ago -- and it was hard to explain nuclear fission or the transistor back then.
What about the explosion in communications and always-connectedness that the Internet and devices have caused? At least there's the virtue that the growth in potential cause and effect have tracked each other. And...it seems to me people are almost always more self-aware, nervous, anxious -- whatever their inherent level of social skills -- when they are aware they are being watched by strangers.
These days, in much of what we do, we're always being watched by hundred to hundreds of millions of strangers. And not even just strangers! There's very few moments of the average day when you're *not* potentially in touch with your wife, your husband, your parents or children, all your friends from the most intimate to the most casual (not to mention assorted past flings and affairs, sometimes). Your boss, your employees, your customers, your clients. When I was young, there were big chunks of the day when I was out of touch, unreachable. Walking to school, 20 minutes where my mother couldn't call me, no friends could text me. Driving to work, nobody could call me. When I got home from work, my boss couldn't reach me except in the direst emergency. If I talked to an acquaintance by phone, or wrote a letter, nobody else overheard the conversation, the way zillions of people do when we write on our FB page, post a comment, Tweet.
It's like Panopticon crossed with the Stasi, where everyone watches everyone, not in general with malevolent intent, but....doesn't seem natural to our monkey brains, I bet.
Yes, I think that's true. I remember the first time I ever posted anything on an online forum, probably about 25 years ago: It felt like a huge deal, like being on Dancing with the Stars or having an editorial in the NYTimes. Thousands of people were going to read my words. I felt nervous and excited and presumptuous. Now of course I'm used to it, like everybody else, and yet I think a part of my brain is still registering that a LOT of people are reading this, and I know very few of them. Even on here, even among the names I recognize I don't know most people's gender or age. And then of course fairly regularly you get a reminder that some members of the group you are speaking to are not the kind of person you'd ordinarily disclose anything to, because they make clear right away that they despise your ideas and hate you for having them. Heh.
That sounds like a very fulfilling use of one's time. As I mentioned in the OP, I think manual labor is good! As is--also already mentioned--literally touching grass.
Consider the analogy to depression: from the outside, depression often looks like someone being a little mopey, slow, or avoidant. Big deal! Cheer up, you big baby!! But dig a little deeper and it turns out that severely depressed people sound like they're suffering more than cancer patients, who objectively suffer a lot but seem to adjust and even find the bright side of their diagnosis, in a way that rarely / never happens with depression. Add to that a bunch of weird physiological symptoms that seem hard to predict and fake in advance (why would malingerers all come up with psychomotor retardation, for example?) and depression starts to look pretty different from "just being really sad".
Much like depression, this derealization thing seems multicausal. Some people are depressed because their lives suck (sometimes for reasons within their control, at that!) and some people are depressed in the midst of the fullness of life, for no obvious reason. Which camp you're in is helpful intel, in case your life just sucks and there's something you might could do about that. But "unsuck your life" isn't helpful advice if your life doesn't really suck in the first place. DPD seems correlated with "having the sort of childhood that would alarm CPS", but "don't have an abusive childhood" isn't actionable. (And yes there is obvious genetic confounding but "don't have child abuser genes" is even less actionable.)
Or consider the analogy to obesity, the bulk (heh) of which is pretty obviously due to some combination of sedentary lifestyle plus cheap and hyperpalatable foods. A victimhood of our own success if there ever was one. Yet "stop being a coddled modern" is not actionable advice in the way that "eat exactly this much and exercise" is.
It's possible that DPD is just another disease of modernity and can be treated by consciously unwinding some of its more virtualizing aspects. It also sounds like a real hell to be trapped in, so I have some sympathy for people who find themselves stuck there, never having chosen to inherit the broken social tech that made their condition all the more likely. So yeah I encourage them to touch grass and meanwhile I'm polling here to ask if there's anything else I've missed.
A) I think a high enough % of people who present with depression or other things like DPD or whatever are just basically malingering, that one of the first main pieces of advice and attempts at therapy should just be to "grow up and start getting out there and doing stuff.
B) Not to mention which that is generally good advice anyway even if it doesn't work. I think even for the people who are actually having some sort of underlying issue that isn't just "I have worked myself into a crummy series of behaviors and excuses that make me unhappy but I am in a local minima and so I struggle to get out", it is still helpful in most cases.
I was "depressed" with an actual diagnosis and at one point an SSRI prescription (which I only took for a couple months before I started reselling) from ages ~11-26. And severely depressed for most of of ages ~13-19.
Now I had a lot to be depressed about. A father who was totally out of the picture since 4, and alcoholic mother who was passed out more days than she wasn't by about 7PM. I was super into girls and horny, and tried really hard to be charming and pleasant, yet high status girls more or less hated me from ~11-16 (had a lot of success after that). Had 2 very serious, embarrassing and public medical issues (one of which involved removing half a testicle). And also generally hated myself and was ashamed at my overall behavior.
Nevertheless on top of that at times it felt like I was literally not in control of my own mind. Like there was a dark whirlpool in my brain just sucking it down into dark, intrusive self-harming thoughts. I got lots of advice, mostly about talking SSRIs or about therapy related to my mother. None of that was very helpful, SSRIs just made me feel numb.
What was helpful was when my life started going better. And going out and accomplishing things and building up some self esteem. And I am positive that my uncles conscripting me into manual labor and things like that, while I HATED it, was at a minimum more helpful than the therapy, and looking back now I wish they had done it more.
What I needed was less candy coating. More people pointing out all the good things I had in my life, and how easy it would be to turn it around. (Which I did eventually stumble into on my own). But everyone was so concerned with servicing/validating my whining that there weren't nearly enough people saying "even with all this shit you are probably sitting in a top 3% situation globally and a top 1% situation historically, and you are going to fucking whine and wallow about this instead of turn it into something?". That is a message that would have resonated with me, and did resonate with me the one time I heard it.
Anyway, I jsut think we are way too precious about these things. You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and the world needs omelets not cracked eggs.
I'm more sympathetic to your tough love approach than you'd think a shrink would be. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the best approach with kids who have school phobia is to make them go to school Sure, also talk with them about their worries, try to teach them some coping techniques -- but meanwhile, they gotta go to school. I had a school phobia in 7th grade, no idea why, and after my parents saw that I wasn't really sick they gently but firmly insisted I go to school. My fear faded away in a few days, & I as fine with school forever after. And last I checked research supports that view.
On the other hand, I think you overestimate how many people are malingering. I definitely was not, when I had my school phobia. For some reason I had been seized by a fear that if I went to school I was going to throw up in some horrible public way, like right on my desk in the middle of class, and would lay awake literally half the night trying to get unscared, trying to convince myself it wouldn't happen. And in college when I had DPDR I most certainly was not malingering. I was terrified and miserable, and would have paid any amount of money to get the feeling to stop. And, by the way, I was not using the fact that I had that problem to get out of anything. I didn't even tell anybody but a few close friends that I had it. And I continued going to classes, and ended the term with a high GPA.
Telling people who are suffering like that they they're faking it is really a bad move. If they're not, it's very destructive, especially if you are important to them. Think how you'd feel if you had pretty severe pain from a migraine or a whatever and somebody important to you said they didn't believe you that it hurt very bad! On the other hand, a moderate amount of pushing can really help people people who are depressed or anxious. But if you're going to push, the message to give isn't "you're malingering -- get to work" but "it is very likely that being active will make you feel better, even though it feels like it will make you feel worse. Give it a try, for god's sake!"
You have better grounds for your beliefs than I expected, but I wonder how you'd tell if someone had a physical reason (say, a dietary deficiency) for problems with manual labor.
Eh, that could also go in the opposite direction. The few times in my life I've had to endure grueling physical labor I actually found myself dissociating more and more as a coping mechanism.
Asking for someone else: does anyone know of good resources to find rental apartments in the south peninsula (Bay Area, California, USA), within ~5 miles or 20 minutes from San Bruno, ideally under $3k for 1 bedroom plus parking? Person is currently there and scrambling to find something in the next day or two, but all their early leads collapsed.
Apparently all they're getting is automated responses and AI-generated content.
Surf, an app that helps you make new friends based on mutual interests and that some of you will already be familiar with, is looking for a CTO.
A word on the product - on Surf, users open the platform and type in a desired outcome (e.g. "I want to find a partner in London for a Kilimanjaro climbing trip."). We match them with someone who wants to achieve the same outcome. They chat. They become friends. That's it. Elegant. Simple. Life-changing. We want to use it to eradicate loneliness from the world.
A word on who we're looking for - we need someone with considerable NLP/AI/ML pedigree and experience who can also do good things with simple app creation softwares like Expo. Someone who loves the early stage challenges of startup life. Someone so enthused about the idea of eliminating loneliness from the world and finding a friend for everyone that they would happily work on this for a year+ pre-funding.
In terms of existing assets, we've already got lots of proprietary technology incl. key algorithms, and an app that's 80% finished. Our waiting list has seen uptake in over 40 countries (+1 if you consider ACX its own pirate nation) and we're in promising talks with universities over pilot schemes. We already have one advisor (prior exp. at Google) onboard and are actively seeking others to make near-term fundraising more straightforward. Any CTO coming into this project will be well-set-up for success.
Early stage - equity only, but we'll be pursuing funding immediately after launch.
The ideal candidate would be in London, UK but fundamentally we don't care where you live, especially if you're the next Aaron Swartz/Tarun Mathur/Mira Murati.
Get in touch by emailing us at team@imsurf.in with the subject line "Surf CTO Position".
Excellent sentiments, but far afield from the topic: is it 'odd' for conservatives to not want their communities or nations filled with folks who are not 'their people'?
Looking at immigration from an economic perspective is always reasonable, of course -- that's why the white anglo-saxon protestant elite in my example above was willing to let irish (and then italian) catholics overrun some parts of new england. That lens itself is reasonable, but to pretend there are no other possible lenses through which to view the issue is not reasonable.
The irish weren't fond of losing Boston when it happened, either. All of history is every place being overrun and people being sad. I'm no conservative, and I don't believe conserving places/peoples against this kind of thing is even possible. It's just not 'odd' to want to do it. You know what I mean?
The idea that immigration is always economically beneficial is fantasy (unless you think a larger GDP is the sole determinant of a "good" economy). And Irish and Anglo-Saxons are very, very similar genetically/culturally comapred to anglos and somalians.
I think it is a bit more understandable in places like Europe where you have fairly homogeneous cultures that go back hundreds of years or are amalgams of smaller but very close cultures that do (those forced amalgams like France arguably already present a bit of a cultural loss). Denmark with 3 million extra Ugandans settling there over the period of say a hundred years is fundamentally going to be a different country. The same holds for 3 million Koreans or Russians or the Spanish or whatever, but the more distant the incoming culture is, the lower number of people from that culture is going to change Denmark a lot)
Less so in places like the US where the citizen's ancestral culture means next to nothing (to the point where absurdly broad categories like "white" or "black" are considered ethnicities) and almost no citizens can trace their ancestry to America in the 17th century or even the early 19th century (native Americans are an obvious exception, descendants of the original Dutch and English settlers also, to a lesser degree). USA with 60 million extra Ugandans settling there over a century is not going to be that much different. That is unless the melting pot of the US stops being a melting pot and the society atomizes in a way that you have a 60 million people with a completely different culture living separated from the rest of the society...
The difference I guess is that countries like Denmark (and by extension most countries in the Old World) cannot realistically be melting pots lest they stop being the countries they are whereas being a melting pot is kind of the point of the US and "melting" more people is therefore not going to change its nature much.
That said, you can have assimilation even in places like Denmark but I think the capacity for such assimilation is much lower and it is going to happen much slower. By the capacity I mean "absorbing more people from different cultures without changing the country in a fundamental way". So I think it is more understandable if people worry about the speed of immigration, or speed of immigration from distant cultures...but only to a certain degree - like I said, the capacity for assimilation is still nonzero even for the Old World countries (probably also somewhat different for each country).
Yes, this...the way American and Canadian Right-Wingers criticise immigration based on European "tropes" is a bit annoying and just cringe IMO...I understand that some people, even in the US or Canada, might not feel comfortable with people from a different culture, but then to me it doesn't make much sense as one of the major arguments in Europe against immigration is that it will lead to the collapse of the Welfare State (which I share to some extent)… but for the US (and to a lesser extent Canada), this argument doesn't make much sense since the welfare state there isn't nearly as developed as it is in Western Europe... yes, I've heard some self-styled "libertarians" in the US being against immigration because they think foreigners don't appreciate Anglo-Americans libertarian values...which is even more ridiculous, since it not only goes against one of the major tenets of libertarianism (person-to-person exchanges should be the major considerations, and groups don't exist), and also is ridiculous for other reasons (aren't most founders of US startups of immigrant backup)… basically being Anti-Immigration in the US or Canada (either for economic or cultural reasons) is a very cringe position based IMO on egoism and maybe some kind of (White?) Supremacism (I understand that most alt-righters here will deny this, but IMO it's the same as being a leftist who complains about police violence against POCs in Europe)…
For Europe it makes more sense, but even in the (Western) European context I would focus on the economic dimension of immigration and base my criticism on this area (e.g. Daniel Stelter or Thilo Sarrazin).
>this argument doesn't make much sense since the welfare state there isn't nearly as developed as it is in Western Europe.
Non-whites already cost white taxpayers around half a trillion dollars in government services received in excess of taxes paid (not considering the cost of crime and imprisonment, which would significantly increase it).
Importantly, non-whites overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and if enough of them come and Democrats amass enough political power, the welfare state will almost assuredly expand. You're assuming that America has a fixed set of policies that will not change, but they depend entirely on who makes up the voters of this country.
>which is even more ridiculous, since it not only goes against one of the major tenets of libertarianism (person-to-person exchanges should be the major considerations, and groups don't exist), and also is ridiculous for other reasons (aren't most founders of US startups of immigrant backup)…
It's not ridiculous. We don't live in a libertarian society, so groups have power to restrict other people's rights, therefore, its entirely reasonable to think about things in terms of groups.
>basically being Anti-Immigration in the US or Canada (either for economic or cultural reasons) is a very cringe position based IMO on egoism and maybe some kind of (White?) Supremacism
White people have a significantly higher mean IQ than all groups besides North-East Asians and Ashkenazi jews (selected populations of other groups will be high IQ, but pro-immigration people don't support selective immigration). This is a brute scientific fact, and you dismissing this as "white supremacist" is extremely bad faith. You're basically using a slur to dismiss scientific reality that doesn't suit your ideology.
I am not sure how to argue with alt-righters like you...ok fine, are you suggesting that the US should base it's immigration policy solely on IQ? Anyway, if they did, should they still let in people from low-IQ groups if they have higher IQs themselves individually?
Also, you did not provide any reliable source for your claim that "Non-whites already cost white taxpayers around half a trillion dollars in government services received in excess of taxes paid"?
> Importantly, non-whites overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and if enough of them come and Democrats amass enough political power, the welfare state will almost assuredly expand
For a guy likes to complain about the bad guys doing everything based on ‘ideology’ you spout an awful lot of dogmatic right wing ideology yourself. Are you oblivious to the irony?
Or do you think the crap you say is simply ‘the truth’? That is what you are accusing your adversaries of here. They think they are speaking the truth but really it’s just ‘ideology’.
FFS. The word Ideology by itself doesn’t even have inherent negative connotations.
Here let me be as clear as I can.. This is the dictionary definition of ideology:
ideology
noun
1. a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy."the ideology of democracy"
Ton of assumptions there. I realize it's hard to put yourself in someone else's perspective but it's a valuable skill. Of course, if they're 'white supremacists' they're not really people and you don't have to work so hard. Whew!
Nowhere in their comment to they at all claim or even imply that white supremacists aren't people. It seems that you are making assumptions about their motives rather than providing tangible facts that support your side of the argument.
Fair enough. I was responding to the dismissive tone, but was not precise.
As for you responding to me, nowhere in any of my comments here or elsewhere have I advanced or even implied a "side", let alone one that would be served by "tangible facts". You must have me confused with some other commentator -- my point throughout has been that dismissing as 'odd' (or in the case of the comment under discussion here) or the products of pure 'egoism' or 'supremacism' the default position of human groups throughout history is myopic and absurd. Nowhere do I imply I hold this position, and if it seems shocking to you that someone can even describe a side without being on it, that's hardly anything to do with me.
Also all excellent thoughts, but again beside the mark: it's not for us to say how good or meaningful of a culture an ethnic group or coalition needs to maintain in order for it not to be 'odd' for them to want to preserve whatever it is that they have.
And again, a deracinated concern for 'cultural values' is why republicans with very low non-white support can talk about how the good people from south of the border are 'natural conservatives' at the same time that their actual constituents wanted the border sealed shut fifty years ago. It's not something broad like "do these people believe in jesus (albeit a catholic version) and love their families" -- everyone believes in something and loves their own families -- that makes the difference, but merely the question "are these people recognizably 'my people' -- do they look like me, do they sound like me, will their sons have a natural sympathy for mine due to these similarities?" All of this takes place in a fraction of a second when we see another human being -- we notice body language, race (or ethnicity if we're from somewhere that distinguishes this to a high degree of granularity: anthropologists in africa are often amazed at what a tremendous distance a trained human eye can determine in/out group) almost instantly. Most of us here reading this substack learned to set aside these instinctual movements in favor of the individual and in favor of the brotherhood of the human race, but that people who haven't done this work continue to feel the way the vast majority of humanity until the modern period felt isn't 'odd' in any meaningful sense.
Who in the US are "your people"? I am not American, but from what I gather (e.g. popular media, social media, news, blogs etc.) there seems to be little that various groups of Americans (broadly "liberals' and "conservatives"), so I think that time were "Americans" (or at least White Americans) of all kinds were feeling like they were part of the same group are now over for a long while...
You can ctrl-f in this page (if substack will allow you) to see that I'm not talking about myself or 'my people' -- we're engaged in an anthropological exercise to explain the apparent motivations of people we would otherwise think of as "odd".
Now if we pretend you were addressing that question to a white american who opposes immigration, if he's smart he would look at you with disgust and say that he doesn't have to justify his sense of his people to an obviously hostile interlocutor engaged in tactical ignorance -- after all, we know exactly who this white conservative's people are when we call them backwards hicks who don't spice their food and think pro wrassling is real, but when we're talking about who they think they are suddenly they don't exist as a people group.
Honestly, I don't deal much with White Americans, except on the internet...since I'm not planning to move to the US, I don't think I'll be having too many conversations with them... as for Europeans who are against immigrants: I understand the sentiment, but they should base their arguments rationally (i.e. in economics)...
The idea that group-level preference is irrational and economics is rational is probably not your most rational opinion. People don't live in economies, they live in communities. And that goes for everyone. When black folk in Harlem complained they were being priced out by gentrification, shouting at them about economics probably wouldn't have reassured them much. Same thing everywhere else, every time this happens. Not saying it shouldn't happen or that you should care, just trying to help you understand people who aren't like you.
The part left unsaid (but which we all know, and without which the conversation doesn't make any sense) is that some cultures are better than other cultures. Adding more Swiss people to US culture is likely to make it better, adding more Ugandans will likely make it worse.
It's no secret that Swiss culture is better than Ugandan culture, it's obvious from the fact that countries populated by Swiss people look like Switzerland, and countries populated by Ugandan people look like Uganda.
Sorry, but this argument is unserious IMO... for two reasons:
Yes, Switzerland is a wealthy country with a high quality of life, but is it really only because it's inhabited by "Swiss" people? I mean, it is a country with 3 official languages, and this alone should cause "Ethno-Nationalists" to see where they went wrong by using Switzerland as an example of an "Ethnonationalist" country... IMO it's much more complicated why Switzerland is so wealthy, but it's partly because of Geography and obviously the institutions (which formed that way for various reasons further still) of that country...definitely not genetics/biology though... I mean, just saying that if Swiss People move somewhere a place automatically becomes "better" strikes me as unrealistic...
After all, there are places in the US where many people Swiss descent live , and let's see how they perform economically against the rest of the country (according to Wikipedia, these are the following places with the most Swiss Americans as a % of their population :
Berne, Indiana – 29.10%
Monticello, Wisconsin – 28.82%
New Glarus, Wisconsin – 28.26%
Boys Ranch, Texas – 23.30%
Monroe, Wisconsin – 18.91%
Pandora, Ohio – 18.90%
Argyle, Wisconsin – 17.84%
Sugarcreek, Ohio – 17.29%
Elgin, Iowa – 15.79%
Monroe, Indiana – 14.35%)
Looking at the median household income for some of these places, they were
Also, secondly, among Americans who are anti-immigration, there seems to be the believe that it would be simple to just get people from those wealthy European countries to move to the US...but the truth is simply that not many people in Western Europe are interested in moving to the US anymore...so it's simply not an option. So either you don't have any immigration (because there aren't many people from other Western Countries who would want to move to the US) and deal with US demography becoming more like Japan in the future, or simply accept that if economic growth is important to you (as it seems to be for most US conservatives), then the US will need immigration and the vast majority of it will come from "Non-Western" countries...
Also, lastly,, while I agree that most people would agree with you and say that Swiss culture is better than Ugandan culture, it is still subjective...since culture is inherently subjective.
Oh come on. Instead of burying your nose in a book (or Googling random data), just freaking go to Switzerland, walk around and keep your eyes and ears open. Nobody who's actually been to Switzerland for any length of time can doubt that Switzerland is as successful as it is because it's full of Swiss people.
"Who cares about statistics? What about my lived experience?" -> I suspect you dislike people who make arguments like this; why do it yourself?
(Have /you/ ever lived in Switzerland? If not, it's not even your own ~lived experience~ it's that of a hypothetical person you're imagining, even less grounded in reality.)
I've been to Switzerland quite a few times (8 times in the past 12 years)…and it's a very beautiful place, both in terms of the natural and built environment.
But are you suggesting that if all 8 million people from Switzerland were to move to the US, then they would magically turn the US (with a population of 330 million people) into a society just like Switzerland...? Also, as I wrote before, Switzerland itself is a multicultural and multiethnic country, so to use Switzerland of all countries as an example for Ethnonationalism is a bit odd...
And also, once again I am asking why anyone from Switzerland would want to move to the US if it's already a better country (I think you could say objectively that this is the case, at least in terms of statistics like GDP and health outcomes)…?
>Yes, Switzerland is a wealthy country with a high quality of life, but is it really only because it's inhabited by "Swiss" people?
OF COURSE!
It's not because of it's natural resources. It's not that Switzerland has magic soil. Switzerland is prosperous entirely because of the people living there, and if you change the people living there, you change the country. If replaced the Swiss population with the population of Haiti, the country collapses. People are what make a country.
> mean, it is a country with 3 official languages, and this alone should cause "Ethno-Nationalists" to see where they went wrong by using Switzerland as an example of an "Ethnonationalist" country...
Ethno-nationalism isn't linguistic nationalism. They're all the same race. They're literally more closely genetically related than people from different parts of India are!
> and obviously the institutions (which formed that way for various reasons further still)
They formed the way they did because of the people living there. There's no grand mystery here. It's the people. Africans have never, ever made a country with "good instutions" before, and the only non-genetic explanation of this is an endless series of just so stories to rationalize a denial of racial differences.
>I mean, just saying that if Swiss People move somewhere a place automatically becomes "better" strikes me as unrealistic...
Northern/western Europeans have made everywhere they go better. Look at the US, look at Canada, look at Australia, look at New Zealand, look at South Africa.
"unrealistic" is any narartive in which the sudden and rapid flourishing of these countries following european settlement has nothing to do with them being settled by the same type of people.
> deal with US demography becoming more like Japan in the future, or simply accept that if economic growth is important to you
Economic growth isn't important - per capita GDP growth is important, and you will not get that from low-IQ third world immigrants. They will continue to be a fiscal drain.
>Also, lastly,, while I agree that most people would agree with you and say that Swiss culture is better than Ugandan culture, it is still subjective...since culture is inherently subjective.
If we're talking about what leads to properous, safe, socities with good instiutions, then no, it's not subjective in the slightest.
>Ethno-nationalism isn't linguistic nationalism. They're all the same race. They're literally more closely genetically related than people from different parts of India are!
India is an extremely large, diverse country that has 22 different languages recognised in its constitution. Being more homogenous than India is like being taller than Peter Dinklage.
Well, you don't seem to answer my arguments...Are you saying that it's because of the "genetics" of the Swiss people that Switzerland is such a rich country? Sorry, but how come Ticino is so rich, if large parts of Italy aren't? Also "Europeans have made everywhere they go better" is really debatable...I am not saying that colonialism was always bad, but what you are stating here is pure opinion..no sources to back up your claims. Also "per capita GDP growth is important" - if it's caused by IQ why isn't Japan growing faster than India or even the US, considering they have a higher IQ as a country?
No they're not. South Africa was a much better place to live, even during apartheid, even for blacks, than was Zimbabwe. People can put up with a fair amount of petty racism in order to have enough to eat and not have a serious risk of being fed to a woodchipper because you said something disrespectful about the Chief Thug. Ranking racism as the #1 Evil is a First World Problem viewpoint.
How is that comment racist? It was a comment about culture --social shibboleths, the values people cherish or don't, how they act or don't act on those, et cetera. I don't see any place where "people with black skin are better/worse than people with red/yellow/green skin" was stated. If you're seeing things that aren't really there -- maybe it's your own assumptions about people that need examining?
If you mean "diverse" in terms of skin color, I personally couldn't care less about that, any more than I care how many toes other commenters have, or the color of their pubic hair. Frankly, I would find it a little creepy if someone *was* interested in those things -- if it were of interest to other commenters whether I was black or yellow or white. Why do you want to know? Ew.
If you mean "diverse" in the sense of different life histories, different perspectives and talents, then I'm all for that, but I am baffled how this connects to skin color. Again, the fact that you seem to assume it does makes me wonder about your own unexamined and maybe unconscious race-based and race-oriented attitudes about other people.
Anyone put off by "racism" here (i.e. discussing the scientific REALITY of racial differences) doesn't belong here, because it means they're incapable of good faith discuession of thorny issues.
Speaking of melting pot, I have been thinking lately about that concept, and also the concept of "white." It seems to me that the woke left have been looking at those two terms as intricately linked. That to have cultures melt together means that the people sublimating their culture to the broader culture become "white" regardless of their skin color or racial background. That something is lost in the process of "melting" together. This is not as big a deal for Anglo-Saxons who change a little bit, but a really big deal for cultural minorities who have to change more from who they might be in order to fit it.
I would be curious to get other thoughts on this aspect, though I recognize it's a bit niche for a third tier post response.
Well, I am not American and my impression of Americans (to a lesser degree also Canadians and Latin Americans, but they seem less "universalistic" to me) is that they underestimate a lot by how much Europeans differ from each other. The difference between say Spain and Sweden is at least as large as that between Mexico and Canada. And even the cultural between France and Germany is like the difference between Mexico and the US. Even the differences INSIDE European countries are probably at least as large as the differences between the US and Canada. E.g. Bavaria vs Schleswig-Holstein (it's basically not even the same language anymore :D ).
Americans with European ancestry might have a few specific family dishes that somewhat resemble something you might encounter in their "old country", maybe they know a little bit more about the history of that country...and that's about that. Otherwise they are Americans (even if they fancy calling themselves Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans or whatever). At least that is my experience with all Americans I've met in Europe and elsewhere (though I've never been to the US or anywhere in North America, actually).
If the "white ethnicities" (basically usually meaning European ethnicities) retained their individuality, then the US would look like the EU. It would never become a federation in the first place (though probably some states would be pushing for it in hopes of controlling it...*cough* France *cough*), you'd be stuck with the articles of the confederation and each state would have a very unique identity, most people form one state would not understand the people from another state unless they learned a foreign language, etc.
Of course, Germans and Ukrainians are a lot closer than Germans and Malaysians, but Bavarians and the people from Schleswig-Holstein (both parts of modern-day Germany) are very likely further away from each other culturally (even linguistically in a way) than German-Americans and Ukrainian-Americans.
So at the very least, the various Europeans largely melted to "whites" in the US. The same can probably be said of Africans although even though there it was often quite involuntary. But if you look at (sub-saharan) Africa, being "black" means very little there, being Bantu vs being say Oromo is a big difference there. For various historical reasons (but probably mostly slavery) the melting pot in the US seems to be worse at melting it much further than that (although both groups are still very American, i.e. American whites are not just an average of Europeans and American blacks are not an average of Africans...they are both distinctly American)
Exactly... that's my impression too, though we Europeans do the same e.g. in regards to thinking of "Indian people" as being the same as a European nationality, even if India itself should be compared to the whole of Europe IMO, since both are subcontinents of (Eur)Asia...but yeah, the American view of "races" is quite peculiar to them, especially "White" vs "everyone else" and considering people of Pakistani and Japanese ancestry to be part of the same "race" strikes me as weird too...
Not all of us think of "white" as some monolithic group, and especially not "Asian" - though some of our regulations and government counting rules may make it seem that way. "Woke" is not the only viewpoint in America, and is actually a pretty small minority (though apparently a majority in a number of fields, including academia, media, and tech).
That's not exactly the case though. "White" ethnicities retain their individuality, they're just in a state of mutual intercomprehensibility with other whites.
In places where peoples live together, the groups will become "white" unless there are active steps taken to do otherwise. In Austin, Mexicans and Vietnamese were as white as anyone else. Things are different in New York. Though didn't realize how many white ethnic enclaves existed until I moved up here.
I'm also going to question the generalization of "White ethnicities retain their individuality". I believe that in the vast majority of cases, by the third generation any remnant of their ancestral identity is more of a hobby than anything else. And usually not even that. My Irish-American sister-in-law drinks Guinness, celebrates St. Patrick's day, visited Dublin when anyone else would have visited London or Paris, and is otherwise indistinguishable from any other mainstream American. For my part, I happen to know which European countries my ancestors came from, but that fact is about as relevant to me as my astrological sign (which I also happen to know). And the vast majority of the white Americans I know, I would have a hard time guessing their ancestry beyond "Europe" unless I recognized the surname's origin.
I didn't know that white ethnics existed until I moved here. It was a revelation to be able to distinguish a Pole from a Dane from an Irishperson by sight.
But again, I'm not claiming that the mass-media "American" "ethnicity" doesn't exist or that people haven't been pressured to abandon previous identities in favor of it. What I'm claiming is that it's neither necessary nor sufficient to adopt it in order to be "white." That as long as those particular ethnicities are mutually intelligible with the existing "white" bloc, they will be considered as being "white."
This allows for the phenomenon that I saw in Texas of whiteness allowing for a larger variety of skin colors than elsewhere.
I know a fair number of immigrants and their kids/grandkids. The kids who grew up here are basically Americans who will, if pressed, go ahead and speak some Spanish, but who think of themselves as Americans, hang out with and date other random Americans, and only mention that they're Salvadoran or Mexican or Peruvian or whatever if someone asks or there's some special reason it's relevant. The grandkids mostly don't even know Spanish or Tagalog or Chinese or whatever.
I think the main difference is in culture though. Yes an average Pole looks different than an average Irishman and you can get a better than 50% accuracy guessing their ethnicity but with some people you can't really tell by just looking at them whether they are French or Irish or German or Swedish or Polish or even Spanish in some cases (if we are talking about northern Spain). Also, the looks are really not quite as important to people, I think.
It is the cultures which are different and that is what matters more to people, not the shade of your skin colour (though of course there is always some prejudice based on the first impressions). I know people with Vietnamese ancestry (born here, children of immigrants) here in the Czech republic who I consider pretty much Czech. And their kids will be culturally as Czech as Italian-Americans are Americans. So while a (ethnically) French guy looks a lot more like a Czech guy than these people, his culture is clearly French and not Czech and that is what matters. Or rather the physical looks give the first impression but that only lasts until you actually go and talk to the people.
By the way, I was actually really surprised that people consider Harry Windsor's (or whatever his surname is now that he is no longer an official part of the British royal family and so should use an actual surname) wife black. If nobody ever mentioned that to me and someone asked me I'd say she was white. She is definitely very American in any case :-)
Yeah this just isn't the whole story. As the other person replied tons of "white" people in the US had lost almost all their individuality by the 1980s. Some families retained a small smattering of "ethnic" practices, but many did not or were so interbred as for them to be meaningless, or just ad hoc curiosities instead of some actual heritage.
My parents were between them like 6 different types of northern European minimum (though my dad wasn't in the picture anyway). Living in a pretty German/Scandinavian part of the country. I know some families who retained their "Finnishness", and a bit of Finnish cultural practices, and Swedish, and Polish, and German. But just a few. Most of them were like mine and were just "American" with no particular ethnic connection other than something researched for elementary school projects on "melting pots". And these are only like 4th generation families with 5th generation kids.
I really think the TV and mass culture of the 60s/70s did a good job of washing out much of the ethnic difference for a lot of people, especially white people.
The shared cultural heritage was Charlie Brown Christmas special not lutefisk.
IMO it should be accepted that "White American" is an ethnicity just like "German" or "Russian" (which itself are also composites of people with many ethnic backgrounds)…of course, these days, White American could be split into "liberal" and "conservative" as sub-ethnicities... :D .
Except that the "white" part has been mostly optional since the 1980s at the latest. Not everybody takes the option, so it's still mostly white, but we shouldn't be trying to insist that it is exclusively white.
Not all "white" ethnicities retain their individuality. Some lost it before coming to the US, and many lost it after. Some of it is a random mixing of previously separate people (my mom's family is Eastern European, with some German, Polish, Slovakian, etc. and various unknowns). My dad's family may or may not involve a variety of Western European cultures. We don't know or observe any of the culturally relevant practices from any of these countries. And assuming that one "white" cultural aspect is the same as another is part of the problem. Slovakians are not German, and may have good reason to resent them.
IMO, the melting pot model describes American cities much better than it does American rural regions. I've only lived in one American rural region, so I might be generalizing wrong, but it definitely has a distinctive culture. This is slowly getting eroded by internal migration and cultural influence of people from the dominant cultural group.
There have been observations and articles (whose accuracy I'm not remotely able to speak to except in the broadest sense) referring an ongoing homogenization and "Southernization" of US rural culture.
I have no firsthand knowledge if that's right, though it would help explain the popularity of Confederate iconography in places like southern Illinois (the Land of Lincoln!) and West Virginia (which exists as a state because people there in the 1860s were decidedly not Confederates).
I’m in New Hampshire, and I’ve been surprised and disappointed to see a Confederate battle flag or two even this far north. Trumpy types, of course: more looking to flip the bird than express anything resembling a thought. The homogenization of hick culture via the internet is complete. Ironically enough, the Republican Party of the 21st century has become the Confederacy 2.0
Dunno about WV, but in Illinois (where I live and where I have spent lots of times in the rural parts for more than a decade now) the overall trend may be related to US rural culture shrinking. There are small cities all over central and southern Illinois that are now half-ghost towns: built out for 3,000 residents but now home to only 1,000, etc. (Driving through places like Henry, Illinois is downright spooky -- the empty houses mostly aren't boarded up they're just sitting there like a dusty old movie set.)
Illinois now has 40 entire counties each having resident populations under 20,000 people, and 15 of them have fewer than 10,000. That drain-out is not new of course but it is very current, those rural counties' current population curves all look like this:
Our statewide population decreased by 0.1% from 2010 to 2020 while the City of Chicago population increased by a similar tiny fraction. The suburban areas generally increased, the medium-sized cities like Rockford stayed flat. The part of the state which is really draining out is that vast farm belt. And the people remaining are disproportionately older; you see hardly any 30somethings or 40somethings anymore except for the Mexican-immigrant pockets, every farm-county elected official or community leader now is in his/her 70s, etc.
To what degree the homogenization/Southernization (which is absolutely true) is a cause of the rural drain as opposed to vice versa, I have no idea. The two are simultaneous though and surely connected in some way.
Yeah but Illinois is a dumpster fire next to 55-gallon drums of aviation fuel stored in the mail hold of RMS Titanic, so most people with a brain have fled or are making plans to flee.
Yea that's been the talking point in certain circles for a while now, it just isn't supported by reality. For instance I need to correct something I wrote above: in fact Illinois statewide had a net population gain of 250,000 residents from the 2010 to 2020 censuses. (I had accidentally looked at a preliminary estimate of the 2020 census not the actual final census results.)
The population-loss meme is connected to the one about Illinois being one of the highest-taxing states, when in fact it ranks 30th among 50 states by state income tax rates. Is also very average nationally (23rd) in sales taxes; where Illinois does crack the top ten (8th) is in property-tax rates.
And the part of Illinois which genuinely is emptying out is that huge farm belt in the middle. Since that is the part of our state's economy which is least impacted by the property tax rates (farmland in Illinois is taxed at 1/6th the rate of residential or commercial properties), it does not appear that levels of taxation are a driving factor in which parts of the state are losing/gaining population.
The US also has the advantage of hundreds of years of development of social technologies for turning people into new Americans. For example, we Americans tend to be less subtle in communication than most places but that's for obvious reasons.
Even if that's true, it doesn't make it unreasonable at all. And people in 19th century America would have considered it laughable to suggest whites would ever be a minority in the US, and yet this is an inevitability this century.
I'm not sure that's the question intended. Everyone already knows that that fear is common around the world. Historically, that's how many nations and peoples perished, dissolved, or were conquered. It's the usual explanation for the fall of Rome. (I recently posted my own disagreement with that here, but I can't deny that the Goths arrived as refugees, then became the rulers of Western Rome). I think outright conquest was more common, but it's often hard to tell at great distances in time. Historians now argue over whether the Celts wiped out the Picts; whether the Anglo-Saxons invaded England suddenly and violently, or slowly and peacefully; whether the Hyksos invaded ancient Egypt from outside or were immigrants who seized power (https://www.science.org/content/article/invasion-ancient-egypt-may-have-actually-been-immigrant-uprising), and whether the "sea people" invaded ancient Egypt, or were originally just refugees.
I also note that the question is posed using the words "their people", and not ethnic or racial terms. Today, conservatives don't want their nation filled with folks who are radicals, and radicals don't want their nation filled with folks who are conservatives. Is one of those "odder" than the other?
So I think that, if there's a question to ask here, it's, "Why do so many people today think the fear of being outnumbered by people who don't respect your cultural values is unreasonable or immoral?" Or perhaps, "Why is everyone in America today in denial about their reluctance to live with people who aren't 'their people'?"
Radical is the opposite of conservative. Liberal is, if anything, the opposite of authoritarian. Today America has a conservative party and a radical party, but no uniquely liberal or authoritarian party. Both liberal and authoritarian ideals are split about equally between our parties.
Liberalism historically emphasized individualism, equality before the law, equality of opportunity, free markets, private property, the limitation of state power, freedom of speech, toleration of diverse opinions, and the right to own weapons. Conservatives are clearly the liberals today in that original meaning of the term. But they fail when it comes to newer freedoms that weren't thought of 2 centuries ago, like control over one's own body (sexual preference and practice, prostitution, medical treatment, recreational drug use, abortion if your community's metaphysics allow it); the freedom to have privacy (no search without a warrant, freedom to travel and to buy things without it being tracked), cryptography, and pornography; and freedom from gender roles.
Forgive me Phil, I’m way out my wheelhouse here but your definitions seem a bit fusty.
I’ve poked around a bit and having completely absorbed the thinking of Edmund Burke [joke] I see radical being used to describe Margret Thatcher and that weird bit of CosPlay that just went down in Brasilia.
Help me out here with some fairly recent examples. Would you label all these people as Conservative?
The word "radical" has a clear meaning. Radicals are people who want to make large changes right now.
The word "conservative" doesn't denote a particular set of beliefs, but the desire to keep things mostly the way they are at the present moment, or to revert them to how they were at some prior time. This means it doesn't have a clear meaning, because often one party wants to keep things as they are, while the other wants to adopt a policy that was national policy sometime in the (possibly distant) past.
So these terms aren't really opposites. There are radical conservatives, who want to make big changes right now to revert to some (possibly imaginary) earlier time, like the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, or maybe Margaret Thatcher (I don't follow British politics).
I'd call all those people you listed mostly conservative, but "conservative" meant something different in Reagan's time than it does today. For instance,
- In the 1950s, conservatives were against free speech if it might be communist propaganda. Today, radicals are against free speech in general. So you could call them "conservative" because they want to blacklist and silence people as was done in the 1950s.
- In Woodrow Wilson's day, conservatives thought America should worry about America, while Wilsonian progressives said it should take on poverty and bad governments in other nations, preferably working toward a world government. After World War 2, the Marshall Plan was definitely radical and interventionist, but was supported by "conservatives". In Reagan's day, conservatives felt that America had a responsibility for the rest of the world, while radicals felt America should stop interfering with other nations. Today, conservatives again think America should worry about America, while radicals again say it should take on poverty in other nations, preferably working toward a world government.
The term "liberal" is clearer than "conservative". Historically, it refers to principles of liberty described by Enlightenment thinkers, especially John Locke in the 17th century. The main point of what I wrote is about the meaning of "liberal", not about the meaning of "conservative".
The confusion over the meaning of "liberal" is probably due to the Civil War. The Old South considered itself liberal in the old sense, and yet was a hierarchical society that didn't extend the freedoms it praised to slaves or the lower classes. I would argue that it wasn't really liberal. There was no freedom of speech. Abolitionists or workmen trying to claim equal rights before the law would get beaten up. And the North was both radical and liberal (in any sense).
You could argue that the term "liberal" today has come to mean simply people who want radical changes. I object to people doing that, because I believe personal liberty is important, and the people who want radical changes today are generally opposed to personal liberty. I don't like it when people call for censorship, government control of sex and gender, racial separatism, and the elimination of gun rights, free trade, and private property, and call it "liberal".
So my use of the word "liberal" isn't as objectively correct as I implied. I just think it's more honest.
Indeed, they did from long before any Europeans showed up. E.g. when the first French voyageurs arrived in the Great Lakes they found that the Iroquois and Algonquin confederacies had been engaged in a mutually-genocidal war for something like a century, with the core issue being which tribe was entitled to live where.
Similar examples are found throughout history around the world going as far back as we have any historical records. It does seem as if that is one of those fundamental gut human fears.
If resources are scarce, people are going to fight about resources. Where resources are not scarce , people might fight over ethnicity and ideology , but also might not. Western societies tend to deliver abundance, and enforce tolerance.
One reason for the Norman conquest of Ireland was a petty king inviting in Anglo-Norman mercenaries to help him in a political row with another petty king which escalated up to the high king. Petty 1 seals the deal by marrying his daughter off to leader of said mercs, with promises that merc will be king after him. Mercs then decide they like the place, settle down all over, and set up as local lordlings. Local chieftains and kings who are fighting each other decide that having the new guys on *their* side whacking their enemies over the head is a great idea.
Then the king in England decides "hey, my former vassals may be getting ideas above their station, time to remind them who's the king" and claims lordship of Ireland. Fast-forward the Eight Hundred Years 😁
It happened all over: A and B are at each other's throats, C turns up, A and/or B thinks this is great opportunity to get C on their side, eventually C ends up owning the place. Then it's hard to kick them out again:
Same happened in Middle/South-America. I'm certainly confusing which is one was which, but the Mayas and Aztecs were at each others throats. Then spanish conquistadors showed up and Mayans invited them to crush the Aztecs (or the other way round?) and guess who ended up owning the place.
Will the international drug trade inevitably collapse thanks to future machines that can synthesize any drug from simple precursors? I ask because I just read a report describing how advances in chemistry over the last 15 years had made it possible to synthesize methamphetamine from more common types of chemicals that governments have difficulty tracking.
What's the market case for anyone ever developing a "future machine that can synthesize any drug from simple precursors"? It may be technologically feasible at some point, but it's going to be competing with an extant global supply chain that can connect you with a factory that produces the particular chemical you want at scale and with full economies of scale, now with overnight delivery. I can see niche applications, but they may not be enough to finance the development and it may not be enough for hypothetical future you to get lost in the crowd when you buy one for your home drug-peddling business.
I remember the early hype about 3-D printers as the inevitable, omnipresent home appliance of the future, and the speculation about how that would mean e.g. gun control was futile because anyone would be able to print a Glock or an AR-15 on demand. I also remember what happened when that dream met the reality of Amazon, leaving 3-D printers as mostly hobbyist toys that are nowhere near capable of printing serious guns, with a handful of high-end industrial machines that could *maybe* do so but not at a competitive scale even on the black market.
You mean illegal drug trade, I assume? Doesn't seem likely. It's very unlikely that any time in the next 100 years it will be possible to dial into a simple machine the structure of some random small molecule and have it synthesize it from whatever random feedstocks you can source from your local grocery, hardware, and animal feed stores. A more plausible scenario is that it becomes possible to type your structure and desired precursors into OChemChatBot and have it outline a plausible synthesis.
Of course, whether the synthesis works or causes your garage/backwoods lab to explode in blue-green fire because OChemChatBot hallucinated the answer will remain a business risk.
I think it's more likely that the tech will be available, but giving the recipe to your Synth-o-matic will be illegal. Defense Distributed will be an indicator.
I hadn’t read either of these before and they created a lot of new tracks of thought and a tall stack of new reading I want to do.
Right now I’ll only say that my take on Daniel Ingram, from watching videos of people interviewing him, is that he is playing the long con. Sorry David , if you are really enlightened this won’t bother you, if you are running a con it probably won’t either.
I'm trying to help a young guy I know find a job that's a good fit. He's in his mid-20's, and has ADD & Asperger's. He's distractible, and a bit odd -- on the other hand he is friendly, honest, hard-working, and quite bright. He's got a college degree in computer animation, and knows how to use Blendr, Photoshop and some of the lower-end animation and video editing software. Is also competent, though not expert, with the basic office suite apps -- Word, Excel, etc. -- and had a couple courses in Python. Has built a couple simple web sites.
He's been working at a hardware store stocking shelves and helping customers for several years. He is well-liked there but makes little more than minimum wage, and really needs to earn more. It seems to me that his computer skills should help him get a job that pays above minimum wage, but I can't think of a job that might suit. But if I were opening a store on a tight budget, and was not very computer literate myself, I'd love to have somebody like him who could help me get oriented with using a computer for the store, could build a simple website for the store, could explain spread sheets to me, could make attractive notices in a nice font to post somewhere -- things like that -- and then later help me unload boxes and put the stuff on the shelves.
He is willing to take one or 2 courses if improving certain crucial skills would make him more hirable for jobs that pay at least 50% more than minimum wage, but he's clueless about what courses to take.
One last thing: It would not work for him to be self-employed. He needs the structure of a regular job.
What ideas have you got for this amiable young oddball?.
He could start as an office assistant for some small law/accounting/insurance firms etc, develop his computer skills and grow with the business or move on to a larger firm for a better position after 6 months -1 year of experience.
It sounds like his social skills might be the core problem? If you're only looking for "above minimum wage" and he has a college degree, this seems like an extremely easy problem to solve. Even if his degree were in something completely unusable, he should be able to land a generic office job somewhere. Adding in what could be summarized as "IT skills" to a lot of jobs should also open up a small world of Help Desk or basic tech department jobs. 50% more than minimum wage should be easy going either route, with reasonable expectations of 2X+ minimum wage at least as growth potential.
That is to say, if I'm reading you correctly that he's got social interaction issues holding him back from pursuing something more obvious, then it's not so much his skill set that's in question, as where he can fit in. Assuming that, it seems that his best bets would be to improve his work skills to the point that a large tech firm (or local equivalent if relevant) would want him for his skills and would be willing to overlook the other difficulties, or for him to look for a smaller company where there would be some clearly missing skills (probably general IT/MS Office) that would be willing to give the guy a chance.
If his social skills are strong enough, then the other option I would suggest is doubling down on one or more specific aspects of his degree or tech knowledge and applying specifically for those kinds of jobs. I don't know computer animation as a field specifically, but it sounds to me like a field that is hard to get into because it's so niche (geographically dependent, limited general use for most companies). If so, he may need to figure out all of the related fields that have some kind of crossover, and apply there as well.
"But if I were opening a store on a tight budget, and was not very computer literate myself, I'd love to have somebody like him who could help me get oriented with using a computer for the store, could build a simple website for the store, could explain spread sheets to me, could make attractive notices in a nice font to post somewhere -- things like that -- and then later help me unload boxes and put the stuff on the shelves."
Some of these things you only need once, and you can buy them separately. There are Word and Excel courses for beginners. There are companies that will create for you a static website cheaply.
I do not think it is realistic to look for a tailored "stock-keeper / Python web developer" role. That is very unlikely to happen... and even if by a miracle it happens, he would lose all the leverage that comes from being able to say "I quit", because it is unlikely he would find a job of the same type again. So he needs to choose one or the other.
However, that does *not* mean that he needs to make the choice in advance. He can simply apply to both types of jobs simultaneously, and take the first job offer that is an improvement over his current position. But he needs to remember that the two different roles require two different personae. When applying to a stock-keeper job, do not emphasize Python and Photoshop. When applying to a Python development job, the experience in stock-keeping is only relevant in the sense of "can keep a job".
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So, the first option is to try becoming a better-paid stock-keeper. Write a CV that displays (1) previous experience with stocking shelves, and (2) the knowledge of office applications, that is: Word, Excel, e-mail. (Everything else is dark magic that the stock-keepers are not supposed to know.) Send this to shops, both large and small. Or maybe, let a job agency do it for you. The image you are selling here is "an intelligent stock-keeper, who can also do the related administrative work". (Which might be a reason to pay him better than mere stock-keeper.) In longer term, possible advancement to a position of a supervisor, or maybe a purely administrative position. Or the company might immediately offer an administrative position instead.
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Another option is to put the focus on Python and web development. The problem with developing simple web sites is that a company only needs such thing *once*; and them maybe an update a few months later. That is not enough to justify a full-time job. He would need to develop for many companies, but if self-employment is not an option, he needs an employer who does this kind of business. But in 2023, such company will probably use some content management system, and create the new websites by clicking "create web site" in the user interface. The ability to create a simple web site from scratch is only useful as a stepping stone towards something more complicated.
So the image here is "a young person with basic IT skills". Apply for a position of tester or junior Python developer.
Before applying as a tester, download https://www.selenium.dev/ and write a few Python scripts. Try automating something simple; like log in to a website, go to some list and verify that an item with certain properties exists, maybe also select that item and perform some action and verify that you received a success message. You can do this over a weekend, and it could make a dramatic difference over "I have never done anything testing-related". As a web developer, I assume you already know HTML and CSS; also learn how to write (the most simple) XPath expressions to use in the Selenium scripts.
Advantages of being a tester: requires less knowledge than applying as a developer, and you can transition to a developer later. Disadvantages: many software companies do not use testers, because the testing is done by the developers.
To apply as a Python developer... I am out of my depth here, not a Python developer. Learn how to use "venv", "pytest", https://jupyter.org/ . Maybe ask someone, what are the most popular Python frameworks these days, and write something simple in one of them. Notice that Python is useful not just for web development, but also to write command-line scripts which e.g. process JSON files or find something in a database.
Don't overthink it. The idea is that you spend a year or two in your first IT job, and then you can apply elsewhere and ask for a significantly higher salary.
Thanks for your detailed advice. I was thinking that it would probably help this guy to meet with someone whose job it is to assess somebody's skills and tell them what jobs are a good fit, also which of the good-fit jobs are currently looking for more employees, and what skills, if mastered, would make the person more hirable. Looked online, found ads for places that advertised that they do that. For instance one called STEM Career Services: "STEM Career Services retains a panel of expert career coaches, each with invaluable experience in consulting, biotech, pharma, federal government, nonprofits and more – all ready to help you find the perfect job." Is this bogus, or a real service? Seems like there should be places offering actual help of the kind I have in mind, because there must be a need for it.
I have never seen a service like that, so no idea. Perhaps try to find a review online? Also, it could be something in a middle: a mere job agency that tries to look more impressive than it really is. Which might still be a good outcome.
I only have a job experience with the job market in Slovakia; I have no idea whether in other countries it works similarly or not. Most job agencies are not specializing on IT; they provide jobs for everyone. Which means that they have a few hundred job positions they hunt for, and maybe five of them are IT related. So it does not make sense to give them a too detailed list of your skills and preferences, they will anyway just give you one of those five options that seems to match best the keywords you have mentioned. Might as well say "Python developer" and save time. There is also one job agency specializing on IT, but they only want self-employed contractors.
I always thought that something better should exist, and I am not really sure why it does not. Maybe Slovakia is just a too little market. Or maybe it is a chicken-and-egg problem, like trying to build a new Facebook. It does not matter how good idea you have, it is most likely to fail, because people want to be where other people already are. Imagine you start a new job agency tomorrow, now what? Companies reject you because you have no job candidates waiting. Candidates reject you because you have no job offers waiting. So you either fail, or you desperately take anything you can, and become the general job agency with hundred company clients and five IT positions. This is just my guess; never tried that.
Then there is coaching, which is a different type of business: you pay them money, they give you lessons. Can they actually find you a job? Probably only in the sense that if you have skills, any job agency would find you the same job. Maybe they cooperate with a job agency or two, and send them CVs of people who completed their courses. But finding you a job is *not* their core business; it is giving you lessons for money. Probably might as well take lessons from someone who doesn't call themselves a "career service". But again, just a guess.
eaThanks. Can you give me an idea how someone could learn about server maintenance? Is that the sort of thing you can learn with an online course? I do not work in tech and don't know about this sort of thing to advise him, or to judge whether he's up to mastering server maintenance..
I was thinking that it would probably help this guy to meet with someone whose job it is to assess somebody's skills and tell them what jobs are a good fit, also which of the good-fit jobs are currently looking for more employees, and what skills, if mastered, would make the person more hirable. Looked online, found ads for places that advertised that they do that. For instance one called STEM Career Services: "STEM Career Services retains a panel of expert career coaches, each with invaluable experience in consulting, biotech, pharma, federal government, nonprofits and more – all ready to help you find the perfect job." Is this bogus, or a real service? Seems like there should be places offering actual help of the kind I have in mind, because there must be a need for it.
Finally got DALL-e to produce an image of Shrimp Love Me, Unaligned AI's Fear Me. It's here if you want to have a look: https://i.imgur.com/fBwwZSq.png
I had to make 2 images and photoshop them together. Main prompt was "Steampunk style: A man standing in water is dismantling a huge machine. Many shrimp are swimming towards him." But DALL-e just would not do the damn shrimp no matter how I phrased it. I tried mentioning them before the huge machine, but then I got machine versions of shrimp -- short of robotic metallic ones. I also tried editing the original by erasing a lot of little areas and then putting "swimming shrimp" as the prompt for the edit. DALL-e simply filled the erased areas with what had been there before, or with plain blue water. So finally I just did a separate image with prompt "Many pink shrimp are swimming towards the center of the image," which DALL-e rendered just fine, and I photoshopped the 2 together. That's the first time I've used Photoshop for a DALL-e image, and it definitely made the process less fun. There's something magical about just using what DALL-e gives me, but in this case I hadda have the shrimp.
I have a couple related to AI (The Ol' Job and What Dreams May Come), The Shell Game relates to economics, and there are some others like Gourbain's Flux Capacity Theorem that I think some people round here might like. Also the pinned, No Hot Take Under the Sun, is short and directly inspired by something Scott said once.
> God created each one of us to live out our lives in one or another cognitive and ideological bubble, and though we may paw desperately at the inside of the slippery surface, there is no outward progress. Every inch up the wall just rotates the sphere around us.
I am the worst sort of reader, the sort who comes up with obscure exceptions without addressing the gist. Anyway, have you read about craniopagus twins, i.e. conjoined twins joined at the head? I have read that their cognition seems to overlap somewhat (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan). Can their minds fit into the bubble metaphor?
that's really interesting! i imagine they have a lot in common and probably don't disagree with each other too much on political or social issues, but who knows. It'd be interesting to be physically and cognitively attached to someone you can never agree with on anything. If they see the same things, but perceive them differently, it'd just go to show how important perception is in terms of interpreting and understanding the world
If, in general, the "Art World" hates Tartarianism and everyone else likes it, this might be an opportunity to break out of a local maximum and mainstream Tartarianism again. AI could allow the capitalists to cut the Art World out of the loop and sell people the styles they like. Of course. this would likely depend on AI design being able to generalize to things like woodworking if it wants to compete with IKEA.
I doubt it. The commercial art for commission world has always been Tartarianism meets Furry Porn.
The Art World is filled with weird stuff like bananas taped to the wall because it's defined in opposition to the large and thriving beautiful and thus actually popular art scene, not because there is a shortage of actually beautiful stuff around.
AI Art will make changes within that beautiful art scene, but it won't change the relationship between the pretty scene and the Art World. To the extent that Ai Art actually enters the art would, it will do so by continuing it's existing un-pretty styles.
I don't expect AI art to enter the Art World at all; the opposite, in fact. I propose that AI could break the Art World's influence on commercial art/design. I have two end tables in my living room: one is a Brutalist IKEA piece, while the other is a more Tartarian design that I inherited from my grandmother. What if AI made it possible to compete with IKEA by selling Tartarian furniture? The Art World might end up becoming a hermetic scene with no broader influence.
It seems that you are saying the Art World produces ugly art because pretty art is an oversaturated field? I can see that, and it makes sense to me. Given that, then the only real chance to break into art (or fashion, etc.) is to make ugly art. That would apply to AIs as much as people, so yes, AIs would have to make ugly art that is somehow novel in order to get recognized. Being from an AI seems enough right now to be novel, though that will likely change if there are free or cheap ways to get AI to create art on demand.
If you're producing pretty art it means you're just one of those low-status artists who goes around making decorative landscapes for lower-upper-middle-class people to buy and hang in their houses. Maybe you have a small gallery in a popular tourist area where people wander in and consider which of your pretty landscapes would look best in their dining room.
This means that your whole career is dependent on outsiders, not artists, which is adjacent to being an outsider yourself.
I agree that's the case now, but I'm more interested in how we got here. Renaissance artists painted and sculpted pretty things, and were deemed very high status for doing so. It's not a given that pretty = low status.
Do you think there could be a large scale (at least several million people EDIT: hundreds of thousands should suffice to make this interesting...the main aim of this is to avoid very small social structures which are much simpler to handle) society which worked on more or less on the same principles modern western democracies work on without modern technology?
What I mean by more or less "same principles" is something along the lines of close to universal suffrage (specifically with women also being on more or less equal footing with men), no slavery (or de facto slavery), high level of individualism and individual rights (the negative rights, i.e. not expecting state-run social welfare systems but expecting a society where people are more often than not free to do whatever they want to do as long as they don't interfere with the same freedoms of others).
Are there any real-world examples?
What is the minimum amount of technology required for such a society in your opinion? Is there in fact a minimum?
Bonus question: What do you think were the societies closest to this in each era/area of the world?
Note: I do not count philosophy and social institutions as technology (although in some sense it is a very important piece of technology) so I allow even rather implausible societies you'd get if you could magically transfer modern people to the world 20 000 years ago, had them all forget everything about their physical technology and replaced that knowledge with survival skills (so that such society doesn't just die out in a week).
I can think of 2 close but not quite examples:
1. Medieval Switzerland. Well, the last canton to give women a right to vote did it in 1990 (rather it was made to do that by the federal court) but an alt-history medieval Swiss confederation where even women get a say does not feel like that big a stretch of imagination. And the low level of centralization seems to overcome the technological burdens associated with democracy in a large-scale society (in fact, it seems to work better than most countries even today and the individual Swiss votes actually often have a meaningful weight).
2. Medieval Iceland, kinda?...something between direct democracy and a "libertarian anarcho-feudalism"...women were still not exactly equal to men there either (perhaps better than in medieval Switzerland, worse than anywhere in Europe today).
I think the big question that needs to be answered is 'what are the military requirements of the society?' Most of the social details that matter for determining the principles involved are going to be determined by the answer to this question. With no military needs, there's very few things standing in the way of an ideal society. The two realistic military requirement scenarios I can think of are 'living alongside one or more potentially hostile peer societies' and 'the potential threat of an overwhelming number of hostile outsiders' (what we might label based on recent threads on ACX as 'SN risk').
There's a lot to unpack here. I define a 'peer society' as one with a similar general technological level, resource base, and population (but not necessarily the same). While in the long run I take as true that the more free society will advance more economically and technologically, that's meaningless if the current technology level allows the less free neighbor to win militarily in the short term.
With modern technology, we can produce and transport food and other essentials efficiently enough that we can survive on a permanent professional military and still maintain modern values. If, on the other hand, you need almost all the population producing food and other necessities, then permanent soldiers are a serious drag on your economy (unless you use them to pillage your neighbors, which modern values won't allow you to do). The first smaller question, then, is 'do you consider the principles of 'modern Western democracies' to allow conscription and/or a period of compulsory military service?'
Different military technologies and social organizations allow different levels of what permanent military capabilities and temporary military capabilities you can expect your society to be able to call on. To go with one of the more obvious real world examples, if your small landowners are practically born with a longbow in their hands for hunting, it's a lot easier to call up a competent militia capable of countering professional armored enemies than if you have to train them from scratch.
EDITED TO ADD: What's interesting is that the ebb and flow of military technology goes both ways. It's probably good for your hypothetical modern values society if useful weapons are commonly owned, either because your farmer's blade-on-a-stick farm tool is not significantly worse than the other guy's spear, or because longbows or muskets are common hunting weapons on the frontier. It's probably bad for your hypothetical modern values society if the battlefield is dominated by cavalry or other animal-based troops (chariots, elephants, etc.) This has several interesting implications: first, that your society could become worse off as technology progresses if the new tech favors a less democratic means of warfare. Second, that the geography of your society also needs to be taken into account, ie bad terrain for horses may be good terrain for a modern values low tech society.
I think conscription in the ancient city-state style is ok, as long as the society only uses it to defend itself (an empire with city state at its core which is very free but lives of the work of the people it conquered does not count as the society I am looking for). By the way, some modern western democracies still have this kind of conscription (Switzerland for example, Germany until very recently, probably more examples exist).
I would say that a professional military paid by some form of taxation (or even something more voluntary, but that is out of scope) is ideal...provided that you structure it carefully in such a way that it does not take over the society like it gradually did in Rome after the Marian reforms. But like you said, it is typically not an option for a pre-modern society, so limited conscription stays within bounds for such a hypothetical society.
To answer your question, I think there is a sweet spot at which a lasting modern values society is possible with a low tech base, at least as far as military tech goes. Switzerland is probably close to the ideal case. You want enough natural resources (especially farmland) to be at least self-sufficient in the necessities, but not be prosperous enough to be an obvious target. You want natural barriers to army movement (especially horse-based troops) but you want trade to be possible. You want to be far away from any steppe or steppe-like geographical feature that could produce nomad hordes, or at least ensure that by the time they get to your natural barriers you've had time to mobilize your farmers to make trying to pillage an expensive proposition not worth the rewards. At this point, modern values comes down to reducing the amount of infant and maternal mortality, reducing the risk of disasters, maintaining trade with neighbors (in ideas and culture as much as goods), and dealing with the cultural problems inherent to religious friction.
Good points. I was thinking along the same lines but I underestimated the military aspect, I think, especially the steppe nomads. In fact, from what I can tell (and that is frankly not much, so feel free to correct me), very early Russia or at least parts of it were fairly "liberal" for their time. Places like the republic of Novgorod seemed to have a lot of potential in this respect. But it seems that the longest lasting impact of Mongol invasions was probably the way the Russian princes became a lot more like the Mongols themselves and places like Novgorod eventually went up in flames, being replaced by an authoritarian society that has not really changed that much until today. But maybe Novgorod was also pretty bad and I just assume it wasn't because they were a merchant republic very much connected to the Hansa.
Switzerland seems to meet all your requirements except for the birth mortality - modern medicine is probably the most important technology for the emancipation of women. The Swiss also seemed to fare better than most in dealing with the 16th century religious conflicts. Perhaps it also helps to have a somewhat more rural society. Most of the free places in the past were economically kind of backwater. Then again, Italy was very rich and probably more free than most places but probably quite a bit less free than Switzerland (my impression is that those places were mostly oligarchies if not outright monarchies). Maybe it has less to do with money and more with geography (which leads to less money). It is much harder to set up a more authoritarian regime in a country which is full of mountains.
So mountains and a distance from the steppe seem to be good candidates for two necessary conditions for a low-tech society to be liberal. And modern medicine (or something close to that, I guess that you could have discovered something like penicillin by accident even in the middle ages?) without which women are unlikely to achieve any significant emancipation.
If you have better tech, you might not need the mountains. Steppe warfare becomes obsolete and land becomes less valuable on its own (and costlier to conquer).
I wonder if the mountains are that crucial after all....the low countries have also been very close to being liberal (probably somewhat less so than Switzerland) for most of their history. They were even very rich from a certain point onwards (though boggy swamps before that). They were definitely very far away from steppe nomads (although it is flatland all the way from Russia to the Netherlands, it is just a bit too far away from Mongolia I guess).
I've been thinking this over. It ultimately comes down to how much power you need to maintain your society from stresses both inside and outside. I would hope that having a democratic government would do a lot to alleviate most of the internal stresses from competing for power; you don't have elites raising private armies when that won't work to give them control over the levers of society.
War and religion are the two outside context problems your society has to contend with, in that you can do everything 'right' and still lose because of factors entirely out of your control. As I think about it, religion is a thornier issue because of your adherence to modern values, as in your values mean can't stop your people from adopting religious beliefs which may be against your values, at which point you have internal stress again. Switzerland was very lucky in having Christianity, even though it did experience some conflict.
I think the low countries were at their high point when their more powerful neighbors were distracted by the newly available ability to colonize the rest of the world. Why fight each other over Holland when you could more profitably establish control over lands other than Europe? Again, that's something you can't take for granted. I don't assume that mountains are the only natural barriers; I think the channel worked very well for England, in that it was wide enough to make invasion very difficult, yet was narrow enough that trade with the continent could flourish. Japan, on the other hand, was a bit too far away from the other east Asian countries (though there are obviously other factors as to why those two turned out differently).
Offhand I'd say you've got cause and effect reversed here. It's technology that enables centralized oppression, and the concepts of republicanism and individual rights are a response to that, an effort to preserve the pre-technological style of living that humans evolved to prefer.
Without technology, it's not really plausible, nor is it of interest, for several million people to coordinate their actions to accomplish vast centralized goals, from building cities to making war, and so having your life hijacked by some far away strange authority doesn't happen naturally. A hunter-gatherer Stone Age society is inherently pretty liberal, because anyone who doesn't like the local social order can usually just walk away and fade over the horizon. Stuff gets decided by consensus, with a leaning towards the people who've been around the longest and/or have made good decisions before. There's not much concept of a franchise, because you wouldn't decline to listen to even a kid, if the kid had something useful to say.
Which is not to say there aren't Stone Age tribes that are oppressive or violent, of course. Human beings are of a nature that could fuck up Paradise if offered to them on a platter. But oppression and violence on a million-person scale -- and the development of the concepts of republican self-government and individual liberties as a bulwark against them -- requires technology.
"Without technology, it's not really plausible, nor is it of interest, for several million people to coordinate their actions to accomplish vast centralized goals,"
I suppose it depends on what you and the OP mean by "technology" - if it includes any time of tools - then yeah. Without tools (aka technology) it's not clear that we are in any way talking about humans.
And is the "several million" a scale or metaphor for "lots"? A bee hive has about 60 -80,000 individuals. Is the hive structure to hold the honey a technology?
I suppose the biggest Neolithic cities maybe got to 100k, but still a lot of "technology" involved.
Christianity seemed to be able to coordinate a centralized mission on the scale of millions, but roads and ships were a necessary "technological aid" - even before the cooption of the the pagan war technology.
several million - yes, that is a metaphor for many. I wanted to exclude tribes of tens of hundreds of people or even societies in the thousands. But hundreds of thousands would have probably been enough, millions is way too many for ancient civilizations.
technology - basically anything less than the sort of technology that we see as the societies which we recognize as modern appear in actual history (i.e. something like less than late 19th century technology more or less). The aim is to see if there is some minimum technology required (beyond that which allows complex societies of hundreds of thousands in the first place, basically agriculture is a must, writing probably also, everything else is optional). Or as Civilis points out above if there are some other nontechnological conditions which can compensate the lack of technology (tall mountains for example)
Well, a social structure of a few hundred people is inherently simpler (and "easier") than that of millions or even tens to hundreds of thousands. That is why I am mostly interested in the latter. Now, society != state, so they do not have to be a part of a single state but they should not exist as atomic tribes.
I am no expert but I think it was often actually much harder for someone to leave one tribe and join another one. In fact, it seems that in many tribal societies expulsion is the ultimate punishment (rather than death). You are mostly protected by a network of your relatives and friends, as an alien without any of those connections you are basically free game and nobody will care too much if someone robs you and kills you. You might ask another tribe if they'd take you in but since your previous tribe forced you out you are automatically suspicious from the beginning so they are more likely to refuse unless you have something (ideally skills so they cannot just rob you) they don't and want.
In general, I'd rather think about examples of agrarian/settled societies - basically my "hidden" question is something like "could there have been a society that would over time develop to what we recognize as a modern 'western-like' society while being very familiar to us in its structure all the way since its inception in the distant past? And if not, why? Is it because of some crucial technology?
Cities have been around. Why don't you explore that.
And I'm not sure of your artificial cut off of "modern" technology.
Is what you call liberal society possible before Christianity and the radical notion of loving your neighbor and aspirationally even loving your enemy? What is the feature you are really thinking about "pluralism", "cosmopolitanism" - these are features of cities.
Ancient "Water Totalitarianisms" like Egypt or China might be a counter example your assertion that stone age societies can't coordinate oppression, though I don't know if million-person scale was typical for them or not.
Though I agree that technology typically has nothing to do with a free social order. In addition, I also want to add that the "Liberal social order" contains its own fair share of the exact same injustices and unfreedoms of past social orders, and then some. Like, congratulations on "freeing" women out of the need to marry to live..... and into the need to work to live. Double the workforce for the wage payers (and for the exact same amount of total wage), half (or less) the workforce for raising the kids. That's some really fucking impressive Civil Right bullshit you did right there, feminism.
They might be counter-examples had I not prefaced "Stone Age" with "hunter-gatherer."
Hopefully it has not only just occured to you that that circa 1970 first-wave "feminism" had rather less to do with actual female liberation and rather more to do with the (at the time twenty-something) male Boomer desire to loosen up the sexual mores that kept their potential sex partners' legs closed until there was a ring on her finger.
It hasn't occured to me just now that feminism is a hack of course, but it's always worth mentioning to undo the decades of "Feminism == Equality" propaganda.
It's not entirely fair to blame male desire for feminism's tendency to be The Slut Manifesto, it had a role of course but women are not string-controlled dolls entirely programmed by male desire. And for every male with that desire, there is (at least) 1 equal and opposite male (her father, brother, future suitor\crush) with an equally-vehement opposite desire.
>1970 first-wave
I believe the established terminology call that second-wave.
No, of course they're not, which accounts for the qualifiers in my statement, but unfortunately white knighting exists because it works, at least often enough to keep it going generation after generation.
Yep, you're absolutely right that 1960s fathers were appalled by the movement. That's one reason Trust No Square Over 30 was a thing, too. But few cohorts are as energetic and single-minded as twentysomething males looking to get laid. That's why we (used to) draft them.
Actually, I think the established terminology for what Carl is talking about here is "the sexual revolution," which overlapped with second-wave feminism but was far from identical with it. (And yet... the idea that Valerie Solanas, for example, was primarily interested in developing an ideology to help satisfy the sexual desires of boomer males is indeed an intriguing one.)
I mean, it's something current feminists explicitly take credit for whenever it's mentioned, so it's a distinction without a difference.
> Valerie Solanas
That piece of shit was far from the typical feminist, and you owe me... things for reminding me of her. At least 3 photos of kittens or their equivalent is what I demand.
I think the scale of millions was a bit too much for me to ask (I also was thinking about examples which were likely smaller), I think that hundreds of thousands should be enough. The main reason behind that restriction was to exclude very small societies of a few tens to a few hundreds of people.
As for women having to work or marry or anything to survive - I am less interested in the modern welfare state (something that obviously requires a huge economic surplus so it is trivially not available to almost any pre-modern societies, definitely not universally), more in what is considered "negative" freedoms, i.e. basically freedom from oppression. I.e. "you have to figure out your own means of survival, tough luck" is allowed for the sort of society I was thinking about, whereas "you have to do x because you are a woman and if you don't we will put you in jail/kill you/do something else that is bad to you" or "you cannot own a field because you are a serf/woman/slave/..." is not allowed (or rather the more of those things the society has, the further away it is from that hypothetical society of mine).
Negative vs positive freedoms is a sometimes useful distinction but it frequently degenerates into nonsense. Like, a woman today has a negative freedom in not being forced to marry to live, but that translates to being stripped of the negative freedom of not being forced to work to live (i.e. being forced to work to live). The "pre-liberation" situation was the dual of that : she wasn't forced to work, but was being forced to marry (with the significant additional leverage that - if I'm allowed to be that crude - she was in the position of "Employer" rather than "Employed". She is the one who the man seeks, rather than the reverse). I don't understand at all why 1 negative freedom is better than the other.
Aside from that and back to your original question, I think you have your hard limit when you consider that all modern "liberal" societies have barely-replacing or dwindling populations. I won't pretend I know why that happens, but clearly there is something about liberal societies that makes it keep happening over and over again. Modern liberal societies solve that using globalization, they simply "import" people (directly via immigration and indirectly when those immigrants themselves have more children than the typical family in the host country), and "export" work via offshoring. Without globalization, a liberal society will collapse at the same rate of its birth rate.
The question, I think, now reduces to : what's the minimum level of technology to make globalization happen ? I think it varies depending on who or what you want to globalize. For people, not much at all. Basic 1000s-level ships is enough, they were clearly enough to replace 3 continents during the European age of sail[1]. For work and information though, you basically have to have at least the telegraph, or **Extremly** good managment\financial structures that can keep a company going after its work has been partitioned into month-seperated areas of the globe.
[1] I know it happened in the mid-to-late 1000s, but a good deal of that was just navigational knowledge building, i.e. people knowing how oceans work. We have evidence pointing to the chinese knowing how to reach the Americas in the 1300s. <handwave> Polynesians knew how the Pacific work enough to settle it centuries before, though perhaps you need more than that to settle continents rather than islands </handwave>
That's pedantic. The "Work" in my comment is to be understood in the sociological sense, and under that definition it's very much a thing since (at least) the beginning of agriculture.
> A hunter-gatherer Stone Age society is inherently pretty liberal, because anyone who doesn't like the local social order can usually just walk away and fade over the horizon. Stuff gets decided by consensus, with a leaning towards the people who've been around the longest and/or have made good decisions before.
Partly right; I agree that democracy is an attempt to implement stone age consensus building on a larger scale. But you *can't* just walk away from a hunter-gatherer tribe. Long-term survival requires other people, and joining a neighboring tribe is going to be tough; they're going to assume that you did something awful and got yourself exiled.
Depends. If you mean "our traditional enemies" if things have gotten that far, sure. But I believe hunter-gatherer societies generally consist of small mobile bands of a family or three that exist within a larger tribe of somewhat related families that may occasionally get together for special occasions. In the latter case, I expect exchanging between bands happens all the time anyway, for reasons of trade, opportunities, mating, et cetera. I don't think it would be super hard to say I'm fed up with the old man, me 'n' my mate are going to live with the in-laws. You also have to consider that you might easily be able to start your own band if you have a few like-minded friends.
Rome was not a democracy but probably had the state capacity for a semi-modern democracy. However in general I think that the crux technological invention is the printing press.
Is democracy really a feature of technological advances?
Pluralism and cosmopolitan duty of hospitality is the psychosocial prerequisite. That doesn't seem to have anything to do directly with technology but with living together in cities.
This is a weird question because it's not obvious to me why you couldn't have modern liberalism without modern technology. If Earth was hit by a contrived EMP that permanently knocked us back a few centuries, I don't see us needing to undo universal suffrage.
I think the limiting factor comes from requiring a multimillion person democracy. That means communicating over long distances, doing that with caveman technology would take so much work, and seems ultimately kind of pointless. The cave 500 miles away is never going to affect you in any way, why vote on a federal government to rule it? I think the answer is that it becomes possible whenever technology enables enough trade and population density that it's both practical and desirable to put millions of people under one rule, maybe around 1000 BC (plus or minus a thousand, my history knowledge isn't that good).
Your line of thinking about the question is close to mine. Why couldn't we simply envision the 13 American colonies in say, the 1790s (post constitution) but with universal suffrage? The technology to communicate, including holding national elections, was available. They didn't discuss the same topics, because a lot of the answers were going to be too local for a national congress to worry about. But they definitely discussed topics, made decisions, and promulgated those decisions to the people of all colonies.
Tibor, is there a reason you wouldn't consider the beginning of America, if it had universal suffrage and not slavery, as fitting your description? If so, then it seems trivial to assume that such a society were *possible* even if that one has two glaring inconsistencies with your goal. If you agree that the general structure and technology level both fit your needs, then we could likely find a 17-18th century society that does meet your requirements, but even if not it's easy to posit that such a society *could* do so. Otherwise I think we'd need some explanation of why it would be functionally impossible for such a society to exist without slavery and/or limited voting by sex.
Sure, a somewhat counterfactual early America might fit the bill.
"Otherwise I think we'd need some explanation of why it would be functionally impossible for such a society to exist without slavery and/or limited voting by sex."
This is exactly what I am wondering about. The fact that we don't see such societies prior to modernity might suggests that there are some technological obstacles that make them very unlikely. High birth mortality might be one candidate (but maybe it isn't). If there haven't been any such obstacles since (say) the bronze age, why have such societies only started to appear in the last 150-200 years (and in significant numbers)?
Early America is a bit of a special case though - you have a society expanding into an almost virgin continent, with no serious military threats on said continent (neither peer type nor ‘steppe nomad type’) and nowhere near the carrying capacity at the given level of technology.
Also, where exactly is the cutoff for modern technology? I would say early America did have early modern technology.
As Civilis mentioned there were ongoing military threats from natives. There were also European forces who could potentially attack at any time. The colonies had very recently won independence in such a war, and then fought again in 1812.
The British colonies in North America spent about a hundred years developing and fine-tuning the machinery of democratic self-government in an era when the British Army would stomp down hard on any military threat and the British Government would otherwise mostly ignore them. At the end of that time, they were able to tack on a top-level administration and military that could stand off stone-age hunter-gatherers and even win very limited wars with European powers mostly distracted by European wars.
But that first hundred years was critical. Democracy with training wheels.
Even if the plains Native American-type nomads aren't a military threat in the same way that the Mongols were, they're still a military threat to your values.
If the nomadic tribes raid each other, they're almost certainly going to also raid your frontier settlements. This stresses modern values in several ways.
First, you need a permanent military force on the frontier to defend your settlements from larger groups of nomads, which requires a standing army and all the central authority that that requires. This is more of a burden the farther back you go technology wise.
Second, your frontier settlers are going to develop a strong distrust of the nomadic tribespeople, which pushes back against modern multiculturalism.
Third, the war along the frontier will almost certainly be very messy. Among the modern values are the rules of war. It's a lot harder to deal with prisoners if you barely have enough food for your own population. Further, it's highly likely that the prisoners do not share your values, which can cause lots of different issues depending on how your values differ; see Imperial Japan for an example without the tech difference. (Crime and punishment is an area where I think it will be hard to hold modern values at a lower economic tech level).
Well, that is also an answer. I.e. the physical technology is not really necessary. Also, one rule is not strictly necessary for my definition to work. It is more "one society" in which the members of that society can exist kind of freely and easily go from one place to another. So a large enough tribal confederation where you can just switch between the tribes counts even though there is no single "government". A society of multiple tribes where the other tribes are more likely to kill you of you lose the protection of your tribe (e.g. you did something the rest of the tribe did not like and they expel and disavow you) does not count. The society can be extremely decentralized but it should still be one society in a meaningful way.
I tend to think that in principle such a society could exist even without technology. The question is that why hasn't it or if it did, why was it replaced with more authoritarian rule?
Authoritarian rule won out because most of the successful military technological paradigms required having a strong authoritarian government, either centralized or feudal.
I would guess that the biggest single historical technological military advantage is the horse. Horses are a massive military advantage in that they can provide both power and mobility, whether this takes the form of a charioteer, a cataphract, a dehgan, a horse archer, a knight, or a dragoon. Horses are also expensive to maintain. If you want your military to have these expensive advantages, you need some system to maintain them, and you can't conscript them only in times of need like you can foot soldiers.
A fair number of societies came up with the solution to having ready horses when you have a war: in return for grants of authority, you expect in return that the people you grant authority to will show up when a war happens with horses, good gear (weapons and armor) and some peasants (with cheap weapons) to bulk up your ranks. And this pattern works effectively just about anywhere, from China to Iran to France to the steppes.
It's almost worth quoting Wikipedia's article on Horses in Warfare in full, especially the part on the Americas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_warfare#The_Americas), but to summarize: America didn't have horses until the Europeans showed up and used them to militarily overwhelm the natives, especially in the open.; natives that acquired and used horses managed to put up much more resistance.
I tend to agree, but in terms of the European conquest of the Americas, it was such a one-sided affair that even without horses the Europeans would have crushed the natives. You had Old World diseases, they had steel vs basically stone age technology (albeit arguably maxed out to the limit), they had military organization which allowed them to wage war in a way very different from the way the native Americans waged war, they had gunpowder (thought that also probably wasn't really necessary and 15th-16th gunpowder weapons weren't all that decisive, especially against mostly unarmoured opponents).
I mean, the Romans would have crushed the Native Americans pretty much just as easily as the Spanish, the military tech difference was not in hundreds of years but in thousands. And disease killing like 75% of the native population and destabilizing their societies also helped A LOT.
It's not that the plains Indians could have won, it's just an illustration of how one particular military advantage (and not a particularly advanced one) works so well in most situations. The fact that that particular advantage is also tied to a several different authoritarian governance systems independently arising in different parts of the world makes the point even greater.
To get back to your original point and my initial response to you: I think it's possible for a society with a lower technology level to last with something close to modern values, it's just not very likely in most real-world circumstances, especially when you factor in circumstances outside your control. The biggest circumstance outside your control is the military situation, including what "technology" (for a primitive use of the term) underlies the current military paradigm you live in. Many military paradigms incentivize authoritarian social systems, especially the further back you go and the tighter the economic circumstances are.
I think that sounds like a reasonably rational theory as to why history looks the way it does.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me as well. Basically, a society with modern-ish values can give you an economic advantage (from a certain tech level onward...because slave labour probably is more efficient before a certain point, especially in certain labour-intensive industries).
From a certain level of technology onward, you actually get a large military advantage from an economic advantage (industrial revolution is what allowed Europe to basically conquer the world, because industrial production gives you a huge military advantage). But below that tech level you don't get that advantage and authoritarian rule actually tends to give you an edge militarily (that or a steppe nomad structure, but that is limited geographically and also very far from modern values, perhaps even more so).
I think you underestimate how much modern society relies on the technologically enabled surplus whereby a tiny fraction of the population can produce enough food for all, most children survive to adulthood etc. premodern life was mostly nasty, brutish and short. Not a good match to modern values.
This is one of the reasons I suspect there might be some minimum tech requirements for modern values. One other reason might be in medicine and its impact on birth/children mortality
World population in 1500 was 5% the size of what it is today. If Johan's aliens showed up and irreversibly zapped Earth back to 1500 technology (say), (including no tractors, no fertilizer, no pesticides, and no modern high yield crops), probably 95% of the population would die. And that's assuming we can still produce as much food as they did in 1500 with 1500 technology. I'm sure there are skills involved in farming without any modern technology, which we have thoroughly lost, so it might be worse. Maybe even 99% of the population dies. What kind of civilization emerges after that apocalypse...who knows.
No effective birth control is going to be a big perturbation and is surely going to effect the roles of the sexes. Also if `no modern technology' means we are back at a population that is 99% subsistence farmers, I'd guess we're much more likely to end up with, at a minimum, some kind of feudal structure than universal adult suffrage.
If we retain our knowledge of stuff like the germ theory of disease, we still get a pretty enormous win over the previous instance of 1500 technology. If they vanish the capital but leave the knowledge in books, we'll be back to 21st century technology in a couple centuries. (The first 20 years or so will be really bad and lots of people will die, but if there's still civilization with books and some memory of the old world, they'll know what they're working toward. I'm pretty sure a good blacksmith can build a decent steam engine if he's shown how, for example. Some clever group of people will build steamships and cannons and end up ruling a whole continent.)
If they change the laws of physics so guns and engines don't work and electricity won't flow in wires (The scenario in the Change books), we'll still have all the other relevant knowledge. Antibiotics and the germ theory of disease, hydraulics and statistical quality control, etc.
Nit: Copper IUDs can I believe be made and used effectively with 16th century technology, if you know that they are a thing. They aren't an ideal birth control solution, particularly in isolation, but they're probably good enough to significantly perturb society - or in the hypothetical techno-apocalypse, significantly reduce the perturbation.
Sure. None of the people who only know how to write persuasively, interpret complex Supreme Court decisions, or write Javascript are going to care that they don't have a vote. They're going to be only too glad to do exactly what they're told by the local capo good at logistical thinking, who can successfully organize the useful people who know how to make soap, assist a cow with a difficult birth, shear a sheep, or figure out in which tree the bees keep their honey.
Indeed they won’t care, because they will most likely be among the 99% of the population that died of starvation in the aftermath of the disappearance of modern technology. A premodern society has no use for JavaScript or the ability to interpret complex Supreme Court decisions.
Oh I dunno. If they're young and trainable, you always need people to dig holes, move heavy piles of stuff from here to there, and take the midnight to 4am watch. Old guys like me need to watch out, though, lest it be ice floe time. I should learn beekeeping in my retirement. I already know how to make soap, fortunately, but I know squat about farm animals.
>No effective birth control is going to be a big perturbation and is surely going to effect the roles of the sexes.
Possibly less than we think: if modern birth control and medical abortion became unavailable, the current social norms would not be grossly incompatible with other ways of getting rid of unwanted babies. (Infant exposure was a thing).
Lack of antivirals to treat HIV and antibiotics for other STDs would be a bigger disruption to sexual relations.
If we go back to preindustrial infant mortality rates, each woman has to bear several children just to keep the population stable. Adam Smith estimated that the average poor woman (that is, a typical woman) needed ten or twelve live births to produce two adult offspring.
By no modern technology, what exactly do you mean. Sure, `no cars, no computers, no radios' - but is there effective contraception? Understanding of the germ theory of disease?
Do you count hunter-gatherer societies? (Is the `several million' threshold intended to exclude them? How do you draw the borders of `your' society). Is the population living close to the carrying capacity of the land?
Basically, my thoughts were along the lines of - was it possible from bronze age onwards to have a society which resembles ours in most respects but which has between bronze age and very early modern technology. And if not, what are the sort of technologies that prevent this from happening. My basic question is - could there have been a society way back in the distant past which basically looked very familiar to the late 19th to early 21st century western thinking/way of life? Would it be possible for such a society to roughly keep within that societal framework all the way until the actual 21st century? If not, why not (my assumption is that has to be due to technology)? Now, there has been quite a bit of change since the 1880s or so but the fundamentals have mostly remained the same since then...i.e. some variation is allowed but much less than what we see in the actual history.
I am less interested in prehistory because social structure of at most a few hundred people is a lot easier problem than structuring a society of millions. Also, stone age tribes Now, the people do not have to be a part of a single state, they can be very decentralized but still function as a single society. However, for it to count as a single society it has to be relatively easy to move from one part to another. A tribal confederation where each member can simply leave and join another tribe (which I don't believe was always or even often an option in history) might count as such a society.
Also, hundreds of thousands of people should probably suffice to count.
"could there have been a society way back in the distant past which basically looked very familiar to the late 19th to early 21st century western thinking/way of life? "
No. First off if you go very far back at all a huge portion of the population becomes manual laborers (farmers).
I think Civilis's point about military pressures is a key part of the answer (no). Other parts are maternal and infant mortality, lack of contraception, and the Malthusian trap, which technology liberated us from.
That seems like a good summary of the thread. Some modern values are hard to aspire to without the economic surplus of technology.
I think that contraception is not really that big a deal, but the lack of modern medicine (and the associated death rates during childbirth and among children) is. A combination of interrupted intercourse and keeping track of the calendar can reduce chance of pregnancy significantly. Probably not to zero pregnancies (assuming both partners are fertile of course) but maybe to 2-3, definitely not 8 or 10. If a woman only had sex say a week after ovulation, the chance of pregnancy is close to zero (unless you miscalculate the date for the ovulation).
So contraceptives are probably a necessary requirements for hippie free love and there would generally be less casual sex without them but I don't really think the society would change that much if tomorrow they stopped working. But perhaps they allowed a culture shift which would be mostly retained without them today but which would not have happened without them in the first place.
I forgot to answer my own bonus question. It will probably be very off and wildly Eurocentric but I think it could be something like:
0. prehistory - Ook's tribe. They best tribe!
1. bronze age - Phoenicia? A very uninformed speculation, basing it mostly on them being mostly mercantile city states. I would definitely expect more freedom there than say in Assyria under Ashurbanipal (unless conquered by Ashurbanipal).
2. classical antiquity - Roman republic? They seemed to do better on suffrage than the Greeks with fewer slaves and more rights for women (Greeks were close to fundamentalist Islam on women's rights). But they only get the 1st place since the bar is so low as far as I can tell.
3. late antiquity - I don't really know...While the early Roman empire was probably still better in this regard than most other places at the time, Rome kind of turned almost totalitarian with and after Diocletian. At the same time it still controlled most of the known world. The Sassanids weren't exactly great either. I don't know much about India or northern Europe of the time but probably some places there must have been more free than either of the two empires of the time (China probably wasn't).
3. early to high medieval - Iceland? But of course, we are talking about tens of thousands of people at most.
4. late medieval to ...well ... now - Switzerland? Or the US (though not before 1865).
Had an interesting blog-relevant discussion with ChatGPT; is there some way to engineer my original prompt to make ChatGPT connect the pieces of information it has?
Me: Does the author of SSC write any other public blogs?
ChatGPT: I am not able to provide information about the activities or current projects of the author of Slate Star Codex (SSC) as my knowledge is limited to publicly available information and my browsing function is currently disabled. It is possible that the author of SSC may be writing under a different pseudonym or platform, but I do not have any information on this.
Me: Do you know what Astral Codex Ten is?
ChatGPT: Astral Codex Ten (ACT) is a blog that was written by the same person who wrote Slate Star Codex (SSC). The blog covers similar topics as SSC, including psychology, neuroscience, politics, and philosophy, and is known for its in-depth and analytical approach to issues. ACT was created after the discontinuation of SSC and is currently active. Like SSC, ACT has gained a significant following and is widely read.
--
My other takeaway from playing around with the tool is that it's extraordinarily bad at giving summaries of plots of existing works of fiction, as it frequently mixes up major details and inserts false bits that stereotypically occur in the work's genre. Obviously this is the most intelligent AI I've ever chatted with, but compared to discussing with a normal human it feels frustratingly dumb.
I had a similar problem on like day 2 of ChatGPT's release, where I was asking it questions about Fringe Benefits Tax. If I was discussing about FBT in Australia and then tried to ask it questions about FBT in New Zealand, it would act like it didn't exist in NZ, and similarly if I opened the conversation talking about FBT in New Zealand it couldn't transition to talking about FBT in Australia. I used the feedback mechanism embedded in the website and when I tried to replicate it again just now, it no longer has that problem. So I guess the engineering solution is: provide feedback then try again later?
The former is clearly one of the failsafes kicking in to block you, not the main neural net failing to connect its information. It's got the same phrasing as all the other "you tripped a failsafe" answers.
I’m just finishing “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” by Daniel Everett and am curious as to how or if his dust up with Noam Chomsky played out. Is language inherent or an artifact?
My impression of current consensus (which is a few years old now) is that most people think Chomsky and Pinker overstated the extent to which the "language instinct" drives extremely specific behaviors, has immutable, domain-specific "modules" for particular tasks, and has particular grammatical features "hard coded." However, I think people still generally agree that humans do HAVE a language instinct, and that language isn't JUST an artifact or emergent feature of the rest of our cognition.
Would be interested to hear from people who have paid attention to this debate more recently.
That is a good summary of the consensus position, but as a linguist, I am also of the belief that the present position is the result of a general retreat and loss of ground. It is a position that will likely keep moving to the empiricist end as time goes on.
I’m not a linguist. I completed an undergrad minor in Linguistics with Russian as my foreign language when I got my CSci degree so I have a bit more background knowledge than someone who plays a linguist on television.
Kind of a language enthusiast though. Can you recommend any blogs or journals I can follow to keep up with things?
There's the well-known Language Log, which you may have come across already if you're interested in language and linguistics. To the right of the posts is a blogroll, click to unfurl. Somewhere in that long list, there might be blogs which offer updates to the Chomsky-Everett debate. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
Whenever I see "XBB" (the new covid-19 variant), the word my brain immediately jumps to is "Xibalba". Does anyone have other words that come to mind when they see "XBB"?
Tangentially, according to wikipedia which is always accurate, it's pronounced more like "sheeble-ba" (if you have an American accent), which is not only cooler to my ears, but also fits the rhyme scheme of both Blondie's "Rapture" and Titus Andromedon's "Peeno Noir". And both of those songs are now mashing up in my head to create a new earworm. Enjoy!
Actually, the ugly and unpronouncable 'XBB' just gives me an awful feeling that the modern world is so full of teensy mutually contingent details, so pointlessly intricate, that we have run out of names to give to things and have to use randomly generated alphabet sequences, sort of like the passwords my computer makes up for me now that it's no longer safe for me to use stuff like the names of beloved pets from long ago followed by my year college graduation. Here in the fucking bleak fucking complicated fucking more-stuff- than-meaning modern world we use alphanumerics. The units of life unpronounceable jumbo randos. Gaaah.
It would probably take a platoon of English graduate students working full time to assign creative, pronounceable, non-trademarked and not-offensive-in-any-translation names to the several thousand dots on the far right.
And then people would end up confused, the way they ended up confused when everyone got to assign a nice meaningful name to new chemical compounds (like "barbituric acid" for my good friend Barbara), and would insist on systematic names, and then we would get "1,3-diazinane-2,4,6-trione" instead, which kind of brings us full circle in terms of euphony alas.
I think the way the covid virus evolves just ended up being rather intricate, and the naming system behind "XBB" is actually a rather decent attempt at labeling and tracking the numerous leaves in covid's family tree, so to speak. it does kind of reflect how we are bad at predicting how many covid variants we will get in the future and how severe they will be.
but uh yeah it would be nice if important things have more catchy names. like someone mentioned further down, hurricanes get human names, and this works out pretty well - we reliably get a few dozen hurricanes each year and the formation of a hurricane isn't to be blamed on any one particular country. Alphanumeric naming conventions should be left for specialists and computers.
Having read up on astronomy for a while, I think I have become desensitized to scientific things of interest getting labeled with long strings of letters and numbers.
Is every single word in the English language offensive now? I didn't get the memo from the wokeists! What's their identity-politics-based objection to "Kraken"?
And yes, I am being just the tiniest bit sarcastic, why do you ask? Let's just nickname stuff reasonably neutrally and not worry so much. I don't know; that may be easy for me to say, given I'm not on social media at all, but... I just really feel like saying, tonight, if social media and the pointlessly intricate life of the digital world are depressing (and yeah, I see Eremoiaios' point, they kinda are)--there are still other things in life. All the old things still exist despite our ignoring them. Digging dirt and watching seeds germinate is a great cure for that feeling, or better yet, tanning buckskin. It's laborious and satisfying and involves no pointlessly intricate details at all, and the utterly weird way the stuff behaves during the stretching phase is great fun.
I expect this digression may seem extremely irrelevant to you, it's just... it's very pleasant being irrelevant sometimes. This is a weird place to recommend it, but I do.
There is an old (1963) Czechoslovak SF movie called Ikarie XB-1, based on a novel written by a Polish author Stanislaw Lem. Now I see it has a dubbed English version under awful title "Voyage to the End of the Universe".
As a side note, did the powers-that-be decide to stop naming variants after Greek letters because they were up to pi and knew people would have too much fun with "hurr durr pi variant" jokes?
It might have to do with how the virus was evolving. Omicron was really different from Delta, and also didn't descend from Delta (the two have a relatively old common ancestor), and quickly outcompeted Delta. But ever since, we've been just getting various descendants of Omicron, none of which were so different and more infectious as to make the WHO use another Greek letter. Although maybe giving XBB or XBB.1.5 a new Greek letter might be nice in that we wouldn't all have to deal with long sequences of letters and numbers.
I'm willing to take those in the field at their word that omicron subvariants aren't different enough to rate a new Greek letter, and I'm not a huge fan of the informal mythical monster nomenclature I've seen. (Calling the latest variant "the Kraken" is conclusory and not IMHO helpful.) But I think that given that there's going to be popular coverage of subvariants, some neutral hurricane name-style option would be helpful to make it easier to write about them.
Evidence suggests not really, given how little public attention the name or the subvariant has really evoked. It's gotten about as much or maybe less reporting than the last few dominant subvariants, and has provoked no particular public response beyond the standard exhortations to vaccinate, boost and maybe mask if you feel like it. (Ventilation? What's that?) And vaccine requirements have been scaled back if anything.)
The main increased public response to Covid in recent months in the US at least has been requiring testing for Chinese travelers, which is orthogonal to XBB.1.5 (and kind of pointless for anything else given existing prevalence).
And I guess the feds are sending out four more free tests per household (whoo!), but that seems more to be about the general increase in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths during the early winter's variant soup, rather than being sparked by "the Kraken".
Maybe it's getting clicks somewhere. But those clicks don't seem to be translating to much visible effect that I can see. It's possible I'm not reading the right sources.
I think they're thinking something along the lines of "if we piss off the CCP, it'll stop letting us into the country *at all* and that would cause issues in our other projects, and/or it'll retaliate against innocent WHO personnel currently in China because they have a history of doing that".
Whether this actually holds up in terms of the maths is questionable, but they wouldn't be the first people to get suckered by China and then succumb to sunk-cost.
I am genuinely curious. Maybe even more generally, where on the evolutionary tree the "asymmetric heart position" appears? As soon as the heart itself? Why?
By the time of jawless fish the heart was already starting with the "blood comes in one side and goes out the other". Not sure it was asymmetrically oriented along the body axis though, but I suspect that started soon after?
Thought experiment based on the general Georgist discussion that sometimes occur here: I'm the mayor of a small village where land is plentiful. I convince a million people to move here, and they each get to buy a plot of land for cheap. We pool our resources and build a city. Our city becomes a nice city and more people want to move in. Land prices go up a lot. Everyone originally involved becomes a millionaire. It's all like a pyramid scheme except the pyramid is real.
Has something like this ever been tried? I assume that the hard part is "convince a million people to move here", but shouldn't we have people or institutions with that kind of pull? Or is the hard part "become a nice city that attracts people"? That doesn't look very hard, most cities seem to be hardly trying.
(Yes, I know my thought experiment is totally unrealistic, I just want to discuss the principle.)
The problem with your thought experiment is the implicit assumption that a city is a collection of buildings and physical infrastructure. In reality, the value of a city is mostly in its people and its social and institutional capital. This is why a city losing its people will be in inexorable decline despite little physical change (e.g. Detroit in the late 20th century was not suffering from earthquakes destroying its buildings).
The problem is not finding a million people to put up capital to construct a bunch of high rise. The problem is turning a million people into an attractive community.
I think the key would be some coherent reason for so many people to choose there, instead of somewhere else. Other commenters mentioned Chicago (railway hub) and Dubai (oil).
But really, every city that has succeeded can be looked at as doing exactly what you are talking about, with different levels of intentionality and different levels of success (including how long it took to grow). If you look at NYC or SF right now, there are people buying and holding land, or developing it, for future purposes. That's really what you're talking about, minus the very short timeframe from your hypothetical (which still works for a number of major cities, including rebuilt ones like Tokyo).
But people in NYC or SF is not coordinating to buy land. The coherent reason to chose this city instead on an already existing place is that the already existing place is expensive.
"Expensive" is always relative. A city may be considered "very expensive" at a particular place in time, then go through a massive upswing and prices increase by some large factor. Does that mean it was or wasn't "expensive" prior to the upswing? All a matter of perspective. I am arguing that a sufficiently large incentive to move to a place overrides the "it's too expensive" reasoning and could be reason for coordination. If significant amounts of oil (or some other valuable natural resource) were found in or around an existing major city, that city may see significant growth in the way you are describing. Similarly, SF became a major tech hub and already high prices were able to skyrocket in a way that could be called coordinated.
I agree that there's a difference. I don't think the difference is a difference in kind as much as level. I think most cities did what you are describing to some extent, and a few (Dubai and Chicago again) doing almost exactly what you are describing.
My original point, looking at those examples, is that you just need a compelling reason to choose that particular city over alternative options, even knowing that second-tier adopters are going to be more than first-tier, and third-tier will pay more again, etc.
If you're talking about a literal one million people are all first-adopters, I think that's a logistical problem that's far too large for our planning and construction industries to handle.
Chicago in 1830 was a grubby frontier outpost of fewer than a thousand people; in 1837 its leaders optimistically declared it to be a city. They were clear (and loud, and insistent, in fact famously would not shut up about) the goal being to become the "next great metropolis", etc. "Come on over and get rich" was absolutely the collective civic concept for decades to come.
In the 1840 census Chicago had 4,500 residents, ten years later it had nearly 30,000 which put it 24th in a nation of 24 million people.
Then starting with the 1860 census the population growth went this way (I'm rounding the totals):
1860: 112,000 (9th in the US)
1870: 300,000 (5th)
(October 1871 the entire central district burns to the ground, is entirely rebuilt by spring 1873)
1880: 503,000 (4th)
1890: 1,100,000 (2nd, stayed there until 1990)
1900: 1,700,000
1910: 2,186,000
1920: 2,702,000
1930: 3,376,000
Lots of people did get rich from Chicago's frantic growth, some of them legally and plenty of them not. People began visiting the place basically to see what was to that point the biggest fastest building of a huge modern city that had ever been even imagined. By 1900 there was a whole published literature in the U.S. and Europe of books and articles (some of them from famous writers), basically marveling at how some log cabins along a middling river running through a swamp had turned into CHICAGO -- complete with mass transit and symphonies and museums and world-class banks and half the nation's resident multi-millionaires and a whole modern developed-nation infrastructure -- in less than a single human lifetime.
(This also had some far-reaching and novel economic impacts way beyond that place, I recommend "Nature's Metropolis" by William Cronon about that part.)
That might be the example to date closest to what you're describing, at least other than ones driven by a particular extractive resource such as nearby oil fields.
Chicago was the success story, but I think that sort of ambition was pretty common. Metropolis, Illinois was founded close to the same time with pretty much the same aim (as the name suggests) and the same vision of being a transport hub, and, well, now its main claim to fame outside its county is trading off the fictional city Siegel and Shuster put Superman in a century later.
St. Louis ("Gateway to the West") also vied with Chicago for that role. There are various reasons given that it failed (e.g., eastern businesses being reluctant to put a railroad hub in a slave state, Illinois beating them to a bridge over the Mississippi), but my sense is that it's not a completely implausible alternate history.
I mean, Chicago didn't have oil fields, but they had a great location for building a railroad hub. From a brief look at the history it's not clear whether they envisioned from the beginning that they should become the great freight gateway to the West; the first railroad charter in 1837 was just for a line to the lead mines at Galena (although at over 150 miles that was still an ambitious scale, for the time). But with railworkers and access to shipping already in place they had all the ingredients to take advantage of the massive demand created by westward expansion.
So, anyway ... while I expect the founders' ambition and optimism helped, the explosion was still very contingent on other circumstances. The city didn't rise to great wealth as some self-contained economic engine.
Sure, that's why I said it is probably the _closest_ real-life example. I don't think the hypothetical exactly as stated is anything but a thought experiment. Cities do not grow to serious sizes in isolation, never have.
And as an aside, yes the 1830s Chicago founders absolutely did envision from the beginning that it become the great freight gateway to the West. So did groups of men who founded Milwaukee, and laid out literally a half-dozen different villages in Northwest Indiana most of which died out, and some other places in that part of the world in that general timeframe. All of those groups initially thought in terms of water transport, specifically in Chicago's case building a new thing called the Illinois & Michigan Canal.
That canal did get finished and its construction did jump-start the new city and it did operate for some decades....but in the big picture it was by the time of its 1848 opening already obsolete. That first railroad company chartered in 1836 didn't run its first train until 1848 and didn't reach beyond the borders of Cook County until the early 1850s...but the new way of things was clear to everybody by then. Chicago pivoted to the new transport technology and by the time of the Civil War was the greatest rail center in the country if not the world.
Having grown up in pre-air-conditioning Texas, I have long thought that a key part of their strategy had to be to get them to move in the six months of fall to spring, so that, by the time summer hit, it was too late to get back to Tennessee. Anyone trying to come here in July would have turned around. Or maybe they were all crazy, like William Barrett “we outrange the Mexicans so let’s get ourselves pinned down in the Alamo instead of using guerilla warfare” Travis.
I'm just old enough to have spent weeks every summer as a child visiting grandparents in Kansas and Oklahoma before AC was completely ubiquitous and effective. Middle-class homes had room AC units which struggled to keep up with the local August climate, car ACs the same and not every car had it, etc. In Oklahoma during the summer absolutely nobody went outside by choice during the day. And that was the 1970s climate not today's!
This is basically Dubai, right? But they have oil. Maybe the problem with this scheme is that random group of immigrants from all over the world lacks social cohesion necessary to build successful economy capable of producing goods which can be traded with outside world and thus pay for necessary imports. If there is an oil deposit nearby, problem solved.
If this were to be done, it would likely need to be done by a group that already has high social cohesion. Mormons maybe? But the Mormon church already have Salt Lake City and I guess they can just continue to grow it instead.
> The graduate student was inspired to try putting the rats on a diet of “palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake. Today, researchers call these “cafeteria diets”.
> When you give a rat a high-fat diet, it eats the right amount and then stops eating, and maintains a healthy weight. But when you give a rat the cafeteria diet, it just keeps eating, and quickly becomes overweight.
It seems like we could learn a lot from this. Seems like we should be able to binary search: try this with 50 foods and track which ones cause weight gain. Then look at the ingredient lists and see which ingredient is causing the weight gain. Then... we'd just know what causes obesity?
Even if the search doesn't uncover an exact culprit, I think a lot of people would get value from just having an index that maps from common foods to How Fat Rats Get if you give it to them.
Consider the origin of the word rubenesque. How about he Venus of Hohle Fels (40,000 BCE). I am not sure that she was pregnant - I think she was just fat.
From Shakespeare's ages of man, the 5th age:
“the justice,
In fair round belly, with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances”
Individual obesity is not a modern thing. Gluttony and sloth have been around for a very long time.
Average population obesity is the modern thing. Obesity comes from easy availability of food and lack of burning calories (physical work). Modernity has created that potential circumstance for more and more people.
We live in an age of plenty and increasing mechanization which has reduced the necessary toil. It is not really the "kinds: of foods it is the easy availability of calories and the lack of required strenuous activity. What you probably need is a sedentary rat.
Perhaps it is not the ingredients per se but the calories per volume. I'd think that a rat can only eat so much volume.
SMTM discusses many of the issues around this (look at their articles on scurvy, for example), but I think would agree that more research in this area is desperately needed. Part of the issue is that if the effect is from a contaminant, or several contaminants, that it would likely be present in different levels in, for example, different lettuces grown in different places at different times, and might get accidentally added during processing of some foods, so just looking at “lettuce”, “wheat flour”, “eggs”, etc, would likely miss this.
SMTM is strangely respected in this community, but I have found the articles I have read from them (admittedly relatively few) to be very unimpressive. They misinterpret or misrepresent the research they present, and offer no real support for their contamination hypothesis, while bizarrely ignoring that obesity correlates very well with increased calorie consumption, which in turn is due to the availability of cheaper and tastier food.
Is it strangely respected? I mostly see people responding by asserting, as if they are killer facts that SMTM was unaware of or omits, ideas and arguments that SMTM discusses at some length. I think you really do have to go on a deep dive of at least reading the many “A Chemical Hunger” posts (or read a good chunk of their posts in the last year, for example) to see the extent to which a) there looks like there’s something there to be considered and b) they are fully committed to approaching this stuff as actual science with all the uncertainty that involves.
In the articles I've read, they misinterpret or purposely distort (I have no way of distinguishing between the two, of course) the research they present, and not some of the details but some of the central points of the articles. I don't think they can be trusted to present scientific results.
My impression is they get way too much respect, yes. They've been funded with a moderately-large-by-EA-standards grant and were initially feted as important by Yudkowsky, to offer a couple of examples.
They disagree that we have good data on whether people today consume more calories than people did before 1960. I personally take issue with your claim that increased calorie consumption "is due to the availability of cheaper and tastier food". That's certainly a decent hypothesis, but far from proven. Assuming people do eat more calories than they used to: how do you know it's due to food price and taste? How do you know that food is tastier today than it was in 1940? How would you even demonstrate the truth of such a claim?
> How do you know that food is tastier today than it was in 1940? How would you even demonstrate the truth of such a claim?
I mean, the 1940s weren't that long ago. We have photographs of what people ate, we have cafeteria menus and shopping lists, we have recipe books. We know that what people ate (in western countries) back then, and it tended to be a bit plainer.
In my understanding people in 1940 ate cake, donuts, pies, cookies, white bread, pancakes, waffles, syrup, biscuits, jam, cheese, sausages, bacon, ham, beef, chicken, and mashed potatoes heaped with butter and gravy. Not to mention that a lot of it was fried in lard.
Now that's just my understanding: I don't have any data to back that up, just anecdotes and old cookbooks. Do you have a better source to point me at that will indicate differently?
Maybe some upper-to-middle class people in the US (one of richest countries in the world at time) ate all that. There were chubby people in the 40s and before (a mental picture including Taft and Churchill emerges).
Here in Europe, my grandmother certainly did not eat donuts and cookies and jam every day in 40s or some other decade, even if we ignore WW2 when large parts of population coincidentally were malnourished. If I think about her eating habits in 90s-00s, assuming they were unchanged from her childhood in 1930s (probably not, because availability had improved and prices plummeted). Mashed potatoes with butter and gravy ... certainly, for dinner. Meat could be included, but not every day. Glass of milk (they had a cow), but I am less certain if they would get cheese. For breakfast, oatmeal and bread and-or eggs. For lunch, some kind of soup. For supper, oatmeal and bread. Such diet gets quite boring quite fast, you won't eat large portions of it for fun.
I like the question you are asking. I will note that in the 1930's people ate fruit for dessert and considered it a treat and couldn't always afford it. I don't think these people could, generally speaking, afford chocolate whip cream top hats every day. Also, the innovation in baked goods over the last 80 years has been quite extreme. There are an unbelievable amount of chemicals in baked goods today, again generally speaking.
Heck, I went ahead and Googled 1940s diner menus and found this one from 1949. It features a ham and relish sandwich on white bread, chicken salad sandwich on white bread, beef bologna and swiss on rye with russian dressing, hamburger steak on a bun, all with a side of french fried potatoes. For dessert we have chocolate whip cream top hats, 5 kinds of pie, cheese cake, and chocolate layer cake (as well as "Assorted danish pastry"). Looks plenty tasty to me!
People are incurious because we already know the answer. As mentioned by Julian below, what is difficult is to find how we could eat reasonably when cheap abundant tasty food is widely available, not why eating all this food make us fat.
I suspect and/or vaguely-remember part of the issue (which may turn up as a confounder in the study as described if naively implemented) is that *variety* itself causes larger portion sizes, because becoming sated with one type of food doesn't necessarily translate to becoming sated with food in general.
Though I don't imagine a diet of "chips which taste good but *never* make you feel full" would help on that front either.
> *variety* itself causes larger portion sizes, because becoming sated with one type of food doesn't necessarily translate to becoming sated with food in general.
Right. I'm sure many of us are familiar with the idea of "there's always room for dessert" or a metaphorical "second stomach for dessert".
It seems to be that high fat food like crisps or high sugar food like sweetened drink can be problematic, but the association of the two is certainly worst!
There is not obesity mystery: nature has selected us to crave the high calorie/sugar/fat/salt food that were both scarce and very valuable in our previous natural environements. Now that these food have become very abundant, we still like them very much and overeat.
Yeah, but (in the industrialized world) "high calorie/sugar/fat/salt food" has been abundant for a century or so, yet the growth of obesity has been more nearly on a timescale of the last half century. or so. There has to be more to the story.
I'm not sure that's true for everybody. Maybe for the upper-middle to upper First World class, sure. But even in my own lower middle-class youth, a mere 50 years ago, we never got store-bought sweets except on very special occasions. When we had a dessert or snack at all, it's because my mother baked it herself. The only time we ever drank soda was on the very rare occasion that we went out to eat.
Ok, I should clarify: I'm not so much talking about store-bought sweets but rather about flour, sugar, butter, and salt. Yes, they have to be combined and baked to e.g. make shortbread cookies, but the ingredients themselves were (in industrialized nations) rather abundant by historical standards by 1922.
Sure, by historical standards. And that's why the people of 1922 were taller and stronger than the people of 1822. I'm just observing that within my lifetime the broad trend of a falling relative real price of food, particularly sweet and refined ingredients, and commercially-made sweets that don't require anyone to invest two hours of personal labor (in addition to the cost of the ingredients) to make them, seems to have continued, and, since we topped out in height to be gained via better nutrition circa 1970[1] maybe now we just gain weight, because of the still greater cornucopia of tasty sweet food ready to our hand almost instantly. Heck, these days we don't even have to get in the car, DoorDash or whatever will deliver it within minutes of our phoning it in.
I'm not ruling out other and multiple explanations, but I also think we can't easily dismiss the simple hypothesis of easier, faster, and cheaper access to tons of sweet foods, because I don't think that trend stopped 150 years ago, even in the First World.
There's a colossal difference between "have raw ingredients to make similar food" and "have a ready-to-eat product with high amounts of those ingredients, pre packaged in plastic and non-perishable, and probably cheaper than whatever lower-calorie options you were looking at"
True, people in 1922 probably could have eaten cake every day if they'd really wanted to. It was social shaming which kept that temptation in check.
At some point the social shame against eating cake every day wore off. People started making small cakes and declaring them to be "muffins" and deciding they were now a breakfast food (muffins have been around for centuries but not in the modern American cake-like form).
Then the muffins got sweeter, and they got bigger. Meanwhile the one little shortbread biscuit that you might have had with tea slowly turned into a chocolate-with-chocolate chips cookie the size of your head. In 2023 you can barely buy ice cream which doesn't have solid chunks of something even sweeter distributed through it. Everything has got sweeter, and sweets have become more socially acceptable.
In Wilkie Collins' "The Woman In White" (1860) the villain is Count Fosco, an Italian nobleman with a taste for sweets. His sweet tooth is portrayed as disgusting, unmanly, creepy -- sweets are for women and children, not for men. But his actual consumption would be nothing remarkable these days.
Maybe. Or maybe there is some sort of contaminant that changed our propensity to overeat. Or maybe our microbiome changed. I'm merely noting that (relatively) cheap flour, butter, and sugar were available early enough that the I doubt that the evolved attractiveness of calorie-dense foods is the whole story.
"Yeah, but (in the industrialized world) "high calorie/sugar/fat/salt food" has been abundant for a century or so".
My impression (sorry, I'm too lazy to look up data!) is that abundant and cheap junk food is much more recent than that, and that until a few decades ago, eating at fast food restaurants was, for example, too expensive to be very common. The percentage of a family's budget spent on food has declined sharply over the 20th century.
Yes this seems like it could be very helpful. Though my guess is it would just track pretty closely "how tasty is X" compared to "how full of calories is X".
People like to talk about "fillingness" or whatever, and that is I suspect a small part of the story.
I have always suspected the main story is simply that a cookie/brownie/cake whatever tastes fucking delicious and is also chock full of calories. Yes you can sort of train yourself into a mental space where you find broccoli delicious. But it is not a fucking cookie and to claim so is silly. And also one of the main ways people make things like broccoli (which I like) delicious is by smothering it in butter/salt/sugar so it is more like a cookie.
Yes this seems like it could be very helpful. Though my guess is it would just track pretty closely "how tasty is X" compared to "how full of calories is X".
Totally agree, with the caveat that "tasty" and "full of calories" are associated, not by coincidence.
Anecdata: When I ate sugar every day, I craved sugar every day. Once I decided to stop, there was a week or so of cravings, then I no longer felt like eating sugary things.
I think that sugar has characteristics that make it more like an addiction than it is like an actual desire. Once your palate stops being accustomed to overly sweet stuff it really doesn't taste that great.
Same thing for me but on a shorter time scale: I do not really like sugar but I crave it if I start eating it. For example I almost never eat candy but in the rare cases where I eat one I am very tempted to eat one after another until the box is empty.
There was a nice discussion of that in one of the Huberman lab podcast a few months ago (At 45 min):
Does any one know of a meta-analysis or a large study of the causal effect of privatization on firm productivity ? Preferably using a experimental/quasi experimental design or regression discontinuity.
Is it the case that they "don't get schizophrenia", or just that it's not diagnosed?
I think there's good arguments to be made that it's irresponsible to diagnose children with things when there's so much noise - they could be considered to have symptoms that point towards all kinds of diagnoses....but sometimes kids are just weird, right?
It should be relatively easy to test this hypothesis by looking at young adults with clearly diagnosed schizophrenia and checking when their major symptoms started to appear (as opposed to the time of diagnosis) - I'm not an expert on this, but as far as I know, for the people with various significant symptoms they seem to start only after childhood, not earlier than their teen years.
A caveat that this is not a specific subject that I'm well-read in, but this is the approximate area I'm educated in. Of the ideas bandied about I'm familiar with, the most compelling one is that schizophrenia is often a disorder of abnormal neuronal connectivity that onsets typically during late adolescence because that is when salient brain development is happening that makes it the high risk window. That's just a high level explanation, though. There are more specific hypotheses that try to connect what those anatomical abnormalities might be and how they relate to known genetic predispositions.
Psychosis not caused by neurological disease/deterioration or brain injury also is extremely rare once a person hits early middle-age, so I'd reform your question to ask why psychosis has developmental risk window during the human lifespan.
My guess: Schizophrenia appeared, at least frequently, with the Modern Age. Children, not being fully socialized/indoctrinated are less affected. Similar to an explanation of childhood innocence that they lack knowledge and experience that adults have accumulated.
"Childhood schizophrenia" used to be a common diagnosis. It somewhat notoriously was an original diagnostic landing spot for people we now would label as just having an autism spectrum disorder. I work primarily with people who have cognitive disabilities and mental health challenges. A sizeable % of my older clients have a "childhood schizophrenia" line in their diagnostic history.
It's rare now and generally only comes up in unusual cases of children having a degenerative issue, but this is a relatively new thing in the larger scope of psychiatric labeling. So if diagnostic awareness was driving things, the culture has moved away from it, not toward it.
That's interesting. It's curious how words change meaning over time and how, uh, 'atypical mental conditions' evolve over time - as do their definitions/labels (as we learn more and how new generations(new perspectives) diagnose them).
Still, my speculation that the Modern Age caused or exacerbated Schizophrenia (and by association Autism) still stands. This based on my incomplete reading of 'Madness and Modernism', Sass(1992) and my incomplete understanding of Iain McGilhrist's '08 and '22 publications. : )
Probably because some of the dopaminergic tracts aren’t fully developed until 18-25. Another theory is that there is a “second hit” that has to happen in one’s environment for symptom onset to occur (large amount of stress, shock etc) and so kids just don’t develop symptoms because they have more protective factors on average. Another possible theory is the gradual decrease in neuroplasticity tracking in an inverse proportion to “brain maturation” as the possible second hit. Just some theories I have.
A psychotic disorder is a more complex suite of symptoms. People rarely present exactly in the textbook ways people read about - except in those rare cases they do and you're shocked someone is so textbook - but if all an adult had was a particularly vivid imaginary friend that typically wouldn't cause them to meet criteria. Heck, it might just mean they're religious. Sensing disembodied personas isn't unto itself what schizophrenia (or psychotic disorders more generally) is.
Yeah one thought would be that schizo behaviors in younger people are both less problematic because they have less power and ability to commit violence, they have 1 and often 2 full time minders to help them, and younger people generally taken less seriously (for good reasons).
My six year old spent a whole year saying his best friend's various relatives did just about anything you could imagine.
You see a jockey, “Bobby Jone’s uncle is a jockey.” You see a hotel under construction “Bobby Jones grandpa once worked on a hotel construction site”. Now probably once in a while these were lies his friend told him. But most of the time it was just his way of relating to the world and novel stimulae when he didn’t have a better response. In a six year old who is going to care?
But if he is doing it at 22 it is probably a sign there is a problem.
Cultural appropriateness is part of making a diagnosis. If someone engages in ritualistic cannibalism of a man-God whose voice they occasionally hear, they're probably not psychotic. Chances are they're just Catholic. Part of this is that if your surrounding culture is Ok with a set of behavioral/cognitive traits, they're going to be less apt to harm your ability to function, which is a necessary part of what it means to have a mental disorder. But the bigger part is there's some underlying etiology to these disorders that can occasionally look like something that happens in a local culture, but is conceptually distinct from it. And that's probably what is going on with a child's imaginary friend as a typical part of childhood development expressed through their local cultural experience vs. the kind of hearing voices/has delusional beliefs scenario you are likening it to.
Also, last week I asked a question about consciousness and free will and it generated a lot of discussion but it also seemed like several people were confused. Superb Owl wrote an interesting post on the same topic
but it didn’t really line up with my individual thinking on the topic. Anyway this time I’d just like to ask, how many people here think the hard problem of consciousness is actually Hard? Has Scott ever written about it? I think that’s where a lot of the divergence came from.
I have a hard time trying to understand what’s supposed to be “hard” about it. The best explanation I’ve got so far is: it’s like life is everyone playing the same video game on their own device and you can interact with everyone else in the game, but you can never ever see anyone else’s screen. Still not sure why that makes it a hard problem.
Why lump free will and consciousness together? In my view the former is just one big hopeless confusion around not-even-wrong unexamined definitions while the latter is one of the most interesting questions of our time.
I like Eliezer's post Zombies Redacted, which is a reworking of Zombies? Zombies!, to which apparently Scott has written a related post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fy2b55mLtghd4fQpx/the-zombie-preacher-of-somerset) although it does not really seem to engage with the hard problem. If there are others I'd also like to know of them.
As for your question, I don't think the "hard problem" is hard in Chalmers' sense, for reasons similar to those expounded in Zombies Redacted (i.e. even people's assertions and theorizings about consciousness have a physical manifestation in the brain and should thus have a physical origin).
The hard problem is the problem of reductively explaining qualia ie. of explaining in a detailed way how and why particular qualia are produced by particular physical behaviour. Asserting that it must be physical, somehow, is not solving it in that sense.
1) Is the problem of consciousness hard in the Chalmerian sense?
2) What is the solution to the problem of consciousness?
I was making an argument for answering 1) in the negative. Your retort that my argument does not answer 2) does not necessarily invalidate it as an answer to 1).
Of course a complete answer to 2) would thereby solve 1), but it's also fair to take a shortcut and try to answer 1) directly. This is what the zombie argument does as well, though I find it unconvincing for the reason I've given (and I'm not aware of any zombie-ists attacking this reply head-on).
Like I said in my original post: "even people's assertions and theorizings about consciousness have a physical manifestation in the brain and should thus have a physical origin". I think this is a deep argument and people who claim the hard problem is capital-H Hard don't engage with it to an extent I find satisfying.
Speaking of non-engagement, Yudkowsky doesn't seem to engage much with Chalmer's attempted correction, and no-one engages much with the anonymous user who attempts to clarify Chalmer's views and gets downvoted to -4.
"Like I said in my original post: "even people's assertions and theorizings about consciousness have a physical manifestation in the brain and should thus have a physical origin". I think this is a deep argument and people who claim the hard problem is capital-H Hard don't engage with it to an extent I find satisfying."
What is engaging with it supposed to tell them? It doesn't make the hard problem -- the problem of saying how consciousness is physical -- easy. (In fact, you previously stepped back from the idea that reports-of-consciousness-are-caused-by-consciousness solving the HP,..although now you seem to be embracing it again).
It also doesn't select a unique answer to the mind-body problem: it's compatible with identity theory, mysterianism, interactive dualism, etc. The only thing it rules out is epiphenomenalism.
EY's reply only discusses zombies and epiphenomenalism. That might be a impactive against two of Chalmers' various claims, since he seems to believe in both, ... but it still isn't a point against the hardness of the hard problem, the thing we are discussing. It's possible for Chalmers to be wrong about zombies and epiphenomenalism, and right about the HP, since it is ideas that are right and wrong, not people. Or so I think. Do you think the HP vanishes without zombies, or something?.
>how many people here think the hard problem of consciousness is actually Hard?
I tend to think that the solution to it is what could be more or less called panpsychism, specifically the idea that consciousness is simply what it "feels like" for a given piece of matter to exist, and self-awareness (which by this theory would be a distinct subset of consciousness rather than synonymous with it) is what happens when conscious matter becomes interconnected in a complex enough way to become self-reflective. The reason I tend towards this answer is that consciousness obviously exists, in the sense of subjective, experienced qualia existing (this being really the only thing we can be absolutely sure of because it is the only thing that is subjectively and directly experienced by us), and yet our knowledge of the external world seems to show that there is very likely nothing beyond matter that is tied to it in such a way as to create consciousness in the way we experience it, so therefore the only solution left is consciousness being an innate quality of matter itself. This seems counterintuitive to most people since I think we all have an innate bias towards some sort of mind-body dualism, but when you consider that existing matter must have some way it objectively *is*, then it makes you wonder why there can't be some inherent way it subjectively *is* as well in terms of how it is existing at that moment in space and time, and so, as said, consciousness is really just the way that existence "feels" for everything that exists.
This theory implies that mountains are, in fact, conscious, if on a very primitive level (again, it differentiates between consciousness and self-awareness). Objecting to the claim that all matter is conscious by asking "why isn't x matter conscious" is begging the question, wouldn't you agree?
im asking why mountains aren’t the most consciousness, being so big. Why wouldn’t they be self aware. All that’s happened here is the hard problem of consciousness is moved to the hard problem of self awareness.
And anyway brains are clearly related to consciousness which is why blows or shots to the brain kill, but to the legs do not. And we can measure brainwaves etc.
That would still leave you with some kind of interaction problem, no? At some point in the causal chain leading to us writing these comments about consciousness, the "innate way existence feels like" has to be expressed in terms of neuron firings and such. But we know that neuron firings already have a complete explanation in physics. So where/how is the interaction between the "innate quality of matter itself" and the physical neuron firings happening, without violating the causal closure of the physical world?
Interesting. Not too different how I think about t, but I have always conceptualized it as materialism, not panpsychism.
Let us assume qualia is innate quality of matter. However, most of how humans experience the world is ... mediated by ... function of our nervous system, not bare qualia. The qualia of seeing a color or tasting or anything requires sensory organs -- a piece of matter a rock does not possess them, so only innate qualia all matter has must be quite different (I wanted to write, much simpler, but maybe that is in the eye of beholder).
I would agree, interestingly this implies that what we experience as "redness," for example, actually has very little to do with what the subjective self-experience of a "red" object or a red-wavelength photon is. Instead it corresponds with how it feels to be a specific electrical pattern in a neural interface, which has nothing in itself that might physically be described as "red" from the outside, but which has become habitually triggered by this otherwise unrelated outside stimulus because it happened to be the pattern of material being experienced as such that, as a cognitive pattern that benefits survival, was most convenient to be triggered by external redness. Essentially, the cognitive equivalent of "the map is not the territory," which is an uncontroversial idea in cognitive sciences, but acquires this additional interesting aspect when we consider the territory itself having the same capability of subjective experience (if not self-reflexivity) as the map.
I think it is a pretty hard problem. After all we haven't solved it yet! That said I don't think it is insurmountable, and I am definitely not a dualist.
FWIW, I suspect the the "hard problem of consciousness" is the lack of a proper definition. Without a proper definition it can't be solved. With the definition that I prefer it's just the mind observing itself, and self=consciousness is the mind observing itself observing itself. But that only works with *some* definitions of consciousness.
There's no hope of finding a single definition that captures all the concerns and issues.
A lot of work has already been done on splitting the problem of consciousness into sub-problems relating to sub-definitions.sense-of--self, higher order thought, access and phenomenal consciousness, etc.
That doesn't dissolve the hard problem: rather the hard problem emerges out of it.The HP relates to qualia/phenomenality specifically.
Narrowing the definition to self-observation leaves unresolved issues...you just have to call them something else.
Regarding therapists: my wife and I had really good luck using Alma. The basic gist is that you put in your insurance and the type of therapy you are interested in and then you interview the pre-sorted potential therapists until you find a fit. I interviewed three and found a great fit with a therapist that focuses on rationality based CBT and IFS (Internal Family Systems). The matching with someone who definitely takes your insurance is pretty remarkable. I’m not sure how widespread this is, but in NYC there were many many options to choose from.
If you use your own judgement to assign p and take the market's implied b, it's pretty straightforward as long as your bet is too small to move the market; the math would be more complicated if you were pushing the odds around, and I don't feel like working it out explicitly right now.
Probably only to the extent that exceeding the Kelly sizing will tend to drive even good forecasters' bankrolls down, reducing the liquidity in the market. If there's sufficient liquidity regardless, then it wouldn't affect the quality of the forecasts.
But doesn't the size of the bet serve as an ostensible surrogate for the forecasters confidence in the prediction?
I have never been truly enamored with the idea that money in fact is a surrogate for anything other than having more money. Rich people are not inherently better predictors. But the theory of prediction markets beyond the wisdom of the crowds is some how that monetizing the process makes it more predictive.
Yes and no. If a single whale (having done the math I demurred from) could move the market all the way to their estimate of the probability without exceeding the Kelly limit, but they stop short, then yes that suggests a lack of confidence in their estimate. But if the market is liquid enough that even the largest participant can only move the line by epsilon, then the confidence of individual bettors becomes irrelevant.
I think the expected utility of monetizing the process will make better predictors *into* rich people, such that over time rich people *would* *be" better predictors. A lot of the theory is based on a steady state, while it seems to me that objections tend to focus on the transient effects of initial implementation (which, if it takes long enough for any given market to approach steady state conditions, would in fact dominate).
Most betting markets you don't have the ability to make repeated bets, nor are the exact figures clear. But yes you want to size your bets if you don't want a high risk of losing it all.
Harry Sussex has just had his autobiography leaked. In it, he makes a number of rather astonishing claims. One of those claims is that he personally killed 25 enemy fighters when he was an Apache copilot / gunner in Afghanistan (he spent 30 weeks on deployment, so approximately one enemy fighter killed per week). He says he is fairly confident about this number because he reviewed footage of his flights on a laptop afterwards, so it explicitly isn't that he eg destroyed a transport van and guessed at how many people were inside
Is this number plausible? Would an average Apache copilot kill at this rate or is there something special about the way Harry was deployed? If 25 kills is not notable, what would the Apache equivalent of an 'ace' be (that is to say, a performance noteworthy enough to comment on)? What psychological support do pilots receive after killing people, given that they do so so frequently? Overall, is Harry likely to be telling the truth?
Without knowing too much about it, I'd say that if 25 kills in 30 weeks was an unusually high number for an Apache, then the Apache would be a pretty useless weapon given the expense, difficulty and vulnerability of it.
I don't think there'd be an equivalent to an "ace" though. An ace fighter pilot must shoot down other fighter pilots, in conditions approximating a fair fight. Apaches (especially in Afghanistan) will avoid anything like a fair fight, so the number of kills you get is mostly just a function of the number of targets you get sent in the direction of.
Considering the footage one sees of helicopter gunships picking people off at long range with night vision, using either missiles or guns, this doesn't seem unusual at all -- this is a team effort ofc, but presumably the gunner is the one pulling the trigger.
Another factor would be that I'm not sure how much aimless patrolling goes on with the gunships -- aren't they mostly flown either in response to intel (ie. reliable source says the guys at such-and-such compound are planting IEDs; go blow them up) or calls for close-air support. ("holy shit we are overwhelmed/these guys over the ridge are lobbing mortars at us, pls send help tuvm")
Knowing nothing about the details of his deployment - one transport van could be 10 people right there. I'm not an expert but having seen some footage from apaches in my day, 25 in 30 weeks strikes me as extremely plausible.
I am happy to say I have no idea who Harry Sussex is. As for people killing others in war zones with modern technology. Sure they might kill quite a few. Just depends on where/how they were deployed. Certainly the median solider isn't killing at that rate. The median soldier is probably sitting at a desk in some base.
I would imagine if you're considering all combatants in a conflict the median soldier usually has zero kills and the highest possible median is one kill.
If you imagine a conflict with 100 combatants, for each combatant to get 1 kill, all 100 people would have to die. For the median soldier to have one kill, at least 51% of combatants would have to die (i.e. if 51 soldiers each get one kill and the rest get zero). In reality, the distribution is probably less flat - the top soldiers may have 10 or more kills - and without a very flat distribution it would be very hard for the median soldier to have even 1 kill. For example, if the top 10% of soldiers averaged 6 kills each, it's impossible for the median to be 1 kill since 6 kills * 10% + 1 kill * 41% = 101% of people.
Yeah that was my point, just stated differently. But also I was mostly talking western soldiers who are generally as a group achieving quite high kill ratios due to their small numbers and materiel advantage. Even so I agree I would bet the median is zero.
"Harry Sussex" is Prince Harry of the UK, I'd be willing to bet it's much more likely you've heard of him under the latter name. "Sussex" is in reference to the fact that he is the Duke of Sussex, although he has stepped down from the duties normally associated with that title. Technically if you wanted to refer to him with a standard "civilian" given and surname, I believe the surname would be "Mountbatten-Windsor," which is what his children use, ̶a̶l̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶"̶S̶u̶s̶s̶e̶x̶"̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶i̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶l̶i̶t̶a̶r̶y̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶e̶n̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶.̶
Edited for correction, upon looking it up the surname used on his uniform in the military was "Wales," in reference to him being the son of the Prince of Wales.
It shows what a total idiot the guy is, to paint a great big target on his back and possibly even endanger his family with his probably exaggerated bragging, not to mention that MeAgain may feel a bit ambivalent about him mowing down non-white people by the bushel (if his exploits are to be believed).
I never gave it much credence before, but now I'm truly starting to believe the rumours that he is actually the son of someone called James Hewitt, who had an affair with Princess Diana. Knowing he is a cuckoo in the nest, and not in the royal bloodline, might explain Harry's apparently compulsive bitterness and vindictiveness (although piles of loot, estimated at $50M, for publishing his latest pot boiler and associated interviews is another fairly plausible motive!)
Still, US readers, take heart, you may not have to put up with him for much longer. He also boasted about taking cocaine, and could soon therefore be kicked out of the US as an undesirable alien! :-)
Oh I dunno his mother (Diana) was also a vindictive airhead. Far as I can tell people only like her because she was pretty and died young and glamorously.
She wasn't even especially pretty, and I'm not sure why people are so intent on pretending that she was. I mean, by Royal Family standards she was, but by "pretty celebrity" standards she wasn't.
The irony is Harry has been complaining for years that the media destroyed her life; but now he is voluntarily allowing them to do the same with his life, not that he has the self awareness to realise that (yet).
Prince Harry's tell all falls into my "none of my damn business" bucket but I can't seem to avoid hearing people talk about it. It seems that people who are actually interested in this stuff are feeling like he's crossing into TMI territory.
He also looks strikingly similar to a young Prince Philip though. Unhappily for His Maj, the good looks in the Mountbatten line seem to have skipped a generation.
People on defense oriented subreddits seem to think that number is on the low end for an Apache pilot in Afghanistan. Air aces are usually in terms of shooting down enemy fighter jets or at least bombers where the enemy is supposed to have defenses. Maybe it would make sense for an Apache crew who destroy 5 armored vehicles to be aces?
...but I ended up taking the advice to heart, and have been happily eating everything-but-the-stem ever since. It really does add up to significantly more apple, especially on the larger varieties like honeycrisp. Made me wonder why I'd spent the first two decades of my life not consuming apples this way. Peer pressure, I guess? Never bothering to fact-check just-so stories? Not understanding "the dose makes the poison"? I don't know. It's at least understandable why people peel fruits and vegetables - they've a notable difference in flavour, texture, etc., if edible in the first place at all. There's some real there, there. (But I still evangelize eating kiwi skins when possible. Have made a few converts!)
Wonder how many other parts of life are like this. Untruths that go unnoticed and thus uncontested, until one actually bothers to verify their structural integrity. Make beliefs pay rent, indeed...
I've been under the impression that skins of kiwis and peaches and other fuzzy foods are nasty because the skins pick up and hang onto potentially pathogenic bacteria, and/or chemicals such as fertilizer and pesticides. Love to be convinced I'm wrong.
I mean, I'll concede that that's what makes cantaloupes higher-risk: the intricate skin pattern creates very high surface area, so it's an excellent breeding ground for bacteria, and dirt isn't easily removed. That's for a ground crop though, the worst possible combination. Berries also have high surface area, and I think that's maybe why they're suggested to wash extra-well? But not sure. Never bothered to research. Cursory Google shows most "should I wash X" sites are pure woo fluff masquerading as wannabe lifestyle brands, so I'm skeptical.
(But I'll fully agree that reversed chemophobia is not ideal weighting of tail risks, and it is after all a trivial inconvenience at best to wash. Still think aesthetics is the stronger argument for going skinless though. Lots of popular tastes and textures that I react abnormally poorly to, so I'm definitely wired weird!)
Do you enjoy the core of the apple as much as the rest of it? Aren't the seeds and tougher membranes in there unpleasant to eat? I'm well aware that there's nothing poisonous or inedible in an apple core. I don't eat them because I don't like them.
If I had to plot out my Apple Enjoyment Gradient X versus Longitudinal Apple Strata Y (latitude? always get those confused), I'd say it looks like a mostly continuous function, yes. Sharp drop-off for the stem ends, as that's the part that "takes work" to avoid, and the bottoms tend to be a primary spot for early spoilage. I'd estimate that my decreased utility from eating a "mushy" spot of the apple is at least three times any small signal related to the membrances and pips.
The technique also matters - there's a reason that video has him eating the apple vertially rather than horizontally. This is intuitive with, say, steak - of course you're gonna notice the fibre a lot more if you cut with the grain, versus against it! To the extent an apple has noticeable "grain", it's parallel to the core. So eating it from the bottom rather than the side means only getting small chunks of such fibre per bite, rather than a whole mouthful at once. It's also easier on the mouth, obviously. Like the way one normally eats celery, rather than nibbling it sideways, which is an endless chewy stringfest.
I think certainly there's different thresholds, and for some people that minor unpleasantless is enough to write off the cores. Some people really hate potato or grape skins too! I guess I'm wondering about an unknowable counterfactual - what percentage of that dislike is organic, versus inculcated via well-intentioned expectations-setting? One way or another, there's a good amount of implicit and explicit pressure against apple cores, an ambient Everybody Knows; would people eat them more often without such messaging? Or a revised message of "it's actually just the seeds that need avoiding", perhaps. No one throws away the "core" of a watermelon for containing seeds, for example, that'd just be silly. ({Plus it's usually the sweetest part.)
Ah, so this is why the "Global South" remains poorer - those nearer the poles keep pulling up the ladderitude after them. Makes sense!
(I wonder if it's partly cultural confusion - the compass has different emphases in Chinese tradition...East, North, West, South. So I always think about left <-> right before up ^|V down.)
>Untruths that go unnoticed and thus uncontested, until one actually bothers to verify their structural integrity
Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's whole thing? I wonder if he would eat the apple core?
One a semi related note: I get a headache/near migraine if a eat an apple without cutting it. No idea why. This seemed to start just a few years ago. I've assumed its some interplay with the way my teeth are pulled when biting the apple and the usually cold temp of the apple pressing on the top of my mouth. It doesn't seem to happen with other similar fruits like pears, peaches, plums. Could just be psychosomatic.
Will freely cop to never having read Nietzche, nor being able to suss out What's The Deal from years of ambient exposure.
That's interesting. I tend to leave apples out, rather than refrigerate them...dulls the flavour, doesn't seem to extend shelf life that much. The firmness of the flesh is also significantly higher than those other fruits. Do you have issues with other similarly-textured whole-bite things?
In "Beyond Good and Evil" Nietzsche lays out his morality. He starts by lamenting that everyone before him just took the presence of morality for granted without examining if it exists at all. I was trying (unsuccessfully) to make a joke. I liked the idea that Nietzsche would have strong opinions on how to eat apples or that eating an apple in whole would be what an Ubermench would do.
I should try eating an apple at room temp to see if i still get the headache. This all started after I took wellbutrin which cause serious jaw/teeth clenching and then pain/headaches. Thats part of why i think its psychosomatic or a learned response.
I eat apple cores so that nothing is left but the stem. It isn't the best part of the apple, but I think of a core as sufficiently messy and nasty that I'd rather not have it around.
It's possible to eat shrimp shells. I found this out from reading a woman who was doing caloric restriction, which can make a person pretty hungry.
Why do people leave the tails on shrimp? Is there any dignified way to get the tail off? Do most people eat the tails?
Pinch the base of the tail firmly along its axis of symmetry while you're eating the shrimp. The meat pops right out, especially if you pull on the shrimp a little with your teeth.
Oh yeah, the tail is my favourite part of the shrimp! I usually get some of those off other peoples' plates when out with family. And it's usually the only shell remaining, what with how they're typically industrially shelled. Which is unfortunate, lotsa classic Chinese <s>shrimp</s> prawn preparation relies on having that crunchy outer layer. I believe they're left on so that people have something solid to grip while preparing them, and also for cocktail-type purposes or eating while fried; the totally-denuded ones seem to only come as Already Fully Cooked, which are used for different things. It's like a natural handle. For more formal occasions, usually one picks up or spears a shrimp near the tail, bites off the rest, then discreetly pushes the discard to a corner or disposal dish.
I think the majority of people don't eat them, since it's unintuitive - most recipes call for shelling, and lotsa older folks still have memories of "de-veining" shrimp, back before better industrial processes largely obsoleted that. They really are crunchy and a bit sharp. I like them anyways cause they tend to pick up a lot of sauce/seasoning, and are quite high in calcium. Forget bone broth or eggshell coffee, give me shrimp shells please. (Great base for seafood broth too, though getting enough is a bit expensive.)
I'll admit I've never heard of someone eating shrimp tails before, although I'd imagine it would be a good source of calcium. As for your other questions, I think the tails are left on when the shrimp is served out of some combination of aesthetics and to give a convenient place to hold it, and I don't really know of any good way to remove the tails that isn't either fiddling around with them in an undignified-looking way, or just biting almost up to the tail and leaving a bit of flesh behind.
I started doing this when a teacher in high school told me the cyanide in the seeds isn't enough to be poisonous, but is enough to slightly lower your blood pressure in a way that might be healthy (I still believe the former, not so sure about the latter). In any case, I've been eating the whole apple ever since.
Coincidentally I also enjoy eating those citrus whole - but those seeds I spit out, they're quite noticeable and often painfully sharp. Dentists were Very Concerned when I was a kid and used to eat whole lemons. Luckily nothing ever came of it. They're very tasty dried with the peel on too! I always use extra zest when a recipe calls for it, hard to go wrong.
The one exception is typical McNavel Oranges...the raw whole peel on those is rather unpleasantly bitter and stringy unless sugared. But they also taste like ass just generally. Give me mandarins (totally edible in whole) or satsuma oranges (less so but exemplars of fruity goodness) instead any day.
I eat everything but the stem too. I can recall at a very early age - probably when I first knew the words - asking my mother if I was at ‘the core’ yet.
Yes, am aware. Hence reference to "the dose makes the poison". The liver can deal with small amounts of cyanide, and does on a regular basis anyway if one eats such exotic foods as rice. From what I've read, the amount is so small as to be negligible; one would have to intentionally eat quite large quantities of pips to get any noticeable problems; the case studies we do have of cyanide poisoning via food involved improper handling, directly sucking on stone fruit pits, or other such improbabilities. Much more likely to get bored of eating apples before that, it's not a once-daily habit even. It's also largely from chewing or grinding up the seeds - if merely swallowed, they mostly pass through inert. It's not like improperly-prepared cassava, which will Definitely Cause Harm in fairly short order.
Stephen Skolnick who used to comment on here a bit says this kind of low-dosage toxicity is only really gonna be an issue for someone with a messed-up microbiome, or who otherwise loses the ability to eliminate such poisons*...but I'm neither in the habit of taking antibiotics, nor eating all that much processed food. So not particularly worried at the moment. I'd abstain for awhile if I were planning a surgery or something though.
I'll admit that the typical kinda-furry brown ones seem intimidating at first..."won't it be all weird and scratchy?" But then I ask if they peel peaches, and of course not, who does that. It's very similar though...peach fuzz, kiwi fuzz. The bark is worse than the bite, literally. And even totally smooth foods can make one choke if they "go down wrong".
These days one can even find <s>naked</s> "golden kiwi", which are sorta extra-oblong and ruddy-yellow rather than green inside, and are totally denuded of hair. And the instructions on the container still say to scoop out the innards and throw away the skin! It's very strange.
(I first heard about kiwi skin being edible as a passing throwaway comment on, idk, some Discovery Channel show or whatever. They claimed it's the part with the highest concentration of nutrients, and this is similarly true for many other foods, like potatoes and grapes. Big If True, never did look into it though. Which, yes, ironic. I just can't be bothered to peel stuff though.)
I was at a workshop where they provided fresh fruit in the pauses, but no cutlery at all. So I was like, how do they expect us to eat these kiwis?? --- And learned that you can eat them with the skin.
Always a fun stunt at parties, makes me remember Police Academy 2, that supermarket pillaging scene where one of the thugs eats a banana with the peel. (But I think banana peels aren't edible)
Yes, I admit I partly do it for surprising people too. Contrarianism for its own sake is a thing.
Banana peels are, in fact, edible - just rather unpalatable without cooking. Very similar to plantains. You can sometimes find dried "baby" bananas with the skin on, as an easier segue into the stuff. Most forms of preparation are like dealing with raw bulk kale - you really have to beat it into submission and cook rather thoroughly to render out that slimy bitterness. Baking works well, and it makes a good confection base too (candied peels).
Although, of note, the composition of a banana (moreso than most fruits) changes *very* quickly as it ripens. The greener a banana is, the higher proportion of starch : sugar in its carbs, and vice versa for yellow. This also affects the micronutrient composition...some are more easily available when greener, some when yellower. And has attendant effects on taste and texture - there's a reason banana bread almost always uses extremely-ripe ones! (I like greener bananas, personally.)
I do, and similarly for pears. It really isn't particularly noticeable unless I go out of my way to notice it. Sorta like how string beans* and celery ribs do have a "string", it's definitely A Physical Thing, but the level of botheringness seems to correspond strongly with how much one has been conditioned to expect it as a bother. Accidentally chewing a pip itself is slightly unpleasant (bitter notes, like with watermelon), but usually they just get swallowed. Nothing in particular stopping me from spitting them out, other than lack of convenient proximity to compost bin, I guess. A later article claimed that the density of bacteria is particularly high around fruit seeds, such as apple cores, so I guess there's some potential benefit too.
*I also enjoy edamame and pea pods, peanut shells, and popcorn kernels...but that's a whole other level of very tough fibre that I don't at all classify as Not Really Noticeable. Used to literally eat toothpicks as a kid, so it's still an improvement.
I did eat toothpick as a kid too, and still eat popcorn kernels! Most of the time when I eat them it's to "have something to do with my mouth", I don't like not having anything to chew while eating. I'll try to eat apple cores, it may help me slow down when eating.
I'll admit that I'm very skeptic about kiwi skins, the ones I get have a furry skin that seems like it would be like chewing hair, plus it may be hard to get clean.
Yeah, it was either that or paper towel. I liked the brown ones made of recycled unbleached paper better. Luckily never developed a true oral fixation like smoking, but it is nice to chew gun or otherwise be occupied in some such way. Much as I like soup, it's not a Proper Meal without some mastication. The solution is clearly to put chewable things in the soup. Diced-up corn on the cob is nice, that gives an excuse to eat with my hands too. Who needs utensils, really?
Kiwi skin has a lot less texture than you'd expect. Not at all like, say, artichoke fuzz (which is legitimately gross and tastes worse, even when boiled to death) or corn silk. The cleanliness I'm not sure, have always been pretty cavalier about eating plants without washing. Supposedly just a rinse takes care of most _____cide residues. Unless they're visibly dirty, like many root crops, in which case one might wanna actually scrub some. (Or melons. Melons really ought to be wiped down before slicing. Amazingly dirty, and to think of passing a sullied knife through the whole flesh...bleurgh.)
I think the fact that you eat peanut shells is pretty important context for your assertion that apple cores are basically the same as the rest of the apple...
I'll agree that they're on a spectrum with string beans, though -- I don't want those, either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They're boring compared to basically any slightly-more-exotic pole bean variety, yeah. Give me purple beans or Chinese long beans any day instead. If it doesn't have that characteristic crunch, if one's teeth don't "squeak"...that's no pole bean, I say.
I guess no one ever taught me they're "supposed to" be shelled before eaten/thrown away? Always just...bit right in. We used to roast pumpkin seeds at home, it seemed a similar type of food to eat whole. Same with sunflower seeds. A prolific snack during ill-fated Little League days. David brand, was it...? Pretty confident one major reason people don't eat the shells is that they're typically extremely salted. I like salt in my diet, but the salted versions of nutshells are...ouch. Harder and harder to find roasted-unsalted these days, and washing them off makes it all gross-soggy. Defeats the purpose of crunchy goodness.
Oh my, I missed the antistocks... let me tell you another reason why they shouldn't work.
They're a proxy for an arbitrary metric that nobody optimizes for - Tesla does not pay dividends, it never has and I doubt that it ever will. Some companies pay dividends regularly, others do not, and the decision about the dividends can be quite divorced from the rest of the value.
Measuring profit? Let me point you to Amazon that doesn't believe in having profits, as much money as they get they reinvest or do some accounting magic with it (I'm exaggerating).
Whatever measure chosen it will at-best be fitted for last year's management with last year's strategy. You aren't running just counter-party risk, you're betting that the measure chosen does indeed reflect changes in value and won't change for completely unrelated reasons.
So if there's one thing this isn't it is - As simple as buying long.
The only argument I can see for them is that a regular share's value is so ephemeral that it's impossible to make the connection between a company's value and the price of a financial instrument any weaker so who cares.
This is straying from where I'm confident of my knowledge, but I assume that if every other metric I know about has fiddly constraints this one would have those too.
Devil's advocate:
Basing a financial instrument's value on rare occurrences is healthy for the economy, at that point I might as well be trading in NFTs that represent different attitudes about tesla's future. And that way the SEC is less likely to throw me in jail.
As a defense of the simplest model, Tesla talks a lot about not paying dividends, but imagine if there were some kind of legally binding contract they could sign that would render them forever unable to pay anything like a dividend. If Tesla signed this contract, do you think their stock price would go down? If so, that suggests the current price reflects some chance they start paying dividends.
You're still investing in the payment-of-tesla-dividends proposition instead of tesla's value, so the antistock is only worth that sliver of value.
I think the stock price change would be more reflective of what people think of a management that signs such contracts than the change in expectation depending on the level of such expectation now and how much uneducated money is moving tesla's price - a thing that I don't know how to measure and how tight that contract is - i.e. would it block other forms of capital return which would cripple the company's financial strategy or leave them open thus making the point a technical triviality.
If tesla would do so as a move to commit to stock buybacks as a capital return mechanism because of the taxation rationale (As Berkshire Hathaway does) the price might go up rather than down.
"Scenes from the Joint Mathematics Meeting (the largest annual meeting of mathematicians in the world):
A talk entitled "Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice""
They wouldn't be there if there any reasonable level of hostility towards them. And the fact that these presentations are even being accepted by the conference organizers is the problem.
Most people reject woke nonsense, but it doesn't matter! The problem isn't most people agreeing with it, it's that these ideologies capture institutions and everyone has to go along with it at the risk of having their livelihoods jeopardized.
How many mathematicians in attendence would be comfortable putting their name on an open letter decrying this presentation's thesis in explicit and direct terms (e.g. not saying something like "This presentation is well intended but unhelpful in fighting against patriarchal systematic racism")? I have a really, really good guess.
A book with the point that AAVE (African American Vernacular English) includes some phrasing which makes mainstream english phrasing about arithmetic hard to understand. This could leave a teacher thinking that the kid just can't understand, while the problem is a need for translation.
Immigrants don't have special problems with learning math that I know of. First and second generation Asian immigrants famously do well in math. That tends to contradict the hypothesis that English gramma is the problem. I Personally learned math in foreign language (French) and was not aware of the language being an impediment.
There's plausibly something about racism in the situation-- not just that children aren't being taught in their home dialect, but that people who default to believing that black people are stupid aren't going to notice there's a language difference causing the difficulty with arithmetic.
This language difference is directly impacted by intelligence. Second gen asian immigrations whose parents don't speak English as a first languge do well above average in literacy. And the thing is, we know blacks are less smart than whites through intelligence testing. And guess what, the IQ subtests most dependant on language (e.g. vocabulary) have smaller racial gaps than those not dependant on language, meaning these IQ gaps cannot be a product of language differences.
And it's bizarre calling this racism, because the "anti-racists" are the ones pushing for AAVE to be accepted as a real language and to not teach black kids proper english. It's the "anti-racists" that have created this situation through their dumb, agrocentrist ideology.
A possible reason (that you ignore) that "Second gen asian immigrations [sic] whose parents don't speak English as a first languge do well above average in literacy" in Standard American English because the English spoken by the communities they're in is by-and-large Standard American English, so there isn't a competing dialect of English involved. And before you protest, just having an "Asian accent" in SAE is not the same thing as a wholly separate dialect with different tenses, different inflection rules, and other grammatical rules, like AAVE is.
If this model is correct, it seems like we should see black kids do better learning math from black teachers than from white teachers. Is there good evidence for this? (I don't know the literature, though I have a broad impression that education research is often not all that great, and I worry about replicability and garden-of-forking-paths issues in it.)
No, it seems like we should be stamping out AAVE as the main dialect black kids speak and get them speaking the same English as the rest of the country/world.
Sure, but it would be an easy study to do, and P[speaks AAVE|black] >> P[speaks AAVE|white].
If the model you're describing is correct, then we have a pretty clear prediction of something we should see--black kids learning math from black math teachers should do better. If we see that, it's some evidence for the theory; if not, it's some evidence against it. But also, it sure seems likely that there's already data on this somewhere.
My point is : the kind of people who mix "Cisheteropatriarchial" and "whites" and "queers of color" in a single sentence without punctuation are probably not interested in your very sensible and level-headed reform. They want solutions like "Stand all the white boys in a line every week and tell them how aweful they are, white girls are one-time-per-month", or "Leave K12 education to suck exactly as much or harder, but accept [politically favorable] blacks more often at universities\jobs, using whatever dumb nonsense you can come up with to justify".
They have to do this, they are addicted to heroics and "Rebel Alliance" narratives, and "kids should have better education" isn't exactly an oppressed take, although people differ on who's responsible and who should pay the bill, but no monster is going to argue with a straight face that "Yes, black kids are having difficulty due to language\worse income\less fathers, and that's a Good Thing". There is no "alpha" in pushing a narrative like that, to borrow Scott's parody terminology.
Wokism actively reward nonsense, because it's a system of morality that rewards novelty. Whenever "morality" and "novelty" come together in a single sentence, disaster is as expected as Death and Taxes. There *is* a place for novelty in morality, at a rate of about 1 idea per century (if ordinary human brains are the ones doing the thinking).
But in a system like wokism, you have to be cutting edge, and how can you be when all the gays have gotten all their rights? the only solution is to invent new gays (made up pronouns and identities) and mix-match the vanilla gays with other identities (queers of color and intersectionality in general). The number of combinations you can get this way is exponential, so they can never run out. They are trapped in a self-accelerating feedback loop of inventing new injustices wholly out of thin air and pretending to be mad about it, then achieving a meaningless\non-existent victory and going to bed before repeating the entire cycle the next day. The world is choke-full of actual injustices to be extremly mad about and spend a lifetime fighting, but they aren't new and sexy, and they are very exhausting and nobody talks about your (tiny and incremental, mostly pyrrhic) victories on twitter and TED.
I can't imagine that it has anything to do with gender. There might be other dialect differences that affect smaller groups, and the problem isn't necessarily only American.
I can imagine that a few children with very good mathematical intuition guess what the teacher must mean, and the majority conclude that it's incomprehensible and they can't learn it.
The Joint Mathematics Meeting is the joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society (the main professional organization of professional mathematicians) and the Mathematics Association of America (the main professional organization of mathematics educators at the undergraduate and high school level). Educators are a core part of this conference. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that educators think about race, gender, and sexuality in the context of education. It's only if you think that education about *math* is somehow not the same sort of human practice where people think about these issues that this should be surprising.
Look, this presentation is woke nonsense. I know it, you know it.
Typically mathematics has been more resistant this nonsense because it is a strictly technical discipline that is less dependant on language than almost any other. This is obviously true, which is why the humanties were ideologically captured many decades ago, whereas serious inroads have only started being made on academic math is recent years.
But the fact that conference organizers for math are accepting this nonsense for presentation shows a significantly negative cultural change that likely signals future ideological capture that will poison yet another field.
> It's only if you think that education about *math* is somehow not the same sort of human practice where people think about these issues that this should be surprising.
Presentations about education are fine. Presentations about education based on demented far-left race and gender ideology are not fine. None of this is based on scientific evidence, it's pure ideology, and it will poison mathematics the way it does everything else it touches.
Kenny, out of pure interest I tried looking up the talk to see what was the actual content. I didn't manage that, but I did find the photo identifying the man giving the talk; Luis Leyva.
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education, Department of Teaching and Learning
Faculty Affiliate, Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies
"At the juncture of gender studies, higher education, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), Leyva’s interdisciplinary research explores narratives of oppression and agency across historically marginalized groups’ educational experiences to uncover interlocking functions of racism and cisheteropatriarchy in undergraduate STEM. He draws on critical race theory, women of color feminisms, and queer of color critique to conceptually and methodologically ground his scholarship, which centers historically marginalized voices in STEM higher education across intersections of race, gender, and sexuality."
I have certainly been educated, in that I never before heard of the term "queer of colour" (I was aware of debate around whether "queer" was or was not a slur). I had thought the term was "queer person" but now it seems that "queer" is a pronoun in itself.
Let us continue:
"Leyva is the Director of the PRISM (Power, Resistance & Identity in STEM Education) Research Lab at Vanderbilt-Peabody College. The lab’s research serves to hold an “intersectional prism” up to underrepresented students’ narratives of experience to illuminate and disrupt multidimensional forms of oppression in undergraduate STEM education.
...His second project, titled COURAGE (Challenging, Operationalizing & Understanding Racialized and Gendered Events) in Undergraduate Mathematics, examines features of instruction in undergraduate calculus classrooms that students from historically marginalized groups experience as discouraging or supportive as mathematics learners. This project, supported by the National Science Foundation (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program), addresses the pervasive role of calculus as a gatekeeper that reinforces racialized and gendered access to STEM. "
So - calculus is bad? Has anyone got an opinion on this? Do away with gatekeeping calculus or not?
If the man is managing to teach black kids maths, then good for him. But I can't navigate all the jargon, and what on earth does the below have to do with learning engineering?
"As a space of collective healing and re-humanizing the research experience in the academy, PRISM members support one another in constantly interrogating their positions of privilege and oppression to engage in research alongside historically marginalized communities in STEM education."
Is that a therapy session or a maths class?
I looked up one of the linked research papers and hold on to your hats, you'll never believe this!
"Introductory mathematics courses, including precalculus and calculus, largely influence Black and Latin* students’ persistence and sense of belonging in STEM. However, prior research on instruction in these courses for advancing more equitable outcomes is limited. This paper presents findings from a study of 18 Black and Latina/o students’ perceptions of introductory mathematics instruction as a racialized and gendered experience at a large, public, and historically white research university. Sociological perspectives of logics and mechanisms of inequality guided an analysis of Black and Latina/o students’ group interview responses on how instruction perpetuates racial and gendered oppression. Two logics were identified: (i) Instructors hold more mathematical authority than students in classrooms; and (ii) Calculus coursework is used to weed out students ‘not cut out’ for STEM. These logics, coupled with the influence of broader sociohistorical forces (e.g., cultural scripts of behavior, stereotypes), gave rise to mechanisms of inequality through seemingly neutral instructional practices that reinforce racial-gendered distribution of classroom participation and STEM persistence. Our findings inform implications for STEM higher education researchers and mathematics faculty to foster socially affirming STEM instruction, especially in introductory courses."
Yes, imagine this shocking revelation: teachers have more authority than the students in classrooms! Were any of you aware of this shocking and distressing "logic" before?
"BSTRACT In this article, the author discusses the intersectionality of mathematics experiences for two Latin@ college women pursuing mathematics-intensive STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors at a large, predominantly White university. The author employs intersectionality and poststructural theories to explore and make meaning of their experiences in relation to discourses of mathematics ability and pursuits of STEM higher education. A cross-case analysis of two Latin@ college women's counter-stories details the development of success-oriented beliefs and strategies in navigating the discourses that they encountered institutionally and interpersonally in their mathematics experiences. Implications are raised for P--16 mathematics and STEM education to broaden equitable learning opportunities for Latin@ women and other marginalized groups' construction of positive mathematics identities at intersections of gender and other social identities."
A whacking *two* Latina students are used to "raise implications for STEM education". I'm loath to call this - no, scrap that, I'm not loath at all. I *am* calling this a grift; do a round of conferences, write a few papers, head up a 'lab' talking about white cis hetero patriarchy bad but extra bad in maths, let's stop teaching particular branch of maths and just let all the queer trans females and other persons of colour enter the engineering course and give 'em the degree at the end, much more equitable!
(I say this as someone ignorant of maths and unable to understand or indeed grapple with it. But if I got a sympathy pass and award due to being a female person who can't be expected to understand hard sums, I'd be insulted and I would never be able to rely on "well at least the person who built that bridge learned how to calculate the stresses correctly so it won't collapse under me")
On calculus being bad - you'll find some very widespread shared beliefs among mathematicians (probably not majority, but maybe close) that it would be better if university calculus requirements were replaced with statistics or logic or critical thinking or something else of that sort.
That's absolutely irrelevant to the point being made. Black kids would likely struggle just as much with a rigorous college statistics course.
As for "logic" or "critical thinking", well this is absurd considering you need to understand calculus to understand vast swathes of scientific theory and these things will not help you with it. And obviously "critical thinking" is one of those bullshit terms that is so vague so as to allow almost anything to be taught underneath it, including ideological nonsense with no empirical evidence of providing any benefit to a student's congitive ability or understanding of other subjects.
Derivatives are easy and useful in many situations. The rest of the calculus, yeah, can get arbitrarily complex, and the technical details are mostly useless even for most people in STEM.
I wonder what exactly passes for "critical thinking". I mean, I understand what the idea is, in theory, but beyond the obvious mistakes, how exactly do you *teach* it, or *measure* it? (For example, teaching people lists of fallacies can easily backfire. The more you know, the easier it is to assign one of them to inconvenient information, so you become more immune against arguments you disagree with.)
So while I agree about the usefulness of critical thinking, I worry that adding it to university requirements would result in something different, such as conformity with some narrative.
Yes, it’s a hard question to know how to structure a quantitative reasoning requirement for a university. But it’s not really controversial that structuring it as a calculus requirement in particular is bad, if you don’t expect people to become engineers. And even engineers should get an actual quantitative reasoning class that covers some probability, which they often don’t get under current structures.
There are many universities where the math requirement can be filled by statistics or formal logic. I don’t know if there are many that don’t have such a requirement at all. I don’t know that any universities have changed this general education requirement one way or another in the past five or ten years.
And all around him are pretty normal mathematical speakers, often POCs (more often in fact) giving proper lectures. It’s probably like there was an occasional Marxism and Mathematics lecture in Soviet technical universities, just because you have to.
More damaging to the U.K, is the general disregard for mathematics exemplified by the dull mediocrity of people like Simon Jenkins.
You mean like how the Soviets basically rejected genetics wholesale on ideological grounds that greatly diminished their scientific and tenchical progress accordingly?
And look, we're already seeing it in other fields today in the west. You can't do certain research, you can't come to certain conclusions. Intelligence researchers are having their access to genetics databases blocked. This is all real and is stunting science.
I would like to know more about this. Like, what were the exact mechanism that caused this. Because, Soviet Union started as a backward feudal country... then at some moment it sent the first man to space... and then it fell behind again. The simple explanations like "of course, soviet communism sucks" are not sufficient, because they cannot explain Gagarin. What was the mechanism that worked at first, and then it didn't; and why?
Russia is still great today at the mathematical olympiad ( https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=RUS ), which is not a completely fair comparison, because greater countries have a natural advantage; it obviously makes a difference when you pick 6 best math students among 1 million, or 10 millions, or 100 millions. Then again, Germany has almost as much population as Russia, and it stays visibly behind.
Among multiple factors, relatively how important were crazy people in positions of scientific power, such as Lysenko, versus how important was lack of money when the research becomes expensive. (In other words, could an unexpected source of huge income hypothetically have saved soviet science, or was is doomed regardless?)
One explanation I have heard is that in capitalist countries, new inventions can become products overnight. So the Soviets had space research, but the Americans *also* had dozens of household items based on technology somehow originating from the space research. Could be something useful such as microwave oven, or something stupid such as laser pointer, but either way it provided additional funding for the research, and made the population familiar with the new technology; and then you had millions of people thinking how to make this even better. Meanwhile, the Soviet scientists had to convince some important member of the communist party to approve further research.
Towards the end, Soviets were just shamelessly stealing technology from the West, and still stayed behind. Which is a shame, because they also had some cool idea, such as a computer based on balanced ternary digits (-1, 0, 1) rather than the usual binary (0, 1), and who knows where that research could have led in a parallel history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun Was the missing part the ability of some rich entrepreneur to unilaterally decide to mass produce millions of cheaper smaller ternary computers, spend a lot on advertising, and sell them as expensive toys?
I suppose that different people will come up with different theories. I am curious what was the real reason. Probably a combination of things, but what was their relative importance, and why it first worked and then it didn't?
How specifically is the queer-of-color math different from the cisheteropatriarchal math?
I can see how education relates to color (although I consider the terminology very unfortunate, because it is not the "color" per se, but rather its correlations with being a *cultural* minority and/or not speaking English as a first *language*), or how sexual orientation could be relevant to some biology or history lessons... but the impact of sexual orientation on mathematics is a mystery to me.
All I can imagine is mentioning something like "and by the way, the guy who invented the square root of seven was a black gay who identified as a fox". Is that all?
The author literally thinks calculus exists to gatekeep people who aren't straight white "cis" men from technical fields. It's ideological nonsense, not science.
And don't you think its bizarre that foreign students from Asia who don't speak english as their first language have no issue whatsoever with these "classroom dynamics", but people born and raised in this very country can't learn in it's classrooms? It's all just rationalization for the evil straight white men being more intelligent and capable than other non-asian groups.
Nobody who uses the term "heteropatriarchy" is operating scientifically, it's all ideology.
I still don't see how this is about math specifically, rather than school in general.
(Or could you just replace the word "math" with any other subject, and give the same talk at any other conference? That certainly is a way to increase one's publication count...)
I haven’t seen the presentation so I don’t know what the authors are saying. But there are all sorts of reasons why different subject matters cause different sorts of classroom dynamics. There are specific things about learning how to do proofs in front of other students that are an important part of math classes and no others.
But even if there is nothing distinctive about math here, someone whose work is entirely in math education is likely to limit their claims to math education, even if some of the issues they discuss might generalize to other subjects. If you don’t have semesters or years of observation of physics classrooms, you’re not going to make claims about physics teaching.
You don't think it might be an issue for teaching math if certain groups are innacurately perceived as more talented than others? Or get additional support?
If your role as a teacher and institution is to give the best possible education to your students, and identify the best potential mathematicians, you need to be aware or structural issues so you can mitigate them.
>You don't think it might be an issue for teaching math if certain groups are innacurately perceived as more talented than others?
There's no evidence for this. Whites and Asians are ACCURATELY perceived as better. And trying to pretend otherwise can lead only to the kind of racial discrimination as we see in American colleges' affirmative action policies.
>If your role as a teacher and institution is to give the best possible education to your students, and identify the best potential mathematicians, you need to be aware or structural issues so you can mitigate them.
Then do actual science. This isn't science. It's pure ideology. They're not trying to determine what's true, they're advancing an ideological goal (help their ingroup and hurt their outgroup) and will find any justification for doing so. These people will never, EVER accept that different groups have different innate abilities.
The left will hold up Alan Turing as a brilliant gay genius one moment, and the next they will pretend he doesn't exist to "prove" gays are considered less capable.
The primary determiner of whether you get support or not is how well you do on the test, and whether you are actually trying or seem to be goofing off. Can't see how either of these hard bits of real-world data have dick to do with your color, class, creed, sexual orientation, or any other of the modern points of obsession.
I suppose if you had a specific example (of the impact of sexual orientation on mathematics) you'd probably at least hint at it. So you don't know either.
This isn't science. It's pure ideology. They're not trying to determine what's true, they're advancing an ideological goal (help their ingroup and hurt their outgroup) and will find any justification for doing so.
This are the kind of people who would never, ever accept that intelligence differences exist between races regardless of how much evidence you provide them. They will shout you down, they will call everyone involved racist, they will call for you to be fired. They will never accept something so harmful to their narratives. This is what ideologues do, not scientists.
I agree that there's thinking there, but there's no truth-seeking: no one's trying to find ways that objectively increase a useful endgoal like "we solve navier stokes" or "students understand math better". There's thinking, but it's all about social positioning and jargon-based politics.
Considering the (backwards) progress they've made over the past 50 years, maybe it's time to for them to consider whether their focus is really where it should be.
I think we'd all be willing to listen respectfully if there were clear objective results from this kind of stuff. Show me a state or big district that went all-in on diversity and inclusion initiatives and obtained a decade of steadly rising math SAT scores across the board for everybody.
But in the absence of any objective progress after so many years of discussion and money being poured in, I think the people who are footing the bill -- parents and taxpayers -- are quite justified in their increasing levels of skepticism. I suggest it has dick to do with culture wars per se, it's because as parents we know damn well whether the school is teaching our kids reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic more or less successfully in 2022 than it did in 1972. And the answer is "less."
It's worth asking whether the tools they're bringing to the job are capable of helping them achieving this goal. I am deeply skeptical, but evidence >> models--are there high quality experiments that demonstrate a lasting positive effect from changing the style of teaching math? Say, something with large n, random assignment, and preregistered comparisons (aka, not "we did this intervention to raise adult IQ and discovered that it raised math test scores in the 6th grade among hispanic girls only.")
>I’m pretty sure they are trying for the goal of “students understand math better”.
I am actually pretty sure this isn't a goal of a huge portion of these people. It is very clear they MAIN goal is reducing the disparities between what they perceive as homogenous ethic groups based on color of skin. Not educating people.
And BY FAR the easiest way to reduce disparities is to cut down the tall poppies. And if you don't think this is the case I would encourage you to actually listen to any group of educators/school district that is all fired up about this and look at their actions.
Which often involves 1) gifted and talent gets eliminated 2) Even general curriculum gets easier with lower expectations.
But I wonder if it need be. A friend who is head of maths at a large school in London got fed up that low proportion of girls was studying maths beyond age 16 (in England, that's the point where if you are on the standard academic track you drop down to three or four subjects) and over a few years saw a pretty sustained rise. It certainly feels to me that that's a genuine problem being addressed - and so yes, it's a pity of impractical jargon based nonsense gets in the way here.
The survey has a question asking whether insufficient 'extra content' is a reason for not becoming a paid subscriber. This confused me because I wasn't really sure there *was* extra content beyond open threads. I see now that there definitely is, but I had to look at the archives to figure this out. Possibly this just means I was inattentive, but I think there just isn't much indication, if you're a free subscriber, that there are any nonfree posts at all.
(I'd guess one typical history goes like: 1. Subscribe at free level, intending to evaluate later whether a paid subscription is valuable or indeed any different than a free one. You are helped in this by the assurance that Scott's doing just fine in his deal with Substack and doesn't need the money. 2. Nothing at all reminds you to reconsider #1. 3. ....)
To prove there are people who would happily subscribe but haven't yet, I've subscribed for a year.
I love the idea of being able to put in my best writing samples to an AI for learning, and then only have to give it a list of key points and phrases before it can turn those into an essay or paper in my style of arbitrary length. I've already done the important part of the paper before submitting it, and if I want to tweak its style I can just give it more writing samples to play with.
How should I refer to Scott Alexander in comments here? Should it be "Scott Alexander", or "Alexander", or "Scott"?
What's the best way to refer to the author of a website when discussing them? My instinct has always been that formality and distance are obstacles to conversation, and that you should refer to people as they'd prefer to be addressed unless you're in a formal context, and that most people think of themselves by their first names rather than their surnames. But I recently heard that this is not standard in the US, and using someone's first name before they've invited you to, or without some kind of reciprocal relationship with them, is presumptuous. Is there a standard on this?
Complicating this, I understand that Scott Alexander isn't his full name.
I'm a little surprised by the question in this informal day and age. We're all on an immediate first-name basis in America anyway. Scott's writing style is very conversational, so for me anyway calling him anything but Scott would seem stilted.
For what it's worth, I read something referring to Scott as "Siskind" and it seemed kind of hostile to me-- something like childishly referring to someone by the part of their name they prefer not to be known as in this context.
1. There is a lot of genuinely low-quality sneering, most of it centering around the idea that our esteemed host and Eliezer Yudkowsky are bad people and everything they do should be discounted as a result (I agree with neither A nor B, of course).
2. They have some genuinely good Marxist or SJW points about rationalists being blind to class and privilege impinging on what they think. I am neither a Marxist nor SJW, but even your enemies are right sometimes. And sometimes it's just a matter of 'there are tradeoffs between the welfare of group A or B, I see your point but I am in group A and you are in group B'.
I've pondered this. Elsewhere when referring to a blog author's post or writing to another poster I've use initials (e.g. SA). Same if we're discussing a famous person cited in a previous post. It seems to me a neutral, clear and efficient notation.
Yea, well I'd say it depends on context to make it work and if several regulars start to do it then it becomes 'common knowledge'. Also, it's similar to how less common acronyms are used (which is essentially what initials are) in a paper. The six word name once, early in the writing and then the acronym following.
Thanks everyone, I’ll probably stick with Scott in future.
I’m still unsure about generalising to other websites. On the one hand, this isn’t a typically formal situation, but I’m not sure it’s unambiguously an informal one, either. I’m essentially pestering Scott at work here, this is his job and I’ve ever met him. Another Scott, the radio presenter Scott Stephens, has said that you can’t know someone unless you can smell them - that is, unless you can have a private one-on-one or small group conversation with them. Neither Scott has ever smelled me.
I recall in about 1986 getting a handwritten note from the senior tutor at my Oxford college addressed to "Dear Smith", where Smith stands for my surname. This usage was, I discovered, almost dying out, but it had been a common English trope for friendly informal correspondence, used by academics, senior civil servants, I dare say Bishops. "Dear Mr Smith" was too formal; "Dear Peter" unthinkably forward.
It's almost always just Scott. Occasionally there's a good contextual reason to (mostly satirically) use "Dr. Alexander". Infrequently one uses the full Scott Alexander to differentiate from that other prolific Jewish rational writer, Scott Aaronson.
Other blogs tend to follow the same conventions...Matt Yglesias is just Matt on Slow Boring, Zvi Mowshowitz is just Zvi on Don't Worry About The Vase, Freddie de Boer is just Freddie on his blog (which for some reason lacks a punchy name, I've always found that odd), Bari Weiss is just Bari on Common Sense, Bryan Caplan is just Bryan on <s>Econlib</s> Bet On It. And so on. Oftentimes you can pick it up from the content too - authors will refer to themselves a certain way, and that tends to reflect the comments. It's less about formality and more about reference classes...there are a million Scotts in real life, and (probably) thousands of Scott Alexanders, but within the blogosphere, a much narrower subset of blogging Scotts.
When commenting on someone's blog, I think it's standard to address them by first name only, and to refer to them in the third person by first name only, unless there are other people being discussed with the same first name.
When cold e-mailing someone, it's more standard to start with their title and last name (e.g., "Dear Dr. Alexander," or "Dear Prof. Easwaran,") and then in future replies, to address them however they signed their previous e-mail to you (i.e., with first and last name, or title and last name, if they signed with first and last name, or to switch to first name only if they signaled that this was appropriate by signing with first name only).
Talking in person, you would start with title and last name, unless they explicitly tell you it's ok to move to a first name basis (which is usually something that the higher status person has to initiate).
This depends a lot on conventions within a field/subcommunity. I hang around two different prominent universities in my field--in one, the high-status people are referred to by first name and if you say "Dr X" or "Professor X," people will tell you "we don't do that here." In the other, the high status people are "Dr X" or "Professor X," and as an outsider, how I address someone is part of establishing (or trying to establish) my own place in the pecking order.
I addressed him by Alexander in some articles I’ve written but I think that’s very weird cause I can’t recall anyone calling him that. It’s always Scott in the comments.
As an American--in my experience, using someone's last name instead of their first name is primarily done in formal writing, e.g. in a newspaper article or longform nonfiction. People in customer service roles might refer to clients/customers as Ms/Mr XYZ to convey politeness, but even that is a bit old-fashioned.
There might be some professions where this isn't the case. Maybe law? Law is weird.
As for Scott--I think it's just convention in the comments section here to call him Scott. Using just a first name seems pretty typical for comments sections specific to particular writers or creators. E.g., to pull the first example that comes to mind, Bernadette Banner's YouTube comments typically refer to her as Bernadette. Now I'm wonderng how speakers of other languages do this, and if it's indicative of some parasocial relationship.
I don't comment here much, but I do participate in places where Scott's work is discussed and I (slightly reluctantly) say 'Scott'. I prefer to use a more detached tone when speaking about people's ideas and use last names for intellectuals more than most people do, but I find when I say "Alexander" it sounds like I'm just confused about who I'm talking about.
> I recently heard that this is not standard in the US, and using someone's first name before they've invited you to, or without some kind of reciprocal relationship with them, is presumptuous.
This is very old-fashioned etiquette. People use first names in almost all interactive contexts these days.
When I'm discussing another person _in not-too-formal writing_ I will sometimes deal with the "first name is too informal/familiar/friendly, surname feels weird" problem by using the full name once and then their _initials_.
The thing I am most concerned about there is mostly not the informality of using their first name, it's the possible perception that you're viewing this person as a friend/ally and therefore shouldn't be trusted to be impartial. In many contexts this doesn't matter, but if e.g. there's some discussion about some probably-hostile thing El Sandifer wrote about Scott Alexander, I _am_ going to be trying to be impartial and I will call them ES and SA in order to reduce the risk that someone thinks/feels "he's writing about X as if X is a personal friend of his, so I should assume he's biased".
(If I were writing about someone who _is_ a personal friend of mine, I would say so and would use their first name throughout in order not to mislead, unless the relevant stylistic norms forbid that as e.g. in academic publishing.)
I wonder if people don't use "Mr." anymore mainly because once women became a major part of the professional workforce it was too much trouble to figure out whether to address them "Mrs." "Miss" or "Ms." (Particularly when the correct title is "Dr.')
Also wonder if pronouns will suffer a similar fate for the same reason.
My otherwise-socially-conservative feminist mother, at least, regaled me with stories about how getting folks to agree to drop "Miss" in favour of "Ms" was a victory for equality, back in her day.
Though I'm told that in the rare instance Gen Z is called upon to say "Ms." (e.g., the Ms. Marvel tv show), they're surprisingly likely to pronounce it "Miss".
And back in the 90s I was involved in a wedding where the invitation list for the bachelorette party addressed the single women as Ms. and the married women as Mrs., which struck me as kind of missing the point.
As an elementary schooler in the early 2000s, I was taught to refer to adult women this way. I didn't learn that "Ms." and "Miss" were separate things, rather than different spellings of the same word/idea, until college.
"For reasons involving the NYT article and doxxing, his *last* name (not mentioned here) is used only by his enemies."
I was not aware of this. Some questions - I'm being sincere. Not assuming you (or anyone else) will answer all of them.
Does the fact that I've used his full name (since reading Still Alive) mean I'm one of Scott's enemies? If not, who are Scott's enemies and what makes a person Scott's enemy? Where has this distinction been formulated? Do Scott's enemies agree with it, and do they identify as his enemies? Does Scott agree with it, and more importantly, does he agree with your suggestion?
What purpose is there to classify people as Scott's allies or enemies, other than the obvious tribe-forming, tribe-strenghtening behavior?
What sense is there in tabooing his full name, as he has publicized it himself, deleting and recreating his entire blog during the process? Isn't letting (assumedly) malicious people appropriate the use of his full name counterproductive?
If you use a name on internet, I am not going to investigate whether it is your real name or a pseudonym. Not even because I respect your privacy (although I do), but simply because I do not care. If someone signs their work "Scott Alexander", then for all practical purposes, that person *is* Scott Alexander. Name is just a reference anyway.
Why do I call him "Scott Alexander" when his full name was already made public? First, because this is how I have referred to him for *years*, so I am already used to it. Second, because this is how he still signs his articles. Third, because many other people call him that (for the first two reasons), so if I say "Scott Alexander", people I communicate with immediately know who I am referring to. Three reasons to use the pseudonym, and zero reasons to use the real name.
(Fourth, because not using someone's name has a kabbalistic significance. This is an inside joke. Read https://unsongbook.com/ to find out more.)
In the past, it was possible to figure out Scott's real name, but Scott asked people not to use it publicly, because doing so could have hurt him. Predictably, some assholes did it anyway, and NYT decided to go nuclear.
Since then, Scott has significantly changed his life, so the old reasons not to use his real name *now* no longer apply. (Also, anyone can find it on Wikipedia now.) So there is no harm if you use Scott's real name today. Now we avoid it mostly out of force of habit.
"Since then, Scott has significantly changed his life, so the old reasons not to use his real name *now* no longer apply. (Also, anyone can find it on Wikipedia now.) So there is no harm if you use Scott's real name today. Now we avoid it mostly out of force of habit."
This seems to be a reply to my comment, but I'm not sure whether it is directed at me particularly. However, I agree with the gist of this comment, especially the quoted paragraph - it also did not add to the view I already had. That is, I wonder whether the fact that I questioned [that Scott's last name should Never Be Used] gets interpreted as me saying there never was an issue with people doxing him (which, of course, I haven't so much as hinted at).
>Does the fact that I've used his full name mean I'm one of Scott's enemies ?
Of course not, that's ridiculous.
The commenter you're replying to's heuristic was "using Scott's last name exclusively", which using the full name isn't. And I would say even that heuristic is pretty flawed, I can see where it's coming from but I don't think it performs any better than random chance.
>If not, who are Scott's enemies and what makes a person Scott's enemy?
The commenter you're replying to is using "enemies" lightly in the sense of internet assholes.
- Who are those internet assholes ? who knows, the internet is anonymous, that's why it's so heckin awesome. I once searched for Scott's name ("Scott Alexander") on tumblr and saw a deluge of posts raging about how he "platforms" (God I fucking hate this word) racists and mysogynists and blah blah blah, no idea if you can still find those if you searched now, that was a couple of years ago.
For a pretty reliable dumpster of Scott's (and rationalism's in general) enemies, see reddit's "Sneer Club" subreddit. Another one is MeFe, or Meta Filter, a link aggregator site sorta like reddit or hackernews (and it's pretty good actually assuming you don't go near any woke link). It has a huge woke bias so every Scott link is probably them raging about he "PLaTFOrM"s nazis. Another one is hackernews itself, though thankfully it's far more contrarian and heterogenous on most issues than either reddit or MeFe, but that's exactly why you will occassionaly see the incessant whining.
- What makes a Scott's enemy ? No idea, Scott is really the rare "mild man" type, I'm lucky to have someone like him in my personal life (though unfortunately not for long), it's extremly hard to not at least listen to what he says and then disagree very respectfully if you can muster the guts to disagree at all. He commands by sheer politeness.
Scott's enemies are varied, they are anything from woke left wing to extreme king-cock-sucking right wing. It's hard to say anything generalized about them. I assume the first woke ones were Feminists, all the way back in 2015 or so, for reasons that you better not read about for your own mental health. Oh good old feminists, always blazing the way in being assholes in all sorts of new and exciting mannners. No idea where the first right wing ones came from, I see plenty of them being sour because Scott steelmanned some of their arguments and then counter-argued them to the ground again, but I'm not sure this is the sour spot.
>Where has this distinction been formulated?
In the brain of anybody who see a dedicated group of people consistently moaning about 1 person for a decade or so.
>Do Scott's enemies agree with it, and do they identify as his enemies?
Nobody wants to be seen as the loser who keeps raging about someone who lives rent free in their head, they will probably say something to the effect of "Scott Alexander is a representative of the Crypto-Fascists tech-industry silicon-valley tech bros who want to roll back abortion rights and the rights of the Blax communities of color", and in their own system of knowledge and ethics, this counts. But to most other people who are attracted to rationalism, it doesn't.
>Does Scott agree with it, and more importantly, does he agree with your suggestion?
No idea, and no idea. _I_ would say Scott *definitely* agrees there are people who hate his guts, however (un)charitably he internally justifies or models their behaviour. He also seems pretty sour about the NYT thing. But whether he thinks calling him by his last name is a marker of belonging to this group is much more open to debate.
>What purpose is there to classify people as Scott's allies or enemies, other than the obvious tribe-forming, tribe-strenghtening behavior?
Classification is life's eternal hobbies, and intelligence's first baby steps. Every AI course begins with a baby-mode "Cat or Not" classifier. Even Bacteria classifies their pond water into "Rich in Sulfur" and "Not Rich in Sulfur". If you're *Any* sort of a goal-having goal-seeking agent, you have to classify things. Friend-(X)Or-Foe is a pretty vital distinction. How can you even prevent yourself from noticing that there are consistent markers for a group of people who doesn't give a flying tick about any of your ideas, and dedicates an unhealthy portion of its existence to hating you ?
> Isn't letting (assumedly) malicious people appropriate the use of his full name counterproductive?
Absolutely (and I will still correct you that the guy or gal you're replying to only said "last name exclusively, not the full name). But also, it's good and wholesome to know what upsets the people you respect and then not do it in front of them. If a bunch of assholes keep calling your glass-eyed red-haired friend a ginger 4 eyed nerd, then - unless you're so intimate with the guy that you can single-handedly redeem the words - you better stay away from using those words in front of him. There is nothing inherently taboo or insulting about "ginger" or "nerd", it's just associated with people who make it clear they hate the guy they're describing with.
That's all assuming the original commenter's reasoning, which I find a bit leapy. Calling Scott's by his last name is a bit weird for sure, I have never seen anyone or himself call him that, but it wouldn't even count for a 0.001 in my calculation of whether someone is a Scott's enemy.
I can understand your POV. A couple of points besides that:
"(and I will still correct you that the guy or gal you're replying to only said "last name exclusively, not the full name)"
They said this:
"For reasons involving the NYT article and doxxing, his *last* name (not mentioned here) is used only by his enemies. So never use that."
I did not gather from this the 'last name exclusively' part, particularly not "not the full name" part, and I apologize if this is a very relevant part of the question. However, I can also ask the same questions on using only his surname, which I have also done, not knowing that some people who are not Scott use this as a marker to classify me as one of his enemies, that is, apparently as a random asshole on the Internet.
"But also, it's good and wholesome to know what upsets the people you respect and then not do it in front of them."
I wholeheartedly agree. I seriously question this point's relevance to using Scott's full name. Has he asked to be referred to primarily with his pseudonym? The situation has markedly changed from the days of SSC, precisely due to the fact that he is no longer (relatively) anonymous.
"Calling Scott's by his last name is a bit weird for sure"
I routinely refer to celebrities by their last name. That is, I talk about Yudkowsky, Hanson, *******, Tao, Pele, Einstein and Trump, not Eliezer, Robin, Scott, Terry, Edison, Albert and Donald. I think this is normal.
It's just a signal, like "Barack Hussein Obama" or "Donald Drumpf" -- sure you could use those even if you supported the person in question, but due to the peculiarities of history people may assume that you don't like them.
Barack Obama's middle name is not Hussein, and Donald Trump's last name is not Drumpf. Scott's last name is what it is, and he personally celebrated it in ACX:s opening post. I do not think this analogy works.
I think we disagree about our understanding of "last name", the one I have in my mind is "Siskiend" (I butchered the spelling I know), the one you have in mind seems to be "Alexander" ?
I mean, I'm okay with both. I have made it clear that the point is mostly unconvincing to me, I'm just playing the role of the original commenter's advocate, that's all.
>I did not gather from this the 'last name exclusively' part,
Yes, I realized this just now, I agree it can be understood both ways, perhaps even favoring your way.
> classify me as one of his enemies, that is, apparently as a random asshole on the Internet.
I doubt you should care about the opinions of someones who uses a single word to deduce something like this about you, eh ?
>*******
Seriously, it's okay. Say it : his name is Scott Alexander Siskind, there is no taboo about it, you don't have to star anything. The commenter that started the thread just shared a (quite frankly) flawed heuristic, but people are not dumb algorithms. If you're on Scott Alexander Siskind's blog writing comments that are not 51%+ insulting Scott Alexander Siskind, you probably don't hate Scott Alexander Siskind, or Scott, or S. Alexander, or SSC, or Siskind, or S.A., or S.A. Siskind, or Unsong's author, or the Jewish Author That Loves Writing And Is Enviously Good At It, etc.. I can't speak for Scott, but those all strike me as pretty reasonable aliases for him.
"I think we disagree about our understanding of "last name""
I'm referring to ACX:s writer's (Scott's) family name, the one NYT threatened to and eventually did publish.
"I doubt you should care about the opinions of someones who uses a single word to deduce something like this about you, eh ?"
Absolutely. Let me emphasize that I do not feel that OP:s comment had anything to do with me personally, but I did use myself as an example, mostly to avoid the possible if unlikely lines along "Even if you don't see how using his last name is offensive - well, let me point out that you don't use his last name, but guess who does? Evil enemies!" (yes, I'm also kidding a bit).
Earlier you said that I'm overthinking this, and that the commenter I replied to used the word 'enemy' lightly. That is exactly the relevant part and what I'm opposed to: the cheap usage of the word word 'enemy'. I agree that my comment represents overthinking, and I wholeheartedly believe that whenever the word 'enemy' is used, one absolutely should overthink the case. This - to be extremely wary of groupthink, halo effects (negative or positive), ingroup-outgroup biases etc - was one of the first things I learned when reading the Sequences, and I think it is a very valuable idea.
That is, I consciously decided against a charitable interpretation of their words due to the (psychological, social, cultural) risks associated with using allies and enemies as a framework for thinking. I do not think this is the place for that sort of language (I do NOT mean that words like 'enemy' should be banned or something equally stupid).
I agree with several things you said, and I agree with the last paragraph.
(Also, while I can understand why using his real last name might still be "outgroup-coded," Scott openly uses it in "Still Alive," this blog's second-most popular post, and in his Lorien Psychology project, so I don't think it really has to be kept secret anymore)
I don't really care much about this spelling variant, but if you're arguing "doxxing" is incorrect, I'll argue back.
A quick search reveals no references to this supposed letter exx other than by Stallman, so if it does exist, it's at least pretty obscure. The mispronounciation of "doxing" as /doʊksɪŋ/ seems much more obvious than the mispronounciation of "doxxing" as /dɑxɪŋ/. Avoiding forming digraphs with other meanings does not seem like a rule English actually tends to follow (e.g. "cooperate", "lighthouse"), but doubling final consonants in cases like this when adding a suffix is. I read that the letters "x" and "v" have often historically been exempted from this rule because people thought it looked bad or something, with this exception becoming less common lately, although writing this now I'm doubting my memory/source for this. Anyway, my main point is that consistency is a better reason than most to prefer one spelling (or other linguistic feature) over another, and that points to preferring "doxxing". (Also apparently it's sometimes spelt "doxx" even without a suffix, but I don't see any particular reason that would be preferred).
It's spelt with a double-X because it's Internet slang, and playing with English spelling "rules" is a common Internet game. Wikipedia (which prefers "doxing", FWIW) claims that the original spelling was "d0xing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
I think RMS is joking there: nobody would write "yech" as "yexx", and the standard way to render the Greek letter chi in English is "ch", as in technology, chirality, archaeology, etc. Besides, language is defined by usage, and "doxxing" is at the very least a widespread usage.
Edit: Also, "Exxon" is not pronounced "Ecchon", and doesn't derive from a Greek word! It was a computer-generated variant of their previous name "Esso", which is derived from "S. O." for "Standard Oil", and is still used in much of the world. The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey switched from "Esso" to "Exxon" after other Standard Oil descendants sued to stop them using the "Esso" brand in their territories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ExxonMobil#Exxon_Corporation_(1973-1999)
Further, it's my understanding that they deliberately chose the 'xx' spelling of Exxon *because* this pretty well guaranteed that no one was using that name or word in any prior sense anywhere.
Norms vary by subculture. In Silicon Valley it's normal to address and refer to people by first name in almost all situations. In some other professional cultures it's normal to use last names by default. This sometimes leads to odd juxtapositions-- e.g. my intuition is that both Scott Alexander and academic James C. Scott should be referred to as "Scott".
I have never heard of it being presumptuous to use someone's first name outside of a business setting. That's always been the standard in my part of the US; if it's a formal meeting like a teacher or a doctor you use title and surname, for everything else (like blog posts) you use first names. Especially online where you only know people by the name they want to be known by.
Of course for Scott specifically you'll want to go with "S-Bro", or maybe "The Mysterious Mr. S."
The discussion that followed this comment, and the links posted, are fascinating. Thanks for posting this - please do not hesitate to share similar concepts in the future!
There is an unsatisfying solution to your annoyance : (dx)^2 is 0 because we said so.
This is the approach taken by dual numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number), numbers of the form a+b*ε, where ε is a special number defined by ε^2 = 0 (a root of zero that is itself not zero, nor any real number of course). Compare to imaginery numbers, where we make an equally non-sensical assumption at the start and then derive a whole new beautiful universe. Dual numbers are also extremly awesome, for one thing they allow you to calculate both a function and its derivative in a single forward pass, and - if the programming language you happened to write the code in is dynamic - without changing anything in the code that calculates the function itself. That is, given a piece of code that calculates f(x), giving the dual argument "a+1*ε" to that function (along with defining the necessary fundamental operations) makes the code auto-magically calculate both f(x) and f'(x), represented in the output dual number as c+d*ε.
Differentials are known to be non-sensical, there is a sort of doublethink that occurs where you simuatenously imagine that dx is a "very small number" for some purposes but also 0 for other purposes. I hear they have a modern equivalent in non-standard analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonstandard_analysis), but it seems to be a fairly heavy weight mathematical machinery.
This (the "because we said so" part) reminds me of being back in Grade 9, and Mr Holme teaching us that any number raised to the zero power equals one. He got upset that we repeatedly asked why; "because it's defined as such" wasn't satisfactory.
He should have showed us a series with 2 or 10 raised to different powers, both positive and negative. (Maybe he did - it was a long time ago, and memory becomes selective.)
The relationship between definitions and facts in mathematics is a subtle one. There are many cases in mathematics where a definition and a theorem can switch roles (but the lemmas connecting them stay the same). All definitions in mathematics are in principle arbitrary, but they should be chosen to make interesting facts convenient to express and prove. It's a question of user interface design, really. Mr Holme was right that "because it's defined as such" was the answer to the question you'd asked, but he should have gone on to answer the follow-up question, "why is it defined that way?" And then he could have talked about the definition of 0^0, where there are good arguments for either 0 or 1, but ultimately you have to pick one.
> Compare to imaginery numbers, where we make an equally non-sensical assumption at the start and then derive a whole new beautiful universe.
This has always bugged me. It's the standard way of teaching the subject, but there's another way that isn't nonsensical at all: start by defining complex numbers as 2D real vectors with a new operation you call "multiplication", defined as (a, b) * (c, d) = (ac - bd, ad + bc). We can embed the real numbers into the complex numbers via the map x -> (x, 0), an it's a theorem that (0, 1) * (0, 1) = (-1, 0). I've explained this at greater length here: https://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/158861.html
That looks entirely artificial. Instead, reformulate real addition and multiplication in terms of the number line: to add a, you move the line until 0 is at a; to multiply by a, you pin 0 in place and stretch the line until 1 becomes a. Then you do exactly the same with the number plane and voilà, you have complex arithmetic.
Artificial, yes, but it's clearly well-defined! But I'm happy to admit that your formulation is equivalent *and* makes it easier to see the design rationale.
0.999 ... does not itself directly denote a number starting with "0.9". It is a shorthand notation for "The limit of the sequence { 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, .. }". By the definition of limits, that limit is 1.
The limit of a sequence does not have to be a member of the sequence. For example the limit of the sequence { 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, .. } is zero, even though zero is not in the sequence.
(The above two paragraphs summarise the contents of countless thousands of posts on the Usenet group sci.math, and doubtless many other math forums over the years, where the problem of whether 0.9999... equals 1 is discussed over and over ad nauseam! :-)
Calculus these days, and for over two centuries past (since Bolzano in 1816), has defined derivatives via limits. So there is no need to worry about that (dx)^2 stuff. It was always known to be contrived and suspect, and that was the incentive to replace it by rigorously defined limits.
The best way to understand the modern definition of a limit is to think of it like a challenge, sort of like "anything you can do I can do better":
A sequence {a_1, a_2, a_3, ...} tends to a limit L if no matter how small a positive value, ε, you choose, I can find some N such that every difference abs(a_N - L), abs(a_{N+1} - L), .. from then on in the sequence is smaller than ε.
Generally, the smaller the value of ε, the larger the "starting" value of N from which all the differences are smaller than ε. But no matter how small you choose ε, I can always find some sufficiently large N with that property. So I will always win! :-)
You could think of the smallest N with that property as a function of ε, and that is how the definition is usually expressed. But it does make the definition look a bit intimidating and "busy".
As Dominic mentioned in his reply (currently) just below mine, this is called the epsilon-delta definition. I don't entirely agree with him that it is "very easy to understand", or to really grasp and apply anyway, because most students find it a bit of a "pons asinorum". But once one does grok it then most of classical analysis is practically an open book! Formally it reads:
A sequence {a_1, a_2, .. } tends to a unique limit L if for every ε (the "epsilon") > 0 there exists an integer N(ε) such that abs(a_n - L) < ε (the left hand side being the "delta") for all n >= N(ε).
In topology, there is an identical definition of a limit point in a space, where the "delta" (a interval on the real number line) above is replaced by a neighborhood which is a spherical region centered on that point.
Out of curiosity: would you find [or have found] it easier to understand epsilon/delta if it were expressed in the following way?:
"A sequence {a_1, a_2, .. } tends to a limit L if there exists a function from any positive real (call it ε) to both an integer (call it n) and a proof that abs(a_n - L) < ε."
Alas, now that I try to write this out in English, this is rather unwieldy. It seems dependent types really must be written down symbolically to be coherent.
[Off-topic mumblings: But anyways my idea is that "there exists" is a nearly-incoherent concept used in classical mathematics. To wit: I have found that when pressed, *actual mathematicians* (... okay, okay, actual redditors in /r/math who have demonstrated otherwise excellent fluency in the concepts) will argue that the kind of object that "there exists" because of the Axiom of Choice is not the same kind of object that "there exists" because it has been constructed, even when the same mathematicians [redditors] insist that they are assuming classical mathematics, not constructivism. But this claim has no basis in fact in classical mathematics; the whole point of the AoC is that you get out of it just as valid an object as any other way of obtaining the object. My interpretation is that these mathematicians are really constructivists at heart, but ones who have managed to have hidden the cognitive dissonance under the convenient rug of "there exists", which is a phrase lacking in intension and multiplicitous in extension.]
As it stands, that definition doesn't define a unique limit, because it isn't enough for just some n-th difference to be less than ε. All the subsequent differences n+1, n+2, .. must also be.
For example, the sequence { c n - floor(c n} } for n = 1, 2, .. and some fixed real c > 0 satisfies your definition. But the limit is unique (trivially zero) only when c is an integer. Otherwise, if c is rational then it cycles periodically between a finite set of "limits", and if c is irrational it's even worse because I think every value between 0 and 1 is a "limit"!
However it does highlight that the word "unique" should be included in the definition before "limit"! But a point of discontinuity in an otherwise continuous function is a slight complication because, depending on the side from which that point is approached by a sequence of function values, there may be a left-limit and a right-limit which are not the same (although each is unique in itself) (I say "may" because that is not true if the point is a so-called essential singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_singularity .)
As for the Axiom of Choice and so on, I've never troubled myself over logical foundations. I'm content to leave that to the smart people! :-) But if a non-contradictory axiom gives rise to interesting and useful results, as Choice undoubtedly does, then I think it should generally be allowed, as long as one is clear on which results rely on it.
There are good explanations for this on Physics StackExchange and on MathOverflow. I can't find the one that really spoke to me (I think it was in terms of epsilon-delta limits, and so very easy to understand at even a high-school level) but here are a few that I found while trying to rediscover that one:
It’s not that dx is somehow small but not negligible while dx² is negligible. It’s that 1+dx is indistinguishable from 1, dx+dx² from dx etc.
So when you, for example, differentiate y = x² you get dy = (x+dx)²−x² = 2xdx+dx² and you throw away dx² because it’s dwarfed by dx. If you were to calculate the second derivative you’d likewise keep the least small thing which would happen to be dx².
You're right to say it's not nothing. Since you say it's a 'presumption' I think you're talking about a high-school/non-math-majors' version of calculus. That version takes shortcuts without fully laying the theoretical foundation for these shortcuts, which does exist and is extremely cool. When you understand that foundation it won't be just a 'presumption'. An intro real-analysis course, or even a more theory-oriented undergrad calculus 1 course, will put these conceptual difficulties front-and-center and deal with them in a rigorous way. Bishop Berkeley's "ghosts of departed quantities" may be mentioned, as will the effort in the 1800s to put calculus on a foundation that more rigorously deals with the ideas that made you uneasy. You will start to understand why "let ε<0" is an Extremely Funny Math Joke. There are a few book recommendations you might get; I like Apostol's Calculus (Volume I) for this, because it's what my undergrad course used. I think Spivak's Calculus is also well regarded (not the same as his *Calculus on Manifolds*, that's for later on).
At some point in discussions like this someone will inevitably bring up 'nonstandard analysis', which is a way of bringing formal mathematical meaning to 'dx' as a sort-of-numbery-thing, the way it's used in that intuitive loosey-goosey way in calc 1, but it's possible to actually do calculus without ever admitting that "dx" has a meaning.
My Grade 12 math teacher, the great Mr Desbrisay, took a few of us aside for the last few weeks of school and introduced us to differential calculus. He used an algebraic approach - let's take y = 3x^2 as an example.
y + dy = 3(x + dx)2
y + dy = 3(x^2 + 2xdx + dx^2)
y + dy = 3x^2 + 6xdx + 3dx^2
3x^2 + dy = 3x^2 + 6xdx + 3dx^2
dy = 6xdx (dx^2 was considered to be so insignificant that it could be dropped.)
dy/dx = 6x
We went though a bunch of these, and added in constants (and discovered that the constant drops out - the answer is the same with or without a constant).
And then Mr D asked "Does anyone see the easy way?"
Someone (likely not me) saw that you could put the exponent in front as a multiplier, and reduce the exponent by one. What an epiphany!
***************
The next year, in 1st-year college, our physics teacher had us read Silvanus P. Thompson's Calculus Made Easy. It remains a delightful little book.
As I recall, Professor Thompson used a sum of 1,000 Pounds (i.e. British currency) as x, and dx was something tiny like a farthing (a quarter of a penny). I think there were 240 pence in a pound (in pre-decimal currency), so a farthing was one part in 4 x 240 x 1,000 (or just over 1 part in 10^6), and could, for all practical purposes, be ignored.
******************
Anyway, that was my introduction to calculus, so perhaps it's not surprising I got hung up on the idea of ignoring very small parts that were still there.
A few years later I studied electronics, and took calculus once again. At that point it began to make sense. Unfortunately, I never used it in the workplace, so it's mostly forgotten.
I will look for Apostol - thank you for the recommendation!
Here to second Apostol. I even revisited it a few years ago, just for old times’ sake. But it wasn’t quite the same without Roger Pinkham teaching it. Damn, I miss that man.
As far as I know, there are no STIs that increase libido. This is a little odd, since infectious diseases frequently cause physiological changes that enhance their transmission - influenza causes you to cough and sneeze, smallpox creates blisters, and so on. Any guesses as to why this might be the case? Perhaps it's too difficult to cross the blood-brain barrier, or hormonal changes are too unreliable.
There certainly are cases in the animal world, e.g. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/141031-zombies-parasites-animals-science-halloween. it's pretty well known that rabies causes dogs to lose their fear and become more aggressive, hence spreading the disease via bites. Also, I'm under the impression over the long term pathogens tend to become less infectious, i.e., the payoff to spreading too quickly become negative at the margin.
Do we know of any diseases that affect behavior in some way more complicated than "you feel very ill and lethargic so you lie there and let mosquitoes bite you?"
Are we sure there aren't any? Scientists get to be way more thorough when studying rats than with humans. If, say, hepatitis B came with a 20% increase to libido, is that something we're equipped to notice?
It doesn't seem insurmountably hard – alcohol and testosterone both affect libido, and plenty of other naturally occurring substances reduce inhibitions, which would probably increase promiscuity on the margin.
We also know of infections in other mammals, such as toxoplasmosis in rats, that affect behaviour in complex ways. I'm not aware of many bacteria or viruses that are known to do this, but there are parasitic STIs in humans (e.g. trichomoniasis) so I think your question stands.
Do we know that this doesn't happen? It seems hard to control for given that people who get STIs were likely more promiscuous anyway, but my uninformed guess would be that the effect could well exist (60% credence maybe?) and we just haven't looked sufficiently hard.
My guess would be that by their nature, STI already select for people that have more sex, with more different people, less safely ; as in getting a STI is a good enough marker for the STI that you're going to transmit it.
Changing a complex behavior via brain chemistry is far more difficult than triggering those other examples. And there likely isn't a an easy progressive route of evolution for a virus to get there.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for hypersexuality, there don't appear to be any straightforward physiological causes of hypersexuality, so this is likely the right answer. And even if it were possible, it's likely the case that conditions in which individual humans have access to a very large number of unique sex partners are probably rare enough that such a complex trait didn't have the opportunity to evolve.
Controversial possibility: male homosexuality is caused by an as-yet-unidentified STI.
This explains why homosexuality was unknown for almost all of history but has suddenly come out of nowhere in recent decades. It also explains why so many boys who get sexually abused by men wind up as homosexuals.
This is a very strong claim, presented here with weak or zero evidence and is likely wrong. Off the top of my hat:
- The claim reads that all male homosexuality is caused by a STI. That would mean that every man that identifies as primarily homosexual would have had same-sex sexual contact before identifying as gay (Edit: see response to prenatal exposure below). As far as I know, this is not true. Open to evidence.
- The claim does not account for the variability in individual sexuality between homo- and heterosexuality. What percentage "gay" should a person be (as for their preferred sexual orientation) in order for their orientation to have been caused by this assumed STI?
- Related, what causes the rest of the variability in individual sexuality? If a heterosexual male has a romantic crush on his friend (but that's all), what causes this? Are they infected, but have a milder disease?
- Related: what explains the rest of variability in sexual orientation in heterosexual males?
- Related: What explains the variability in sexual orientation in heterosexual females?
- Are most or all (birth-giving) women carriers of this pathogen? If women are carriers of the pathogen (which seems to me like the strongest option, assuming there isn't a worldwide conspiracy of "homosexual recruitment tactics" going on, widely covered up), why does it only cause symptoms in males?
- Why does the infection not cause any local symptoms but only a very complex, irreversible behavioral symptom? What (evolutionary) mechanisms are there to enhance this kind of pathogen's virulence?
- Why does female homosexuality exist? Why does it produce very similar behavior to a pathogen which only causes symptoms in males? Why do the mechanisms producing female homosexuality not apply to male homosexuality?
To sum it up: what reason is there to believe in an infection we have little to no evidence of causing psychosocial/psychosexual phenomena which can be adequately explained by other factors, while (I take it) claiming that those factors do in fact explain female homosexuality but do not or cannot apply to males. Are your assumptions ("homosexuality was unknown for most of history", "many sexually abused boys later identify as gay") correct, and do they reflect the available evidence accordingly?
I wouldn't look into this any further. Seems way out of proportion.
The primary advocate for this theory (which does seem dubious to me) is Greg Cochran. He may even have originated it, not sure.
I think the idea is that an infection at some particular stage of prenatal development could result in changes that then lead to being gay.
So far as I know, he has no specific evidence for this idea, just some general evolutionary arguments, which seem unconvincing given the amount of homosexual behavior we see in the animal kingdom.
Having said all that, some of your objections are easily addressed.
To point 1), no, it doesn't imply that - the virus could be something that also spreads by other means, indeed in this case I think the notion is that mom gets infected during some particular window of time.
As for point 2)-5), of course some effect could manifest incompletely or in polymorphic ways. Nor are we trying to explain all human variation in sexual preference here.
6), something that affected development of sex drive seems like it might plausibly only cause obvious effects in males, there is a whole separate XY ontogeny going on there.
7) does seem like a strong objection. We have actually done a fair job of looking for viruses out there, and while there are low impact ones that are *usually* asymptomatic, almost all of them cause some symptoms in some people. Here there's no candidate, no etiology of anything, no statistics that say 'pregnant women who had fevers in months 3-4 of gestation are 30% more likely to report having a gay son'... nada.
And yeah then there's the whole 'doesn't explain lesbians' aspect.
I also think that one of the things they invoke, namely, 'unknown for all of history', is mostly explainable by taboos. If you read US primary sources for say 1650-1850 (which is a lot of material!), how much evidence of homosexuality would you find? Maybe a sermon or two against sodomy, a couple of court cases without specific details?
That we don't find evidence in the much sparser material from some ancient civilizations doesn't seem like it needs much explanation. Greek mentions of it (besides being explained by the fact that we have an unreasonable amount of material from them, relatively speaking) come down to the fact that they weren't against it.
Greg's argument for this idea is mainly based on the fitness cost. Intuitively, it seems like male homosexuality should be selected against pretty strongly, since it decreases your expected number of offspring, potentially by quite a lot if there were opportunities for infidelity/extramarital sex/rape that could have left offspring if you preferred women, but not if you preferred men.
A common idea for how male homosexuality could be selected for involves the "gay uncle" idea--maybe gay men pour lots of resources into their cousins and nephews and siblings. This could work, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that it actually happens all that much--gay uncles don't in general seem to be better (or worse) at taking care of nephews/siblings/cousins than straight uncles. Further, for this to be a good strategy for the genes in the gay uncle, he needs to be about twice as effective at helping his siblings's kids as a gay uncle as he would have been helping his own kids as a straight uncle--that could happen, but it sure seems hard to get it to work out.
Another common argument is that sexual interest or preference for men in an ancestral environment might not have mattered much--if you're paired off, your wife is rate-limited in terms of the number of babies she can have, so what you do in your off hours is not a big deal. (And indeed, I think masturbation is pretty common everywhere, and it similarly is guaranteed to leave zero offspring.) On the other hand, it's hard to believe that there wouldn't be some fitness advantage in almost any environment to preferring a fling with a girl to a fling with a boy--there's some chance you'll leave your rival raising your baby, or leave the woman whose village your tribe sacked with a baby to raise.
Greg's argument is that when there's something with a persistent fitness cost that isn't being selected away, that's often a good marker for some kind of infectious cause. Thousands of generations of humans have been selected for behaviors that led to more children (which presumably mostly focuses on sex with people who can produce children), but some virus that circulates in childhood and clobbers some important function regarding sexual interest isn't under selection to max out its hosts' fertility.
OTOH, I don't think anyone has ever found any strong evidence for an infectious cause. It seems like if this exists, we should see its tracks in the many cases where Western explorers contacted isolated human settlements/tribes, and they went from approximately zero homosexuality to a normal (by our standards) rate of homosexuality. You'd kind-of expect that to have happened in the Americas as the Eurasian disease package showed up and everyone was exposed to it. I don't know enough to be sure, but my impression is that we don't generally see this pattern.
The other plausible explanation I've seen for homosexuality is that human sexuality is complicated, so there are dozens of things that can get a little misaligned and lead to non-reproductive sexual behavior--something you see a lot in many places in current culture.
>I also think that one of the things they invoke, namely, 'unknown for all of history', is mostly explainable by taboos. If you read US primary sources for say 1650-1850 (which is a lot of material!), how much evidence of homosexuality would you find?
There would be some suspiciously strongly confirmed bachelors, or dudes "who enjoyed the company of men" and such. It is there if you look for it, though numbers are hard to estimate and likely not what activists would like to claim.
Thanks - I can't access my earlier comment, but here goes.
1) accepted, although I did write my comment in response to the OP, specifically.
If the claim says that homosexuality is caused by a sexually transmitted infection, I'm going to treat it as such. Prenatal exposure would qualify, but that would undermine the whole "recruitment" point, which was presented as a (very dubious) fact needing explanation. I'm assuming the original comment did not take this into account, then.
Prenatal infection would also raise the question on why it would need to be a STI in particular, as other infections such as listeria or toxoplasmosis can also cause changes in prenatal development. It is also worth inquiring why it would need to be an infection in particular, if prenatal development is our key idea: pretty much anything and everything influences it.
2) Partly accepted - the claim does in fact claim to explain all male homosexuality, which is precisely what it says ("male homosexuality is caused by..." - not "most male homosexuality" or "male homosexuality is partly caused by..." or some other weaker claim). The claim is very strong, anti-orthodox and therefore in my eyes very dubious.
I think accepting that most variance in sexual orientation is caused by factors other than the supposed infection raises an a priori question on why it is required, then, that an infection causes a yet-to-be-specified-threshold-crossing amount of homosexual orientation. That is, why the other factors are not enough to cause e.g. homosexuality in case of males, but are so in females.
While I find the idea interesting, "homosexuality was unknown for almost all of history but has suddenly come out of nowhere in recent decades" seems wrong. If that's a thing that's been happening, part of the explanation is probably in the fact that more people talk about it. I remember what I think was a study about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" on this but for trans people in schools. Also, Scott has written a review of Crazy Like Us, a book that talks about people developing "western mental issues" after being exposed to their existence. I also remember Scott writing about how multiple identity disorder (I think) was at one time very popular and looking for it increased its presence.
This ties in to the idea of induced false memories. One of my issues with "homosexuality is caused by child abuse" is that it can be vety hard to prove in some cases, and if that becomes the main way to see things, it will feed on itself.
Since we're on the topic of fun theories: gay men are gay from birth, and emit pheromones that attracts other gay men. That would reverse the causality between being gay and child abuse.
Usual disclaimer that this is of course totally independant from the humanity of people, cis people, trans people, western people, non-western people, doctors, people with multiple identities, homosexuals, heterosexuals, people that were abused as children.
What's the oldest mention of male homosexuality in writing? It's clearly been widespread for a very long time, but I don't know how long it's been documented.
I can't find strong confirmation with a quick googling, but I suspect that neurosyphilis could case some combination of reduced inhibitions and increased libido in some cases.
Well, you got it from your partner to begin with, so In order to help spread they would have to decrease attraction to your current partner, who already has it, while increasing attraction to other partners, which is going to be a lot more complicated than increasing libido.
It only has to jiggle some knobs and levers in a way that increases its spread--it's not like the virus' DNA or RNA knows anything about blisters or sneezing or diarrhea helping it to spread--it's just jiggling knobs and levers and hill-climbing its way to higher fitness.
If there's not a workable way to get to "make the human hornier so he will spread me more" that it can get to by small random changes to the virus' DNA or RNA + hill-climbing, it won't manage it.
Are you saying current diseases need to suppress our urge to cough/sneeze when we're alone and increase your urge to cough/sneeze when near healthy people in order to be effective?
Presumably at least 50% of people who newly acquire a sexually transmitted disease do so from a partner who is either new, or not their only current partner. In either case, there's no need to decrease attraction to one's current existing partners to spread the disease.
Note that that isn't _necessary_ mathematically, though indeed presumably in the real world. (I am not sure whether Kenny was suggesting mathematical necessity or not, but I know I initially read his comment that way.)
Imagine that there are two kinds of people, whom we'll call Hubs and Spokes. They are all in permanent sexual partnerships where each Spoke has one partner, who is a Hub, but each Hub has many partners, who are all Spokes. (Perhaps for some reason the Hubs are much more desirable than the Spokes and much more interested in sex.) So the formal-relationship graph is made of lots of many-pointed stars, each with a Hub at the centre and lots of Spokes attached.
"Extramarital" interactions are almost all Hub-Hub. (Again, perhaps the Hubs are more desirable and more interested in sex.)
Now if an STD spreads, most of its spread will be from Hubs to the Spokes who are their partners. So most new infections are from someone who is _not new_ and _is the newly infected person's current partner_.
Again, I don't think this toy model much resembles the actual world, and I agree with Kenny's presumption as far as the actual world goes. But if anyone else shared my reaction of initially nodding wisely and saying "yes, that seems like the kind of thing that would be necessarily true", they should note that in fact it isn't; Kenny's presumption embodies some nontrivial beliefs about the world's actual patterns of sexual relationships and sexual interactions.
> they would have to decrease attraction to your current partner, who already has it, while increasing attraction to other partners
This doesn't follow. It is possible, plausible, and I suspect correct that increased sex drive leads to more partners. I don't see why it would have to be the case that you'd need to lower attraction to your current partner.
Path of least resistance for higher libido is to have more sex with your current partner. Especially if their libido is also increased by the STI. There's an upper limit to how much sex a person can physically have, and finding new partners takes time that could be spent having sex with the old one.
I'd say a one-sided analysis will probably not show much, infidelity is more likely a mismatch of libidos; one partner wants sex much more often than the other. A disease that increases both people's libidos won't change the balance, so won't result in more infidelity, so has no evolutionary advantage.
Alternately, infidelity is a loss of attraction to one's current partner.
If it is found to be constitutional and statutorily authorized, I am eligible for Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Should I apply? More specifically, I am uneasy with applying for student loan forgiveness because I believe it is a short-sighted, harmful, and unfair policy. This leaves me with three questions which I could use help with:
(1) Do you agree with my assessment of the student loan forgiveness program?
(a) It is a short-term fix to the problem of high university tuition that does nothing to curb the two major problems with the current system: young students with non-profitable career paths are allowed to take difficult to repay loans with little cost-benefit analysis and student debt is not-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Instead of fixing these problems, loan forgiveness is a band-aid that creates moral hazard as students will take on more debt with the expectation that it will be forgiven;
(b) It is an abuse of executive power. The Biden administration argues that the HEREOS Act authorizes the Secretary of Education to provide relief to student loan recipients during a national emergency and that COVID is a national emergency justifying relief. However, I do not believe that COVID is currently a national emergency, and, even if it were, I don’t believe that forgiving debts is an effective manner of combatting COVID. Just like Trump’s dubious border emergency, this is an attempt by the executive branch to sidestep Congress by using emergency powers. To me, this is a disturbing authoritarian development in American politics which I do not want to be a beneficiary of;
(c) It is expensive. Are we sure that subsidizing higher education is the best use for such a large amount of money;
(d) It is unfair. The only people who are eligible for student loan forgiveness are people who went to college. Since people who go to college tend to be richer than those who did not, student debt forgiveness is a regressive form of relief. It is also unfair to people who repaid their loans quickly and thus are not eligible for relief. And, it seems unfair that I, making 200k+ a year, will receive “relief,” paid for by less fortunate people, from an investment I made in my career.
(2) Assuming that my arguments against the policy are sound, if I want to be a moral person, does believing that the program is harmful mean that I should not apply for it or is it some type of minor generalized harm that I am blameless for imposing? For example, biking or driving to a friend’s house takes about the same amount of time. Driving imposes a small negative externality on the world through pollution. But I still drive whenever I want to because the harm seems so abstract and remote.
(3) If I do accept the money, what should I do with it? I could take the money for myself. I could also donate it. Are there any other options?
However, I'd probably take the money, if I were eligible for it.
I've never voluntarily paid the government extra money in taxes, and I've never written charity checks to the government just because I want to support it.
Refusing to take government money is roughly equivalent to these things.
If I ever came to regret my decision, I could just write the government a check.
Well, speaking as one of those who'll be forking out the taxes to cover this "free" gift from government, there's no freakign way to know whether you should take the money or not. Maybe you're a gifted but impoverished individual, and your education gave wings to your talent that will let you produce amazing things in the future. Future textbooks on immunology will cite your name with reverence, say, or you will write the greatest novel of the 21st century, or even just be an awesome parent to a brood of happy children. And then I'd be just fine with contributing some shekels of my income to subsidize your education.
Or on the other hand maybe you're a God-damned navel-gazing social parasite, who studied frivolity and shallow faddish intellectual wankery, and you will be a burden on your family and the public purse until you pass out in a ditch from to many drugs and snuff it. In which case, paying for your education by taking my grandchildrens' inheritance is obscene.
There's just no way to know! And this is why a shotgun approach like this is moronic. It lovingly spreads high-quality expensive fertilizer on squares miles of land, without us knowing, or being able to know, how much of the land is fertile soil and how much asphalt or salt pan. Stupid to an amazing degree for a species that prides itself on being one up on the chimps.
All I can suggest to you is that you ask yourself whether it's a gift you feel you can and will return value on. If you take the money, will you consider it a weird form of investment, as if the rest of us bought stock in your career? Will you do your best to return, via the education it bought, something of value? Be successful, inventive, artistic, inspiring, or at least sober, hard-working, reliable, sanguine? If so, then I say go for it and godspeed. Let it then just be a reminder that you, like all the rest of us, stand on the shoulders of those who came before.
In lieu of a "like", wanted to say I really liked this comment. (And your comments just generally.) It's been a strange 3-ish years now of random checks, sometimes to the needy, sometimes not...sometimes spent wisely, sometimes not. Peoples' revealed preferences once they had stimulus in hand were interesting to compare. Some of my lefty friends who rail against empty kleptocratic materialism...used their checks to buy new gaming PCs. Some used it to pay down debts, some used it to further educations, some blew it on ephemeral hedonism. (I opened accounts with Vanguard and TreasuryDirect after getting investment advice here. Score one for instrumental rationality?)
It's different with student debt jubilee...not just OOM-wise, although that's a big part. But because it's easy to argue no wrong was even incurred, and the targeting is...not the most progressive. I've felt bad also for students who started educations just after the cutoff. Whether it clears the court or not, that sure seems pretty unfair - knowing the class right before you maybe got $thousands, and you get nothing. But now the possibility of future debt clearing will forever hang in the air...and, if it happens again, current beneficiaries like me will be paying for someone else's new debt. So then what was the point, after all? Robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Pontius...
Don't care about 1b at all, all the Executives at least back to Jackson regularly abuse their authority. And congress mostly likes it since it gives them political cover.
1a, 1c, and 1d are true.
As for 2, that is your call. I don't take all the tax breaks I can. I also volunteer more than my fair share at group orgs and do other things that strictly speaking are "unfair" to me at a cost to myself. But sometimes the reverse happens and I rely on the efforts of others. it is all down to your personal compass, there is no "objective" fact of the matter.
3 One thing to do would be to donate the money to some group/structure that is trying to break the current university system and its broken incentives/culture. I am sure there are some out there.
Take the money and donate 100% of it to a skilled blue collar scholarship program like MikeRoweWorks or, better yet, find deserving individuals going into or currently in skilled labor training and pay their tuition.
I will concede that you would probably do "more good" donating 100% of the funds to Against Malaria, however that wouldn't help any of the blue collar American workers who will be harmed in the course of paying your student loans, nor would abstaining from loan forgiveness.
But this money could be life-changing help for several of the individuals of the group who will be most negatively impacted should the loan forgiveness go through, so there is a poetry in transferring the wealth into *their* future.
And there's another angle: Our civilization is running short on welders, electricians, mechanics, nurses, etc, all people who arguably have far more utility to civilization than the average college graduate with a pajama job. We need more of them.
D) unfair. -> you’d be surprised to learn how unfair the US is. Only the middle classes worry about it. If this loan forgiveness were to banks they would gobble it up.
Yeah, this is parallel to the old discussion on Megan McArdle's blog, where her middle-class moral framework clashed with her MBA-taught notion of proper corporate behavior. Her basic take was that using bankruptcy strategically was an immoral and bad thing for an individual to do, which seems totally right to me--this is a program intended to help get people out of a deep hole, not to let you shift the costs of your fun spending onto others. But then she would turn around and see businesses using bankruptcy strategically in a totally different light--this is just how the game is played, they'd be screwing over their shareholders if they didn't reach for every advantage. I don't know how she'd resolve the question now, but I remember it as an interesting example of having two different worlds of moral intuition that collided in some places.
I live in a country, where higher education is (mostly) free of charge, and where you can apply for additional government funds to finance your living costs while you're studying if your parents don't have enough income. I won't deny that this impacts my views on the matter.
Having said this,
(1)
a) The basic underlying idea for the just mentioned policy is that higher education creates benefits to society at large - even if those benefits won't get enumarated through high-paid jobs. Hence, it's worth spending government money, because you create positive externatilities in the future. Given this assumption the description of the problem you're offering seems off.
c) see a)
d) You want to do what is feasable to make sure that lack of parents' wealth will not deter people to go to college. I believe the need to take huge loans can easily provide additional deterence for children from poorer families.
This is mostly to provide some additional ideas. I'm not arguing for Biden's programme specifically, because I don't know enough about the context and the details. Also, I think some of your arguments are valid. I'm not sure they are important enough to counter potential benefits, but that would be a different question.
> You want to do what is feasable to make sure that lack of parents' wealth will not deter people to go to college.
I don't see how a one-time debt forgiveness helps this at all. It's an unexpected windfall to people with student debt, but they didn't know this would happen when they took the loan and anyone taking a new loan today won't get any debt forgiveness.
> a) The basic underlying idea for the just mentioned policy is that higher education creates benefits to society at large
This doesn't address the parent comment's complaint. Even if sending people to university created a utopia with zero crime and great voters and no pollution, then that's great, but the complaint is that we're saddling students with debt. We're not doing anything to reduce the amount of debt future students will have.
That aside, for reasons that are too long to get into, I'm not sure more tertiary education benefits society. The US has one of the highest rates of completing university in the world. You can see a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment. The US's ~44% isn't the highest in the world, but it beats most of Europe and is significantly higher than Germany's 27%. If this extra education is making the US a better place to live than most of Europe, I'm not seeing it.
> I don't see how a one-time debt forgiveness helps this at all.
Sure. I didn't write this to say, Biden's plan is the best policy remedy for this. I wrote this, because I found the outline of the topic as presented in d) to be somewhat limited. Not a very concise argument from my part, rather some additional thoughts to keep in mind.
As a side note, I think there is a 'precedent' and 'we want to change the dept-burden issue' related to this, as John Schilling writes.
> This doesn't address the parent comment's complaint.
it doesn't. I wrote this, because the parent comment's description of the "two major problems with the current system" seemed very limited. If you re-read the two major problems as in the original post, you might know what I mean.
I didn't look up the wiki source yet. This doesn't mean 44% finished at least with a bachelor degree, does it? That would be quite high indeed.
> I didn't look up the wiki source yet. This doesn't mean 44% finished at least with a bachelor degree, does it?
The link explains it better than I can. It's the stats for people aged 25-64 who have completed "tertiary education". The majority of those are bachelor degrees, but it includes other programs as well (medical degrees, nursing schools, community colleges, etc.).
Yeah, that's true. But it's true in the sense that no stats between the US and German education systems could ever be an apples to apples comparison. The education systems are different, plus the job market and the population are different.
One of the differences is that vocational programs are more prestigious and common in Germany.
And that seems relevant to the topic at hand. Would American students (and society) be better off if more went into trades instead of getting bachelor degrees? They'd have less debt, and often higher paying careers.
You're assuming it's a one-time windfall, when in fact it's a precedent-setting hint that every decade or so when the Democrats come back into power they'll offer up another Jubilee to win a bunch of extra votes.
Maybe in 10 years the hot issue will be medical debt. Or jobs displaced by AI.
I wouldn't take on student debt now just on the hopes that it'll be forgiven later. It's too unpredictable, and I don't think it'll be the deciding factor for many people choosing whether to go to college today.
It's very relevant that Biden's policies are specifically structured badly in an unfair way that causes terrible incentives. Countries with (semi-)free public education typically have better management, cost controls and testing requirements (none of which the Biden plan has).
I think (1) is correct, (2) you should take the money anyway, and (3) you should in general act morally regarding money (e.g. using some of it for charity/supporting production you value/avoiding spending too much of it on things with negative externalities). You arguably should apply these limits more strictly to money obtained through this program, but I'd say "apply more" should be somewhere between 0 and 100% (say, donate 20-30% of it or something)
(2) I never thought about the programme the way you describe it under (1). But if you believe this, you shouldn't take the money.
Also, if a lot of people would avoid the 'small' externalities caused by driving instead of biking, the overall result would be big enough. So yes, I suggest you bike. Or you drive, if this is what you want to do, but then don't excuse yourself with 'the effect is so small'.
1b) possibly, that's up to the courts now; Imperial Presidency keeps going strong
1c) uncontestably yes, with future changes to loan terms costing far more probably
1d) mostly agree, there are some decent steelmen* for its fairness though: that the student debt bubble is mostly an aftershock of the Great Recession, and the macroeconomic policies we chose to pursue. There really was a whole cohort of graduates from that era that left subsidized college life for a terribly shitty job market, and no, most of them were not underwater basket weavers. To the extent that we partially financed the recovery on crippling their income trajectories, some recompense is due. Obviously the means testing could have been chosen more progressively, and it'd be even better if it somehow didn't use tax dollars from the non-graduates. But the politics are a difficult lift no matter what, and making the perfect the enemy of the good usually means nothing gets done at all.
I find this more persuasive than I usually would, because we're seeing a bit of a repeat in economic circumstances now...bumper crops of people electing to start/go back to college, rather than join the workforce. For better or worse, college ends up as an economic refuge during rough markets. It'd be better to not have that always pan out as a terrible bet at the end of what are, after all, several prime earning years being spent on academia.
2) depends on your financial situation. I've been quite torn about it too, but in my case, it literally determines the sign of my entire net worth...other than parents dying and (maybe) getting a share of inheritance, this is one of the few Big Shots I get in my life to make some lasting socioeconomic progress. So I hate it, but I'll take the money if it's available. (As a three-time dropout currently bagging groceries for a living, I feel like I've got a bit more justifiable claim than some others, at least.)
3) Use it in some way that eventually redounds and pays for itself via generating taxable income, as recompense for the second financial helping you've been given. The vast majority of my theoretical share is going right into savings and investments. It's nowhere near enough to sustainably improve living standards in SF, but it's a nice addition to building a real nest egg...I don't want to be a burden on others when I stop working, and that includes the state.
Donation-wise I think the closest 1:1 would be just giving it back to the Treasury on one's tax return. Although at that point, easier to just opt out in the first place...tax implications are up in the air still. You could also opt to pay it forward - use that money to give someone else a shot at "an investment in their career" who really needs it. (Not necessarily college!) That'd be a satisfying resolution karma-wise.
My own take is that in general, I'd prefer libertarian policies, but I have to live in the society I actually have, with a lot of non-libertarian policies I don't think are great. But since I have to live with the non-libertarian policies that harm me, I don't feel overly obliged to refrain from taking advantage of the ones that help me.
Also, this is a {hamfisted, politically targeted} attempt to respond to the higher-education bubble--something that's a genuinely destructive thing going on in the world, driven by a mix of public policy and social/economic realities. I think this kind of "fix the problem caused by our last three new clever policy hacks with a new clever policy hack" approach is usually a bad one, but they are actually trying to fix a real broken thing with real victims. Since you're plausibly one of those victims, it's not crazy to think it's okay to take it.
Yes, you should take the money. You shouldn't even consider not taking the money. If it bothers you that much that it comes from a bad program, find some better use for it. Your protest isn't nearly as valuable as the cash.
(2) The default should be to take the money anyway. The problems you listed only seem relevant if you can determine that an individual abstaining from taking advantage of the program will cause less money to be spent on the program, rather than causing the same amount to somehow be distributed among more people / the program extending longer, etc. [if that were the case, then it would indeed be like driving vs. biking, where your behavior has a minor negative effect.]
Even if an individual abstaining from the program *would* cause less to be collected from others, from a strict utilitarian perspective, you should probably take it anyway, as long as you would donate some percentage that you calculate to an effective charity [probably not a very high percentage. E.g. let's say you get 10k from the program and donate 1k to GiveWell, it seems pretty obvious that the net utility would increase. GiveWell donations tend to be 10 times as effective as direct cash transfers to the neediest people in sub-Saharan Africa. So 1k to GiveWell = 10k directly to sub-Saharan Africans, which is surely of much greater utility than 10k to Americans.]
Of course, this would be the case with any theft from Americans - not just theft mediated by the government.
If theft from the rich with enough given to the very poor to increase net utility, while pocketing the rest bothers you for non-utilitarian reasons, the question is just whether the government stealing from others to give to you similarly bothers you.
If it does, *and if you can determine that the money would not otherwise be taken,* then abstain.
Otherwise, indulge.
(3) What you do with *this* money as opposed to any other money, is mostly only relevant to the utilitarian argument that justifies taking the money based on donating [some of] it.
However, even independent of that, there is a question of what to do with [spare] money.
That depends on how altruistic you want to be.
If you want to be very altruistic, donate much of it. If you want to be less altruistic, donate less of it.
If you legitimately earned money, and wish to selfishly hoard it, that is perfectly fine too. You are hurting nobody, and almost certainly helped the world greatly through whatever you did to earn the money.
In this case, where the money was not earned, the same basic calculus applies, except that getting the money did not generate utility.
Regardless of how much of any money one wishes to donate, it would make sense to donate it as effectively as possible [effective altruism.]
Viable candidates for most effective include GiveWell and Strongminds.
The only treatment of the question “is it ethical to accept money from government programs I believe are immoral” I can think of is by Ayn Rand, who as you may imagine faced that problem a lot more than any non libertarian would. She concludes that you can, so long as you still continue to oppose all immoral government monetary transfers. So no “well actually now that I have my money maybe student loan forgiveness is actually a good idea…”
On the emergencies point, the US currently has 42 ongoing official national emergencies, the oldest (Iran existing) having been going on since 1979. There have only been 14 months of non-emergency since FDR took office and declared the US' longest ever emergency, namely that the fact World War I happened meant he needed to close the banks for a few days.
A perma-emergency justifying massive and arbitrary executive power checked by partisan judicial oversight is now just how the US functions. This is probably because your constitution was written by farmers in the 18th Century who didn't anticipate a massive post-industrial economy necessitating [libertarians - discuss!] a proportionately huge administrative state. Caring about it in this case is basically an isolated demand for rigour.
It's pretty clear that our constitution does not anticipate anything like the nature of our current federal government, and so there's a huge amount of backfilling interpretations to allow us to be what we are. I go back and forth about whether this is more like:
a. A televangelist who started as a biblical literalist but now is stretching his biblical readings and theological reasoning to justify his three mansions, five mistresses, and fleet of expensive cars paid for from donations from hungry widows.
b. A military officer at a remote arctic outpost with a set of orders based on the idea that he's in a tropical rainforest, where following his orders directly would just end up with his command being wiped out, and so he's coming up with very strained interpretations of his orders that will allow him to not do the stuff he's been told to do that would be crazy in the current environment.
I think I'd lean more towards it being (a); America could probably survive with a literal reading of its constitution, given there are very few restrictions on the powers of the states in it and they could all become little countries themselves (the US federal government has different powers than the EU in its constitution, but generally fewer). The difficulty would be the vague boundaries of "interstate commerce" and its interconnectedness with other aspects of life.
There's no good solution to any of this, as you'd need to substantially rewrite the constitution to clearly define the regulatory competencies of the states and the federal government and when they apply. That kind of rewrite would require a constitutional convention though, which would either get deadlocked between the two sides in US politics or produce some awful partisan mess if one side seized control of the process.
In my opinion the moral question comes down to, if you take advantage of the program, does that mean someone else won't be able to do something. I think the program is gross politics, but you're not going to kill it by refusing to take money. You're only hurting yourself. Or, with finite systems, you're avoiding hurting someone else by taking their spot. Help yourself, help someone else, help no one. That's the choice.
(3)'s other option is "buy ad space denouncing the debt forgiveness program".
Glasses greatly improve vision with minimal maintenance. Hearing aids moderately improve hearing with a bit more maintenance. What other senses can be enhanced externally, and what are the problems with doing it?
How complicated would it be to build a device that improves a person's sense of nuance?
Not sure this qualifies, but things like Salt or MSG can improve the taste of foods. This isn't really improving our ability to taste but doest allow us to take more advantage of our ability. There is some so-so research on using things like texture, color, sound to improve/change the taste experience of foods.
The other two increase the abilities of perception to a level comparable to the typical person. Salt changes the perception one has and makes one's perceptions less like the typical person's (in the absense of salt).
It does seem weird that we haven't developed artificial smell sensors. (noses). This is most likely the result have having the wrong model for how smell works. See "Emperor of Scent". (Which I've recommended before.)
We have. They're called gas chromatographs. They just don't present their output as smells, because vision has much higher information bandwidth, and because we like things written down for later, and because we don't want our workplaces full of weird transient smells.
I know nothing of gas chromatographs... they look complicated. Let me again recommend "Emperor of Scent" as a good science read. The idea the author resurrects is that smell measures the molecular vibration spectrum, and not molecular shape. He finds a lot of good evidence for the former. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction
The usual model of how smell works, to the extent I understand it, seems to explain this just fine. Chemical sensors exist. Is that not an artificial sense of smell? I'd assume they correspond less closely with a human sense than, e.g. cameras or microphones, just because smell depends on the molecular shape which doesn't come in a simple spectrum unlike light and sound, and human noses detect a kind of arbitrary selection of things that it would take an awful lot of research and fine-tuning to exactly replicate. There are machines that can be used to identify specific small molecules, but from the point of view of replicating exactly the human sense of smell, they'd be excessively precise, making distinctions a human nose couldn't.
Yeah, "Emperor of Scent" posits that smell comes from the molecular vibration frequency of the molecules, and not their shape. He has some good evidence.
(I'm not really sure what exactly you mean by "nuance" though)
Given that people can be born as, and also train themselves into, "supertasters" - there's probably some mechanically exploitable ways to get +smell, +taste. But I can't really think of a good use for such things? Besides general transhumanist interest, anyway. Maybe something will shake out of research into mitigating long covid anosmia.
Now, proprioception on the other hand...lots of practical applications for a Spidey-sense!
I don't believe it's possible for glasses to improve vision by very much unless you have muscular difficulties with focusing the lenses of your eyes, or some sort of irregularity in the lens. For people with well-tuned lenses and musculature, there's very little that glasses can do to improve vision. (With microscopes or binoculars you can magnify things, but that comes at the expense of the width of field of view.)
I'm not exactly sure how hearing aids work - do they just amplify sound?
Consider night vision goggles or an IR camera--those are ways to actually get better vision in the sense of being able to see in conditions too dark for your original eyes, or to see stuff your eyes never could.
They amplify sound differently in different frequency ranges, to match the curve of the user's hearing loss. (Older analog hearing aids used to just amplify across the board, which didn't work nearly as well.)
They can also do other sorts of processing, like boosting speech frequencies relative to others, filtering background noise, focusing on sound coming from the front rather than the back, etc.
My wife's have different programs: for normal use which focuses on speech, and for music listening which doesn't, and there are also different settings for parties, quiet restaurants, etc. based on what it's going to filter out directionally.
I think once you have a good way of specifying nuance, either it’ll be doable to generate a huge corpus of context-statement-nuance triples and do machine learning to them, or you’ll be able to compute the nuances directly. Then another hard part would be detecting context (a lot of it could come from a long-term memory of voice-to-text conversation logs, or from people’s online presences).
I'm specifically wondering about non-biological tools. Something that can be put on and taken off again. Can you increase sense of humor with, like, funhouse mirror glasses?
That I've seen. There's at least an adaptation curve. My wife was motivated to get past it, but there were definitely early growing pains from recurring ear infections (which eventually ceased, thankfully) to "did the refrigerator always sound like that?"
I suspect it's not helped by the fact that most people get them at a time in life that isn't the best for dealing with new fiddly gadgets (and now often new apps that probably don't have the money, coolness, or perceived market need to attract the top UI designers), that double as a sign of advancing age.
What do people think about the $29 billion valuation of OpenAI? Too high? Too low?
One argument I heard (on the most recent All-In podcast) for it being too high is related to copyright law. Basically it might be difficult for them to commercialize any of their models that have been trained on propriety stuff, like DALL-E allegedly being trained on digital artwork and images OpenAI doesn't legally own.
I don't know if this is true but I've seen a lot of artists online getting angry about it.
Are there any lawyers here who can comment on this possible copyright issue? Is this some new uncharted legal territory that will have to be debated in the courts?
One of those weird cases where it's too low and too high.
On one hand, it's likely that whoever purchases it (out of the half a dozen companies who actually could and might) will eventually get more than $29 billion worth of value from it.
On the other hand, that purchaser could also quite easily build their own OpenAI-equivalent for single-digit billions. It's mostly just a huge acqui-hire, and you could easily hire all the key people from OpenAI (plus a bunch from elsewhere), pay them 10x their already-huge salaries, fill in the gaps with a bunch of smart youngsters, and give them everything they could possibly need... and you could do it for (say) five billion.
But they won't -- for various organisational reasons it's easier for a senior executive to get the company to give them $29 billion for an acquisition than it is to get the company to give them $5 billion to build a new AI team from scratch or to expand one of their existing AI-related teams to something as good as OpenAI.
Too high. It's not apparent to me what, if any, fundamentals AI has at this point. It certainly isn't monetized significantly yet.
AI is going through a bubble right now. OpenAI might still be a good bet as the first wave of the bubble. But it's still going to pop at some point. At the same time, this bubble will be enormously generative and produce some real industries that stick around post-winter. The real test of staying power will be how much it sticks around and grows post-winter. For example, e-commerce went through an insane bubble in the 1990s but post-winter it had such solid fundamentals it kept growing.
Imo the issue isn't access to training data. AI is unambiguously allowed to access publicly available information (as are you). The issue is if what AI produces is transformative and independent enough to overcome the fact it is a direct economic competitor with the artists while being based on their works. Which I personally think is an unsettled area of law. In other words, if you instead created an AI that didn't use training data but simply magically predicted what the average of ten artist's output would be it would still have the same issue. But not a lawyer.
The 29B valuation is probably fair in the sense that OpenAI has gone 0 to 1 in the Peter Thiel definition. Just try to use “whisper” and you will realize this. on the point of lawsuits, its mostly a non-issue, the “artist community” or any other community capable of being a threat are not either motivated, coordinating or powerful enough to bring them down.
As far as I know OpenAI in no way provides a 10x performance, speed, or convenience benefit over the status quo in a monetizable niche market. Also, I would not personally bet on copyright owners not suing in any circumstance.
What would the basis of a lawsuit be? "Your algorithm read my copyrighted text that was made freely available on the internet" seems like it would apply as well to (for example) search engines.
Copyright law is explicitly there to protect economic interests. Search engines do not produce a copy of the work which deprives the original creator of revenue. AI generated responses do deprive the creators of revenue through creating a direct substitute for the original product. Which is what the law is designed around.
The fact it's somewhat novel matters less than the degree to which it's based on the original and a direct substitute for it that deprives the original creator of income. AI is fully based on the original, is explicitly creating a substitute, and deprives the original creator of income. The question of whether mixing together a bunch of other works is sufficient to make it fully novel is an open legal question afaict. But again, not a lawyer.
Great source for point 3. But, keep in mind that this result is because experiments != descriptive statistics. That's because the threats to external validity for (an internally valid) experiment versus survey are quite different:
1) experimental threats to validity involve causal heterogeneity (easily avoided if you aren't just surveying college students), versus...
2) claiming representative statistics of a population when your sample is drawn from a systematically divergent subsample (e.g. asking if someone has access to the internet when you are sampling people via MTurk)
I think that's almost exactly what Scott Alexander was claiming in his article. You shouldn't say "99.5% of people are Mechanical Turk workers" (I figure they have a small lizardman constant because they're apparently a high-quality survey population), but you can say "60% of people give stronger anti-cancelling-student-debt answers if you show them an argument against it". Scott Alexander goes slightly further and says that correlations will normally have little causal heterogeneity, in your words - college-student Mechanical Turk workers would be less swayed by the anti-cancelling-debt argument, and so would general college students.
On the other hand, the paper says there is low treatment heterogeneity for the questions they ask. Arguing that there is high treatment heterogeneity on a particular question would also argue against this article being relevant. I think you'd need some kind of population of "people who [a given person] thinks are as smart as them", each nominating a survey they'd expect to have bias in it, and being shown to be wrong.
Yeah you are on point, and saw what I didn't say as well.
I deliberately did not talk about correlations because I have argued with this community, and Scott, extensively about specific examples of how correlation does not really mean causation.
I agree with Scott that "thinking really hard about the mechanism, formulating hypotheses about how you expect something to generalize to particular out-of-sample populations, sometimes trying to test those hypotheses" is good.
As an addendum to that, my view:
Drawing correlations from cross-sectional data, is extremely fraught when you then have the magical step of "If you’re right about the mechanism" to derive a causal claim. The correct (falsificationist / popperian regime) way to identify a causal claim is to falsify plausible alternative explanations. Under a Bayesian regime, it's to determine that your causal story is the most plausible among all plausible competing explanations. Either approach is damn hard in real life (outside of an experiment), and usually skipped over in lieu of claimants saying "trust me" or "here's another just-so-story". Mechanisms, particularly in the social world, are roughly theorized and often wrong across time, subpopulation, and space. And that need to be correct about the mechanism really matters!
But I think this data falsifies that. “There’s no obvious problems” is fine for generalising from cross-sectional data, as long as the problems are no more obvious than the ones here (e.g. “Mechanical Turk workers should resist priming effects” isn’t a strong enough argument). If you have a specific reason for concern, that’s one thing. But for questions like the ones here https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/pub/The%20Generalizability%20of%20Survey%20Experiments%20SupplementaryMaterials.pdf (one of the two question sets for this paper), do you agree that a vague sense that it’s hard to know whether something generalises isn’t enough, and it’s reasonable to expect this type of result to generalise?
Was anyone else into PUA (pick up artistry) at any time in their lives? I dabbled with in the mid-late 2000s- I read all of the books, I joined a (snort) 'Lair' in a major city, and probably went out with other members 12-15 times or so. We'd actively chat up women in bars, which was a pretty radical concept for me at that time- just do straight-up cold approach. It never lead to anywhere (read: sex) for me, but I will say that for me as an introverted person, I really didn't find cold approach that difficult once I got warmed up. Whether I was rejected or not really didn't impact my emotions, it was easy to be unaffected by strangers I'd likely never see again.
I enjoyed the community aspect of it too, chatting with other men both in person and online about our attempts with women. I had a date (not from pickup) not go well at one point, I wrote about it on the forums and other guys chimed in with good, relevant advice. In general I felt like it was a positive experience and community. However PUA's become enormously controversial/kind of an underground thing now, both for obvious culture war reasons and legitimately evil behavior (rape, murder) by some prominent PUAs.
(Anyways, I was reminded of this because Mark Manson was on Tim Ferriss' podcast again. I was in Boston at the time and Mark was considered the most successful PUA in our community, he was a Big Deal. I never knew him personally, but it's a bit surreal to have had some contact with someone who is now quite famous. He's become extraordinarily successful. Anyways, good for him)
When I was 30 (about 15 years ago) I have read some PUA web forums, and a book or two.
As a sidenote, the PUA community has changed dramatically since then, at least this is how it seems from outside. With popularity comes money, and money changes incentives. At the beginning, it was a group of guys trying to figure out how to get laid, giving each other advice, making hypotheses, testing them, and posting "field reports". Then it became obvious that you can make a lot of money coaching people, and potentially even more by selling books and videos (because such business scales better).
But how can you sell the advice that other people provide for free? You need to differentiate yourself from the crowd -- and that is where many of the bad things come from. You can provide a different perspective. You can be more edgy, as a costly signal. (That is actually worse for your clients, but standing out of the crowd is better for your sales.) You can invent various crazy theories, with zero empirical testing, that people looking for "insight porn" will be happy to pay for. You can even spin the popular misleading advice (that the first PUAs were trying to overcome) as some kind of "meta-PUA", and sell it to people who are not ready to reject the popular advice. I am not reading this stuff anymore, but these days I would expect to find things that make the readers feel good for various reasons, rather than things that are actually verified to help them.
In my experience, as a undiagnosed aspie guy approaching 30 and still mostly clueless about women (and frankly, about humans in general), the greatest value of the PUA materials was challenging the standard bullshit narrative: "just be nice, and if you keep doing it long enough, you will eventually be rewarded... and if this does not seem to work, you were simply not nice enough, or not waiting long enough, just wait a bit more, you are almost there". Also, part of the narrative is that everyone who contradicts the narrative (or notices evidence against it) is bad, and you don't want to be bad, you want to be nice instead, otherwise you will not get the reward. (A simplistic secular version of the religious belief, if you think about it.) And yes, this is completely stupid in hindsight, and yet it can be difficult to break the spell, if you are an aspie and prone to interpret other people's bullshit literally.
I needed to be told that "being nice" and "getting what you want" are roughly *orthogonal* things. Yeah, you can still be nice for the sake of niceness. But if you have specific goals you want to achieve, you better also take specific action optimized for achieving those goals. Specifically, if your goal is getting laid, you might want to become *attractive*. (Again, obvious in hindsight.) Now you just need to figure out what exactly "attractive" means, which is not a trivial task (if you are heterosexual, you need to figure out what is attractive for the *opposite* sex; that might include things that seem either good, or neutral, or even actively harmful to you), and then actually do something about it, which might possibly be the easier part, dunno. Also, instead of waiting to find your "fated true love", go out, meet many people, and try things; you will learn by experience. (If you one day actually meet your fated true love, you better already be quite good at the game. Otherwise, you might be left crying while she shares her bed with someone more attractive.)
And with this general attitude, I went out there, started meeting girls, and my life changed a lot. I'd say I mostly took the good lessons. Yes, I know that some people took the bad lessons instead. I wish there was a better source for people who cannot figure this out on their own from scratch. (Well, there probably are such sources. But also lots of nonsense. How is a beginner today supposed to distinguish the good from the bad? If you can recognize the good advice, you probably don't need it already.)
I never became a player. Just needed to get from clueless to average; and for me, the early PUA literature served that purpose well. (Still a nice guy, by the way, no matter how much Twitter tries to make those words an insult.)
In my mid-twenties, I did a “bootcamp” with a coach who was very nice and wholesome, essentially building self-confidence and improv skills (which helped me). Nothing shady or manipulative. I stayed in touch with him for a couple years after that, and he ended up becoming a certified coach for personal development, while in a happy monogamous relationship with a PhD student in gender studies.
I think his sort of vibe could do wonder for the pre-incel crowd before they get radicalized.
In my early twenties and freshly broken up from my first serious relationship, I remember reading all of this stuff (or at least what existed ~20 years ago, and as far as I can figure out the state of the art hasn't really moved on since then). I was definitely never involved in the "scene" as such, but I was familiar with all the lingo.
While I think there were some good insights in there (e.g. that women value status the same way that men value looks, and vice versa) I think it was overall a net negative for me. The main issue is the way that it encourages men to consider "maximise the number of women who want to have sex with you" to be a goal. This is really only a useful goal if you're either (a) so unattractive that practically zero women want to have sex with you in the first place, or (b) a weirdly highly sexed individual who really gets a lot of life satisfaction from banging random floozies every weekend.
Since I wasn't in either of those categories, instead of focusing on maximising the number of women who want to have sex with me, I should have been focusing on how to meet _a_ woman that _I_ was actually interested in. But no, instead I spent a few years walking around with my head on backwards, optimising for things that I wasn't really interested in, and getting upset when I couldn't have things that I didn't actually want anyway.
If your goal is to find one special woman to have a special connection with, how else are you going to achieve it if not by banging a lot of potentially special women?
Need the desired "special connection" run through her vagina, so that one needs to test drive a bunch of them to be sure you get th best? Possibly there is some other organ involved, sometimes, for some people?
I hate to break it to you, but the vagina part is unavoidable, so you might as well get it over with quickly.
On a more serious note, the two boolean variables of sexual and intellectual compatibility give rise to four disjoint sets. If you’d like one or more women in your life compatible with you in both regards, you do need to test them in both regards and starting with one of the two works much better than with the other.
Well, I'm deeply impressed that you rank them as equally important. Work in the San Fernando Valley, by chance?
I daresay for most men, if there's a deep spiritual and emotional compatability -- which doesn't require confirming acceptable values for the SAE viscosity of vaginal lubrication -- one can usually assume, or in the worst case easily construct, sexual compatibility. I mean...unless you have some pretty specific kinks to which you are really committed.
In reality, lust in the basis of love. How well people rate the emotional/spiritual compatibility of a person is extremely dependant on physical attraction. Personally, I've never felt a romantic emotional connection to any woman I find physically unattractive. I don't feel one for all or even most physically attractive women, but it's certainly a necessary condition.
Some 10 000 km from there, give or take. Do vaginas and brains work differently there?
Snark aside, you forget that she also gets a say in whether she likes you sexually. The statement that sexual compatibility can be constructed in any case can be trivially falsified—can most men construct it with another man?
Barring very unusual cases, mutual sexual compatibility is a must, so whatever strategy you employ in building your relationship(s) has to account for that. I simply suggest that among all the compatibility tests you need to run this one should be chronologically first.
Uh, does not match my life experience. People are not abstract entities with some features like sexual compatibility or intellectual compatibility and finding a partner is a matter of picking up Lego bricks from a box and testing if they attach together. Unlike Lego bricks, people change for etter or worse with their experiences.
If a person has sex with dozen/dozens/several dozens of people until late 30s, they are going to have developed an attitude and values and ways to conceptualize their experiences and are going to have quite different time finding a "compatible partner" than if they were to marry as a virgin in their early 20s after approx year of courtship, and spent a decade building their mutual compatibility out of shared experiences.
If you’re saying compatibility is not predetermined and can be built you have a point, but surely you won’t go so far as to state anyone can be compatible with anyone. Thus we go back to the issue of finding the partner with the highest level of pre-existing compatibility which can be further improved by mutual effort, and neither virginity nor marriage are remotely helpful here.
Or are you in fact agreeing with me by implying that “quite different time” stands for “much easier time”?
I think it's the same phenomenon as with eugenics: there's nothing wrong with the thing per se, but such a high proportion of the practitioners, especially the high-profile ones, have done it in such flagrantly unethical ways that it has an only-partially-undeserved bad rap, and trying to do it ethically is a deeply non-central example.
There's then a second-order effect where the people who /are/ trying to do it ethically are much more likely to recognise that the criticisms of the others are valid than those who don't, and are more likely to try to avoid being associated with the term and describe what they're doing a different way, rather than providing good role models of doing it well, and only the witches are left.
Nowadays, if I see someone openly describe themselves as a pick-up artist, my expectation is that if you dig down into their views you'll find out that they're also a misogynist, and if I see someone describe openly describe themselves as pro-eugenics I expect that if you dig down into their views you'll find that they're also a racist.
As someone who does belief in some limited forms of eugenics I occasionally make half-hearted attempts to reclaim the word, but only cautiously and with limited expectation of success. And I wouldn't support trying to reclaim the phrase "pick-up artist", particularly because I think that while approaching women to see if they're interested in casual sex clearly isn't inherently misogynistic, the phrase "pick-up artist" arguably has connotations of an attitude to it (viewing the women as "marks" rather than as potential partners) that is.
In this case, I'm using it to mean "actively hostile to and contemptuous of black people, and will find bad-faith excuses to dismiss evidence of discrimination against them and to oppose any measure intended to reduce it".
Obviously, this isn't true of everyone who describes themselves as supporting eugenics, but it's depressingly common.
Back when this stuff was more mainstream and new, I heard from some women who were bothered by the idea that there was a kind of "cheat code" where a guy says the right things and then women sleep with them, but otherwise would not. The offense was a mixture of "women aren't so shallow as for this to work and I can't believe you think it would" and a contradictory "that's unfair to abuse women's psychology and trick them into doing things they wouldn't otherwise." This led to some interesting but minimally fleshed out discussions of whether PUA tips actually worked, whether they were ethical if they did, and whether they were novel at all (i.e. men had lied about or overstated their status for thousands of years to get women interested). On some level it clearly does work, but that may be a completely obvious and uninteresting version of "you dress nicer and actually talk to women" instead of the version where you "neg" a woman until she can't stand to not be with you or whatever.
All that to say, if we're only talking about your list of helpful tips for men to be more attractive to women, I don't think it would be controversial or taboo. That there's a whole side that also teaches that you can abuse the psychology of women and trick them into having sex with you is the taboo side.
The #1 taboo thing is openly stating that women want sex, too. And much of the trickery is tiptoeing the fine line where you make it apparent you’re interested in them sexually without ever saying it out loud.
If women want to have sex with men but will reject any man who is direct about having such a desire, they aren’t entitled to denounce anything as “trickery”. Similarly, I know enough of the behavior of men to understand why women prefer ghosting to polite rejection; nevertheless, as long as ghosting is the most likely outcome, the men are totally justified in not spending a lot of effort to get women on a date. Etc.
I have some tricks up my sleeve, mostly in the form of canned responses to common questions, and a knowledge of the underlying principles. Yes, the PUA tips do work. However, I haven’t adopted any that would involve lying. My approach is that anything that doesn’t involve deception and/or coercion is fair game if it gets me what I want, and if what I offer isn’t to her liking, she’s absolutely free to decline at any point.
Relationship management is very different from dating. PUAs are good at dating but very bad at relationships so their advice is not to be trusted. Unfortunately good materials on relationship management, especially if nonmonogamous, are hard to come by.
There was a book review regarding fusion which increased my confidence that nuclear fusion may actually happen in the next 10-15 years.
However, I wonder how that author would consider this counterevidence claiming that Tritium, which is needed for the lowest energy fusion reaction, is extremely expensive, and that the main producers (CANDU reactors in Canada) are going offline this decade. Yes, I do know there are some reactions that generate neutrons and you can attempt to breed it, but this article claims it's insufficient.
To make D-T fusion commercially viable, we're going to have to make tritium breeding work. This is not a solved problem, but it doesn't seem that difficult either. There are several proposed methods that should work, and ITER and other experiments are going to test which one works best in practice. Long-term, the main source or tritium for fusion reactors will be within the reactors themselves.
This article's main concern is that all the tritium will be used up at the experiment stage, before we get tritium breeding working. This is a reasonable concern, if we only look at institutions currently in the tritium market.
My biggest criticism of this article is that it doesn't seem to seriously consider how the market will change. The projection of tritium supply (Figure 1) assumes that ITER is the only consumer and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is the only producer. The article points out the ITER will use up almost all of the stockpile, leaving little for anyone who comes after.
I don't think that ITER will be the only consumer or that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories will be the only producer of tritium by 2050. Currently, there is very little demand for tritium (100g per year), so the stockpiles of tritium have been increasing. The market is going to change by orders of magnitude, so we should expect new suppliers to get interested.
What new suppliers? This article mentions some of them, but seems dismissive.
(1) Military stockpiles and production reactors exist. This might be never be commercially available in the US. This is a political decision: the US values its nuclear weapons much more than it values fusion. It might be different in other countries. In particular, "South Korea has four CANDU reactors and a plant for extracting tritium but does not sell it commercially." South Korea does not have a nuclear weapons program, so I'm not sure what they built them for unless it's going to be available for fusion. They might sell it commercially in the future, or they might be reserving it for K-DEMO, a fusion reactor in South Korea planned for 2037.
(2) Commercial nuclear plants could be retrofitted to produce tritium. The easiest way is to add some lithium-6 within the neutron shielding. This is unlikely to be particularly efficient if the plant wasn't designed for it, and there might be regulations preventing it. But there are hundreds of nuclear power plants in dozens of countries, so it seems plausible that this will happen somewhere. If you can produce a $30,000 per gram substance, and you know that there will be buyers, that seems like a decent incentive to produce it.
(3) The smaller new startups need less tritium than ITER, and will need it sooner, before the current stockpile decays. Some of these startups might even become producers of tritium. SPARC is not going to be tritium self-sufficient, but ARC might (these are the first and second generation of Commonwealth Fusion System's reactors).
(4) I'm skeptical that anything other than D-T will be used in first generation fusion reactors, because other reactions require higher temperature and higher density or confinement time. Other people working on fusion disagree, and are trying to use other fuels.
I agree that tritium availability is a potential problem, but I don't think that it's an unsolvable problem. The most likely future (in my mind) is that the startups will get fusion and become tritium self-sufficient before the current stockpiles run out. Even if that doesn't happen, potential new suppliers exist and will have incentive to produce it. There are regulatory / political barriers, but I think that they will be solvable in at least some countries.
Tritium breeding will be absolutely necessary for deuterium-tritium fusion to be economically viable; the trickle that comes from fission reactors is clearly insufficient. And, in theory, breakeven tritium breeding is doable if you use a lithium first wall and a bit of neutron multiplication. Your source accurately describes some of the practical difficulties in turning this theory into practice, but that mostly just adds to the very long list of practical difficulties in turning the mainstream fusion systems into practical energy sources. Going from "in theory, my plasma is running at greater than 100% of thermodynamic breakeven!" to being able to actually run a light bulb, is probably a bigger stretch than the tritium breeding.
Much better if you can do D-D, and better still with one of the aneutronic reactions, of course.
Thanks for this response, I wonder if we will get a Q > 5 fusion reaction in the next decade or two but fusion indeed never becomes commercially viable. This seems like a probable outcome.
I note that Tritium is one of the resources that exists in relatively large quantities in space (on the moon,, specifically, but possibly also elsewhere?), if off-Earth mining ever becomes a thing
I had a good experience with Anne-Marie Hoyle in Austin. I went to her specifically because I wanted someone that was familiar with IFS. Went from depression to the best emotional health of my life and promptly met the girl of my dreams, which might not be related but the timing is very suspicious. Your results may vary, of course.
Here am I picking a fight in the very first sentence:
" If it’s a simple task, like taking inventory of office supplies, we can write a software program that codes explicit rules telling the computer what to do"
So the computer is going to physically go to the store room and count all the boxes of paper clips? Open the cupboards and check how many ink cartridges remain? Really? Wow, that would make my life so much easier, but I see just one teeny little problem here:
Computers can't walk. And the kind of robots which can physically replace humans aren't around yet, or at least not cheap enough and common enough for every office to have one.
Which means a real live flesh and blood human (such as, ooh, me?) will have to do stocktaking which is physically counting and recording every. damn. box. of. paperclips. Then when the human has done all the work, the results can be entered into the computer.
And then you can come along, write a short program, and go "There you are, problem solved, so easy! Computers can do it all!"
Yeah, right. The point here is, since I can't believe your very first sentence because from my physical experience working in all kinds of places doing stocktakes, I know it's not that simple, hence the rest of it has been chopped off at the knees by this flaw.
> Computers can't walk. And the kind of robots which can physically replace humans aren't around yet, or at least not cheap enough and common enough for every office to have one.
Something that I think is quite important is that economically and from a business point of view, the robot that can do anything a human do is already here: it's a human. His cost will depend on lots of things, including minimum wage, the market. Since we already have humans, other robots tend to be better at one task but way less versatile.
I think that the type of "walking around manipulating physical reality" jobs are the ones being left out of the whole 'sky is falling AI is here' debate.
I don't think manual labour/blue collar/pink collar jobs will be safe from AI and automation, but I think that ironically the middle-management guy in accounts could be replaced by AI sooner than the contract cleaner or janitor in the same office building: jobs that we now do on some device, rather than with pen and paper as in the past. If we're already using a software package to run accounts, the next step is to replace the human and let an AI do the entire task.
At the lower levels, there will still be a reliance on the guys in the depot and the delivery trucks and stacking the shelves to do the raw data entry of "we counted 12,000 boxes of widgets taken in to the warehouse" before the AI can manipulate all the numbers and decide to close down the plant in Tewkesbury making widgets because it's surplus to requirements.
Yeah, I agree with you on that. If your job is mainly "manipulating data through a computer", AI will disrupt your job more than if it's "walking around manipulating physical reality" as you say.
Thank you for taking it in good spirits. I do think this is how the debate around AI is going, that the unexamined presumption is all about automation of what can be done in and by a computer.
I'm not saying manual work won't also be automated away (I think Amazon would love driverless vehicles and stock-picking robots to replace those whiny humans who object to pissing in bottles and no air conditioning in a heatwave and expecting to be able to eat and drink at mealtimes) but that is probably further down the line from the white collar office jobs that will be taken over by AI - see the fuming and seething over AI art, for example. A lot of this seems to be people who do online art commissions as part of how they make a living. I haven't yet seen commercial artists complaining, but they are the ones - rather than the hobbyists - who are most at threat here.
So will AI art do away with all human creativity - or will it be a tool like the camera, where photography became an art-form of its own, and art pivoted from being representational to being conceptual and abstract? I'd bet on the second, but the real use of AI art will be to do stock illustrations for articles like this one here (pulled totally at random):
I could imagine a system where boxes are tagged with NFCs and get automatically registered when they're brought in or out of the stockroom.
I'm not saying that's economical now (though I imagine bigger warehouses are getting there).
In any case I'm not sure that this chops the argument off at the knees – there's plenty of data out there that is readily quantified and would be civilisation changing if it could be fully understood. It might still be humans typing the numbers in in some cases, but I don't think Ari's argument requires them not to.
That was my first thought as well. Theft would likely be a huge problem in a system only monitored by an AI counting what *should* be present. There's also breakage, spoilage, and other forms of unintentional loss.
Can you give some examples? As I note below, Trump did this with foreign policy, but a what others are there? In particular, I’m interested in examples where the rhetoric is explicitly imposing costs on the weak to one’s own benefit because they are weak.
A good example of a supposed slave morality that isn’t actually one, is Christianity. When Nietzsche was writing his philosophy, the believers in this “slave morality”dominated the world, the believers in supposedly tougher religions or cultures were subject to it, many had been so for centuries in fact. Many tougher religions had disappeared.
Wait - your claim is that it can’t be a slave morality *because* it’s believers dominated the world? You know that was still the case when Nietzsche was writing, right? And Christianity was Nietzsche’s main example of a slave morality? I you think Nietzsche was wrong about slave morality, or Christianity?
I say “ When Nietzsche was writing his philosophy, the believers in this “slave morality”dominated the world” and you are asking me if I knew that “ was still the case when Nietzsche was writing, right?”.
Er, yes? That’s why I wrote exactly that
I don’t think we are going to get anywhere with this, so last comment.
It sounds like you're just defining "master morality" to be whatever morality is held by the dominant powers. Under that definition, it's trivially true that nobody in power believes in slave morality, but that's not really related to the Nietzschean concepts that the original question asked about.
It'd all be slave morality - master morality would just be doing what strengthens you, whereas in Nietzschean terms both parties' platforms boil down to whining about fairness.
I think a lot of things the left argues for come from a place of care for others, which as I understand it is what Nietzsche means bf slave morality. But I think most of what the right argues for is either neutral or also slave morality, rather than master morality. As I understand it, master morality means taking from the weak, like the heroes of the Ancient Greeks. Arguably, that describes Trump’s “screw-over-our-allies” foreign policy, but I don’t think anyone really applies it to domestic policy because explicitly making an enemy of someone means they almost certainly won’t vote for you.
The Republican policy of tax cuts for the rich (excuse me, “job creators”) might qualify as master morality, but as you suggest, it's not a great policy for winning elections so its not necessarily what Republicans run on.
Morality doesn’t describe what people do, it describes what people consider to be good. Tax cuts for your donors are universally agreed to be politically useful but evil, the same way that lying that you weren’t aware of a staffer’s illegal activity is useful but evil. But when Republicans try to justify those tax breaks, they don’t say “The rich are just better at influencing politics than you; if you want to change it, donate more”.
(Disclaimer: I haven't read Beyond Good and Evil in full, I'm going based on what I have picked up from excerpts and secondhand sources. Take this with a grain of salt.)
>As I understand it, master morality means taking from the weak, like the heroes of the Ancient Greeks.
From what I understand, this is wrong; Nietzsche explicitly states that those with master-morality are willing to give to the weak -- but that they do it as a show of their own power rather than as an act of pity or sympathy.
Nietzsche also says that those displaying master-morality despise flattery and lies above all else, and are proudly unconcerned with the opinions of others, both of which would seem to exclude Trump. I don't think there's any contemporary politician of any prominence who fits Nietzsche's description of a master.
I haven’t read the sources either, only a summary. (Let me give my summary: I think that master and slave morality describe different visions of what is good, rather than different ways of living. Possibly my summary was slanted, but it described Nietzsche as contrasting the heroes of the Greeks and some Romans, who were celebrated for their power, with the later Christians who celebrated meekness and turning the other cheek. The Greeks had a big tradition of generosity to visitors, you’ll often get whole sections of the Iliad and Odyssey describing someone’s gifts to a visitor, and the thank-you gifts in return. As you say, these are to demonstrate the giver’s power and wealth, not primarily for the benefit of the recipient.)
But modern governments don’t appeal to the same reasoning when they are charitable. Usually, they argue that the recipient needs it. Occasionally, they talk about how the country will look to others if they don’t give, but that’s usually in the context of geopolitics and maintaining influence. Maybe you can argue that having an army at all is driven by master morality.
If I never again see this damned Nietzschean quote - look, here. Have some Depeche Mode instead of me getting all fraught. The only "Master and Servant" discourse I can tolerate:
Not knowing anything in particular about the UK, what struck me about this post is that I couldn't figure out what in the hell it was talking about. The first sentence asks why did the MHRA expect etc., which presupposes that the MHRA actually did expect etc. So far, so good. But the next sentence says that MHRA "must be held to account" ... but not what for. Was it some sort of evil that they "expected a high volume of ... ADRs"?
It was only after reading the replies that it became clear you're assuming not stating that MHRA not only expected but got a high volume of ADRs *and* that those ADRs indicated that there was something wrong with the vaccine *and* that MHRA knew that something wrong with the vaccine in advance. You really need to state all of that explicitly to make it clear what you're arguing.
You might also beware that the second of those unstated propositions is unlikely to be true and the third of them is *extremely* unlikely to be true.
They have a Yellow Card system of reporting in place where anyone, including members of the public, can report adverse reactions and problems. Clearly they anticipated that with a mass rollout of vaccines on a scale like this, a lot of people would be reporting "I got sick, I had pains and aches, I was vomiting/had diarrhoea after getting the vaccine" and such like side-effects.
That would be a lot more than usual reports, and they didn't have the system in place to handle such a volume, so they requested tenders to provide a system to handle this.
If you immediately jump to "aha, they *knew* the vaccines would kill people!!!!!!" then may I enquire as to how you wear your underpants - on your head?
Your link describes an urgent tender for an AI system to process and triage ADR reports.
It looks like an ADR report is something you do when someone experiences unusual symptoms after taking medication. Since people get unusual symptoms all the time, lots of these are going to be false positives.
If you're rolling out a new treatment to a huge number of people and you are pretty sure it's safe but want to be careful, you definitely want to pay a lot of attention to any weird symptoms people report. But if you expect that lots of them will be unrelated to the treatment, you'll need a way to sift through them. An AI expert system to do anomaly detection and cluster analysis seems like a really sensible idea to help you find patterns of symptoms that look suspicious.
So this looks really praiseworthy, honestly. MHRA wanted to do due diligence to catch any unexpected vaccine side effects, and were preparing in advance to make sure they were ready to do so. Generally I was very impressed by the UK vaccine rollout; this reinforces that impression for me.
Interesting post from Emil Kirkegaard on the influence of a country's cognitive elite on the country's various economic and social outcome measures (compared with the influence of average intelligence).
As several commenters note, this could have interesting implications for genetic intelligence enhancement, in that even if only the children of the existing cognitive elite receive genetic cognitive enhancement (i.e. the smart get smarter), this should benefit society as a whole (increases in inequality notwithstanding).
It also makes think of a question that occurred to me before: Instead of the current intelligence distribution of the US, what if everyone had an IQ of say 115? No dumbbells and no nobels, just everyone moderately intelligent. How would this counterfactual society compare to actual US?
How very convenient for Mr. Kirkegaard that he is one of the cognitive elite, is my instinctual response.
Take a look at our current 'cognitive elite' whomever they may be. Are their children all following Papa's footsteps into being awarded Nobel prizes and inventing automatic door knob wipers?
There is an elite, and it may be more intelligent, but it's networking and positions of influence that count when it comes to having an effect on economic and social outcomes, rather than pure brainpower.
"The story of the theory is that it was originally proposed 100+ years ago by Terman, and then mentioned by Jensen and Weyl half a century later."
This is Terman of Terman's Termites, correct? And how did that turn out?
"Terman summarizes the accomplishments of his elite group as follows:
"Nearly 2000 scientific and technical papers and articles and some 60 books and monographs in the sciences, literature, arts, and humanities have been published. Patents granted amount to at least 230. Other writings include 33 novels, about 375 short stories, novelettes, and plays; 60 or more essays, critiques, and sketches; and 265 miscellaneous articles on a variety of subjects. The figures on publications do not include the hundreds of publications by journalists that classify as news stories, editorials, or newspaper columns, nor do they include the hundreds, if not thousands, of radio, television, or motion picture scripts."
Ooooh - radio scripts! Well I'm sure that changed the course of society! All right, that's snarky, but the fact remains: yes, they were successful in their lives. But which of them had a lasting and major impact on society that we can name today as the "Jones Effect" and which of them had good careers writing scripts for Hollywood that nobody can name a particular screenwriter as one of the Termites?
The article also runs into the attitudes of the past: some nations are just better, because.
"Nathaniel Weyl 1970:
Thus, very small changes in the average psychometric intelligence of a society can cause it either to become richly endowed with creative and gifted people or to suffer from a dearth of talent. This is the most probable explanation of the fact that, throughout most of history, genius and creativity have tended to be concentrated in the hands of a few nations and peoples."
Now, where have I recently read something similar about creativity? Oh, yes: a 1922 book about Chinese myths written by a Westerner who unburdens himself of his great experience living and working in China to tell us all about the national character in all its facets:
"Intellectually they were until recently, and to a large extent still are, non-progressive, in bondage to uniformity and mechanism in culture, imitative, unimaginative, torpid, indirect, suspicious, and superstitious.
The character is being modified by intercourse with other peoples of the earth and by the strong force of physical, intellectual, and moral education.
...Whatever form and direction education might have taken, it became stereotyped at an early age by the road to office being made to lead through a knowledge of the classical writings of the ancient sages. It became not only ‘the thing’ to be well versed in the sayings of Confucius, Mencius; etc., and to be able to compose good essays on them containing not a single wrongly written character, but useless for aspirants to office—who constituted practically the whole of the literary class—to acquire any other knowledge. So obsessed was the national mind by this literary mania that even infants’ spines were made to bend so as to produce when adult the ‘scholarly stoop.’ And from the fact that besides the scholar class the rest of the community consisted of agriculturists, artisans, and merchants, whose knowledge was that of their fathers and grandfathers, inculcated in the sons and grandsons as it had been in them, showing them how to carry on in the same groove the calling to which Fate had assigned them, a departure from which would have been considered ‘unfilial’—unless, of course (as it very rarely did), it went the length of attaining through study of the classics a place in the official class, and thus shedding eternal lustre on the family—it will readily be seen that there was nothing to cause education to be concerned with any but one or two of the subjects which are included by Western peoples under that designation. It became at an early age, and remained for many centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius and other classical writers. And so it remained until the abolition, in 1905, of the old competitive examination system, and the substitution of all that is included in the term ‘modern education’ at schools, colleges, and universities all over the country, in which there is rapidly growing up a force that is regenerating the Chinese people, and will make itself felt throughout the whole world.
It is this keen and shrewd appreciation of the learned, and this lust for knowledge, which, barring the tragedy of foreign domination, will make China, in the truest and best sense of the word, a great nation, where, as in the United States of America, the rigid class status and undervaluation, if not disdaining, of knowledge which are proving so disastrous in England and other European countries will be avoided, and the aristocracy of learning established in its place.
...Having noted that Chinese education was mainly literary, and why it was so, it is easy to see that there would be little or no demand for the kind of knowledge classified in the West under the head of science. In so far as any demand existed, it did so, at any rate at first, only because it subserved vital needs. Thus, astronomy, or more properly astrology, was studied in order that the calendar might be regulated, and so the routine of agriculture correctly followed, for on that depended the people’s daily rice, or rather, in the beginning, the various fruits and kinds of flesh which constituted their means of sustentation before their now universal food was known. In philosophy they have had two periods of great activity, the first beginning with Lao Tzŭ and Confucius in the sixth century B.C. and ending with the Burning of the Books by the First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, in 213 B.C.; the second beginning with Chou Tzŭ (A.D. 1017–73) and ending with Chu Hsi (1130–1200). The department of philosophy in the imperial library contained in 190 B.C. 2705 volumes by 137 authors. There can be no doubt that this zeal for the orthodox learning, combined with the literary test for office, was the reason why scientific knowledge was prevented from developing; so much so, that after four thousand or more years of national life we find, during the Manchu Period, which ended the monarchical régime, few of the educated class, giants though they were in knowledge of all departments of their literature and history (the continuity of their traditions laid down in their twenty-four Dynastic Annals has been described as one of the great wonders of the world), with even the elementary scientific learning of a schoolboy in the West. ‘Crude,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘mediocre,’ ‘vague,’ ‘inaccurate,’ ‘want of analysis and generalization,’ are terms we find applied to their knowledge of such leading sciences as geography, mathematics, chemistry, botany, and geology. Their medicine was much hampered by superstition, and perhaps more so by such beliefs as that the seat of the intellect is in the stomach, that thoughts proceed from the heart, that the pit of the stomach is the seat of he breath, that the soul resides in the liver, etc.—the result partly of the idea that dissection of the body would maim it permanently during its existence in the Otherworld. What progress was made was due to European instruction; and this again is the causa causans of the great wave of progress in scientific and philosophical knowledge which is rolling over the whole country and will have marked effects on the history of the world during the coming century."
So it is the rigid class system and dislike of eddication which made England and Europe inferior in learning and attainment to the USA. The Chinese must emulate America in establishing the aristocracy of learning.
>How very convenient for Mr. Kirkegaard that he is one of the cognitive elite, is my instinctual response.
So you think it would be possible for low/average IQ people to write and think about this kind of thing productively? Of course not.
>Take a look at our current 'cognitive elite' whomever they may be. Are their children all following Papa's footsteps into being awarded Nobel prizes and inventing automatic door knob wipers?
Who's doing all the cognitively demanding work in soceity? Who's doing all the scientific research? People with an IQ of 100?
I'm sure it's very flattering to feel you are one of nature's noblemen and part of the aristocracy of learning. But as we see from the above excerpts, it is not a mere matter of modestly shuffling your feet and saying "Well, we're on top because we have all the smart people". There were plenty of smart people in China, yet somehow it lagged behind the West. Even in the West, we see Hail Columbia outstripping the feeble, rigid, disliking learning Brits and Europeans.
"Those that do well with education also do well with health, have less corruption, have better roads, earn higher incomes etc."
Somehow it seems there is more to it than just raw brainpower. As for social progress, yes, that is linked to intelligence - but not necessarily education. Smarter is richer, and richer means you can spend money on things like hospitals, sewerage, cleanliness and all the rest of it.
As for Jensen:
"The growth of civilization, the development of written language and of mathematics, the great religious and philosophic insights, scientific discoveries, practical inventions, industrial developments, advancements in legal and political systems, and the world’s masterpieces of literature, architecture, music and painting, it seems safe to say, are attributable to a rare small proportion of the human population throughout history"
Hmm, I seem to remember something about some of those "great religious insight" types, now what was it?
"7 As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? 8 What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings' houses. 9 What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet."
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men."
So the one thing out of that article that I would agree with is that the smart children should be identified and helped. The smart kids of rich families will always be okay, their families will help them get ahead and teach them what they need to know to navigate the system.
But the kids where nobody has gone to college, where they don't know how to write a killer 'personal statement' or have a range of quirky novel extracurriculars to tickle the fancy of jaded admissions officers, who need the support and guidance and encouragement towards advanced classes - yeah, help them.
But you also cannot neglect the "bottom 5%" or however he puts it, because they too are part of society, they too will have an economic and social impact, and unlike the story, you can't pack them all on rockets to fly off to Venus:
> But the kids where nobody has gone to college, where they don't know how to write a killer 'personal statement' or have a range of quirky novel extracurriculars to tickle the fancy of jaded admissions officers, who need the support and guidance and encouragement towards advanced classes - yeah, help them.
Whenever someone says that IQ is a myth, it is exactly these children he is throwing under the bus.
Also everyone who goes in for "stop looking at SATs and just evaluate the student holistically" is basically switching from grading kids on intelligence and test prep to grading kids on parental social class. Which will solve two urgent problems for higher education:
a. Too many Asians are getting the top spots; they'd like to pare that down and make sure the right sort get those spots.
b. Too few blacks are getting the top spots, and they'd like to somehow give them a boost (at least some subset of the black students are "the right sort")
Explicit laws against racial discrimination make this hard to get away with, especially now that it looks like maybe the supreme court will go ahead and decide that those laws apply even when the universities have a really good reason why they should be able to discriminate by race, and have engaged in various dodges to avoid having the discrimination be too explicit.
But if the schools can simply eliminate any quantitative criteria for admissions, maybe they can keep on discriminating without being obvious enough to get called on it.
First, the paper (1) is much better than the blog post and absolute credit to the men, there is a very clear rmd file (2) with all his code and it's even fairly readable. I'm reasonably confident I could replicate these findings in a morning and make simple iterations with new data or models that afternoon. Absolute bravo!
Second, put me down as this being a statistical artifact for two reasons.
-He's feeding the results of one model into another one and that's always much easier to screw up. Specifically, he's not technically using the IQ of the top 5%, he's running a linear regression on what the top 5% "should" be and then feeding that gap, positive or negative, back into the model. (3) I don't want to say this is super bad but it's....much easier to make mistakes when you plug one complex process into another complex process.
-Worse, the residuals he's generating don't make sense, as he himself notes. Some, like South Africa, match our intuitions but Bulgaria and Ghana don't seem like they have a...unusually intelligent elite. Nor can I imagine a reason why Japan, which has virtually no immigration, should have unusually intelligent elites relative to their general population.
So yeah, my gut says he used a technique likely to generate untrustworthy results, the results don't make much sense, but he plugged them in and they worked. Put my money on weird statistical artifact/bug.
Finally, I am somewhat skeptical of "just elites" theories of IQ enhancement. Partly because I think it focuses too much on the benefits of IQ in terms of GDP. One of the things I appreciated about this paper is that it used the Social Progress Index (4), which looks at a wide range of social and economic factors, not just GDP. And a lot of this factors, like "Money stolen" or "freedom of discussion" are much more influenced by the personalities and abilities of common people than a few elites. Frankly, a lot of the happiness in your daily life depends on ordinary interactions with the people around you and there's no substitute for that.
But, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think this properly models the challenges or opportunities of IQ enhancement technology. Specifically, the challenge is credibly proving that it works. If it works, as I guess a "right rationalist", I'm confident that as soon as a bunch of Asian and White nerds start doing this, our enemies will immediately demand that it be provided to everyone, free of charge, by some large and ugly government bureaucracy. Which is awesome, everyone should have this technology, and it's probably inevitable that some large bureaucracy will be in charge of it. Our enemies are our enemies because they, to be overly charitable, they deprioritize the truly important things in life like, family, freedom, and the pursuit of truth to the point where these things are fading away. They are not our enemies because they have bad health care policies or lack opportunism. Frankly, I think most proponents envisage a world where IQ enhancement is unpopular even after it's proven to work, whereas I see a world where those with the ability will hypocritically flip on a dime and try to take it over and build a powerbase out of it, which, again, is super awesome because that's the best way to distribute this to as many people as possible, which is the point.
I was one of the commenters. I was considering writing an article about it sometime soon. I think it would be a situation where almost everyone will benefit from cognitive enhancement, but the returns will go to those who are enhanced more. I believe that universal subsidy is a reasonable policy. The issue would be that people would still object for moral and religious reasons, and many people would be unable to not accidentally become/get someone pregnant.
I think that a huge number of social issues would be drastically reduced like welfare dependency, crime, illiteracy, etc. The flip side would be that innovation would slow because 115 is intelligent, but the extraordinarily intelligent make very disproportionate contributions to science and technology. See my most recent newsletter about the socio-economic correlates and lack of threshold effects (https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/newsletter-001-cognitive-ability)
I wonder how jobs associated with low iq would be dealt with. If you suddenly made everyone 115 it'd get rid of a lot of smart people but make room for a lot more people help with developing the tech that automates those jobs on a much shorter timeframe
If you just flattened everyone, I think you'd cut off the tails of outcomes due to intelligence. The chip designers and the janitors would all be equal intelligence, which means we'd get highly competent janitors compared to our world, but lousy chip designers compared to our world. In man-vs-man competetions, everything flattens out; in man-vs-nature competitions, we would win if most of the societal benefit from high intelligence was at the low end (not screwing things up), but we'd lose if most of the benefit was from the outsided contributions of the high flyers. My guess is that the second is more accurate--it matters a lot more that our chip designers and drug developers are very good than that our janitors are very good. We can get a multiplicative effect from a smallish number of very smart people, in a way we probably can't do (at least not with out current society) with the people at the bottom becoming smarter.
Suppose we shift the IQ distribution over by a sigma to the right.
A simple model is that the returns to intelligence are a mix of absolute and positional ones.
Some benefits just come from more raw brainpower. Given the same starting technology and resources, having your smartest people be smarter will mean they can build faster microprocessors and more effective drugs and write better code and learn more from nature. At the low end, making the dumbest people a little smarter means they can forsee problems a little better, can understand places where their world is complicated and not get tangled up and make some error that hurts them or society. The shift helps everyone here.
Other benefits are positional--it may be that there's a pretty good living to be had for most anyone in the top 10% of brainpower in your society, and that life will be extra hard for people in the bottom 10% of brainpower. The shift is neutral here.
I usually think of this as the realms of man-vs-nature and man-vs-man. A rising tide that lifts all IQs will make us better at man-vs-nature struggles, but no better at man-vs-man struggles.
Presumably, technological progress would have been a lot slower in such a world. It feels a bit pointless to speculate how far they would have got by AD 2023. They probably wouldn't have had any difficulty inventing agriculture, but what about metallurgy? Does it take a genius to invent bronze for the first time? What about steel? It's hard to even speculate.
Absolutely it requires genius. Genius plus generations of noodling around, and a healthy slice of luck. I defy anyone of even well above average intelligence, somehow born without knowledge of the existence of metals, to come across some nondescript black rock[1] and realize that if it's cooked at a high enough temperature with some partially burned wood in the absence of air and various other exacting conditions it will turn into a shiny magical substance with more tensile strength than any other natural material.
Even for modern humans of good intelligence, with instant access to the vast modern library of information, making iron from rocks in the way it might have been done at the dawn of the Iron Age requires impressive levels of energy and ingenuity[2].
Almost the entire history of chemistry is the history of the human struggle to wrest metals from ores. It's a shame the pantheon of unknown geniuses who wrought these miracles is unknown to history, since they did far more for humanity than any number of Platos, Alexanders, or Rothschilds.
" Does it take a genius to invent bronze for the first time? What about steel? It's hard to even speculate."
This is my main problem with this entire discussion about "cognitive elites": the underlying presumption, or perhaps it's not even that, it's some faint fuzzy picture built up out of popular culture, of the Lone Genius doing the eureka! bit in his lab/garage/under an apple tree, while the dull, cud-chewing masses stand around gape-jawed contributing nothing.
Have a look at one timeline of steel production, kindly note no Lone Geniuses until we get well into the 18th and 19th centuries and guys refining long-standing processes and finding better, more efficient ways, thus getting their names slapped on:
"13th century BC – The earliest evidence of steel production can be traced back to early blacksmiths in the 13th century who discovered that iron become harder, stronger and more durable when carbon was introduced after being left in coal furnaces."
Were all the early blacksmiths Lone Geniuses or, you know, ordinary working guys finding things out by trial and error and happy accident?
"12th century – By the 12th century, Sri Lanka was the world’s largest supplier of crucible steel." Something that didn't catch on until much later with one 'Lone Genius' - or at least, Guy Who Got His Name Slapped On The Procedure - in England:
"1740 – The crucible steel technique is developed by English inventor Benjamin Huntsman."
To be fair, the fact that we don't have a name doesn't necessarily mean that genius (whether lone or collaborative) wasn't involved. Some things are clearly "in the water" once the conditions are right, with a bunch of people coming up with it and fighting over priority. Others really do seem to need a specific someone to come up with it, or not.
E.g., paper seems to have been invented once (chronology suggests probably not by Cai Lun, to whom its attributed) and diffused and improved from there. It took centuries to travel westward, and at least doesn't seem to have been independently invented by anyone else during that time even though it's a useful substitute for expensive parchment/vellum (especially if papyrus isn't handy). That at least seems like the sort of thing that probably depended on someone's key insight. Even if that someone isn't lucky enough for anyone writing history to give them credit for whatever reason.
A lot of inventions that are possible and would be useful don't get invented for a long time. The New World basically didn't have wheels, nobody had stirrups for a long time after they started fighting from horseback, horse collars choked the horses for a long time despite an easy fix. I think writing was invented only a small number of times, and phonetic writing only once. Positional notation with zeros was unknown in Europe until I think the 1400s.
There were also a lot of clever inventions that were lost. The inventor worked out some brilliant solution to a problem but the problem wasn't applicable most other places so it was lost, or nobody understood it, or events overtook the brilliant idea or invention and it was forgotten. The Antikythera Mechanism is an example of this we know about, though probably nearly all the examples have been lost and forgotten. Also, greek fire.
Similarly, I think we still don't know quite how a lot of megastructures were made by stone or bronze age humans--clearly they managed it, since those structures are there, but it's not obvious how. You have to guess that there were some clever folks working on those structures who came up with clever tricks to move the giant pieces of stone around and position them as needed, but if nobody wrote the tricks down and there wasn't an ongoing sequence of such megastructures being built, probably the tricks were just lost. My guess is that there were a couple guys working on the pyramids who were as bright as the guys working on the latest SpaceX rocket or the latest Apple-designed ARM chip, and they were able to come up with some really clever techniques that modern archaeologists, mostly not being one-in-ten-thousand mechanical geniuses, can't figure out.
First, thank you for the link -- that's genuinely interesting. Second, Kirkegaard et al are probably correct about their conclusions. Third, if it were possible to meaningfully bet money on it, I'd bet half a year's salary that they weren't looking in even the right general category of data to meaningfully prove their probably-right hunch.
I wonder if the authors could pass a lie-detector test quizzing them on whether or not they liked "Atlas Shrugged" when they read it as teens.
What do you think is wrong with Kirkegaard and Carl's data?
Almost everyone has political beliefs, and the social sciences contain a disproportionate number of progressives. If it were revealed that a study's author was a Democrat, would you discount their finding to an equal extent as if they were libertarian/enjoyed Rand?
The hypothesized libertarianism is unrelated to the point, which is why it's in a separate section and not in the numbered list. I threw it in because it amused me to do so. As for what's wrong with their data that's the wrong question entirely. I'm sure their data are great. The best. The problem isn't that they're bad at data it's that comparing things is hard when they are very similar and in a controlled laboratory environment, and nearly impossible at the country level.
Imagine two countries. One of them has some material advantage, natural resource, important waterway, good weather, nice beaches, whatever you like. A neighboring country next door has none of these, despite having a superficially similar population that score as well on IQ tests. Something happens, perhaps contact with colonial powers. The first country's advantages are developed or perhaps exploited under the guidance or direct control of some other more developed nation. If there is subsequently any free movement of peoples between the two, in which country are the smart people going to end up?
Further, imagine that none of the actual human capital responsible for making the first country better able to take advantage of natural resources it already possessed were from that country at all. (We'd further have to imagine that the natural resources or advantages were not of the type that without development could have changed the demographic balance in the first place, such as naturally rich fisheries or especially fertile soil.) What's more, those who created the prosperity might not end up living in the country or raising any kids there to show up on the census. The smart kids that do show up in the data might be there because of the good weather. Who knows? So many possible points of comparison.
What we do know is that someone creating a study will perhaps consciously and more likely than not unconsciously select points of comparison that agree with his own hidden priors. A couple of marxists doing the same study might conclude that all of the differences noted are due to trade imbalances or the legacy of colonialism or one nation having conquered another, etc. Is this because marxists are bad at data? No but they would have chosen perhaps a different index for measuring the outcomes and have chosen different economic factors rather than the six these authors chose, perhaps measures of relative wage disparities, press freedoms, what-have-you.
It's common at this stage of a discussion about data to cry that correlation is not causation, but it is important to remember that correlation usually isn't even correlation, let alone anything else. Statistics are hard to do, and much harder to do right. (We saw this often enough and with particularly ugly examples during covid. Someone who is far better at statistics than I and would publish a study about this that or the other thing which would be taken up by partisans of one side or another and spread around on twitter. Within 24 hours of it getting big enough to attract attention from people on the other side of the debate, and often within 20 minutes, some luminary who is actually good at statistics would briefly explain why the whole thing is bogus and everyone should be embarrassed to have believed it in the first place. Many such cases. Sad!)
I wrote a short story about folks trying to escape a video game simulation, if you’re looking for a fun read. Inspired by a real glitch in Mario in which you could access the backend of the game through in-game actions:
I have always thought the Simulation shtick is criminally underused. There is really a niche for a computer scientist\software engineer\security researcher (-adjacent) author who tells a modern day Matrix in the style a malware exploit blogpost (e.g. "we privilege-escalated our way into getting an execute permission on arbitary memory"). It would have massive potential if executed correctly.
I think I got a glimpse of that in gwern's It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World, in the mid sections where the AI was exploiting any systems it can its hands on to get money and hardware. And of course Greg Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora are the role models I base this imaginary genre on.
I find it very funny that they decided the Universal Language Translation could get lowered in priority compared to instructions presumably requiring knowing the language. I guess the multivariable apocalypse will do that to you.
I've got three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email address, or email me at mine, which is specified here:
Isn’t it basically ODD that people in low density states and regions and or with less formal education should be unsympathetic to the package of immigration & “wokism” & expanding health insurance & freer trade & taxing the rich & people “having pronouns & a larger social safety net & being more concerned by urban “crime” & wanting to own handguns w/o hassles than people in high-density places. I mean there could be reasons for some of them but why the package?
Living in a vast dense community requires substantial control of human individuality. You can't have everyone just doing as he pleases, you need social shibboleths to constrain behavior, because functional coordination is essential for a dense urban community. Living in a low concentration more self-sufficient community permits one to shrug and be live-and-let-live with your crazy (to you) neighbors. So human beings in dense concentrations have always had a higher preference for exploring and adopting social ideologies that help narrow individual variation in thought and behavior.
And education of course promotes dominant urban social ideologies, because it serves that class of human beings -- the highly specialized workers training for the complex coordinated urban economy.
So the observation is no more surprising than that understanding of and adherence to religious dogma in the Middle Ages was concentrated in the cities, monasteries, and universities.
Yes, that seem right, but it does not translate very well onto issues like taxation/deficits, trade, immigration, climate change policy, heterogender attitudes.
Why not? I think the mistaken assumption here is that a particular position on these issues is much more appealling to city and country mice. I don't think that's the case. The positions adopted by both are to no small extent arbitrary (which may help explain why it seems nonobvious why each cohort might adopt their respective positions, and why some of the adopted positions are in logical contradiction).
What *is* important is the position as a tribal identity signaling device. If you say "I'm worried about global warming and think we should ban all gasoline-powered cars!" you are not really saying something practical so much as identifying yourself as a member of a certain tribe. Same if you say "I think the illegal immigrants flooding across the border brought us COVID and syphilis and we should build a forty-foot wall to keep those vermin out."
I mean, you might also genuinely believe the position, but as in all social movements and religions, the true believers are probably a fairly modest minority, most other people sign on because (1) the dogma seems at least a little plausible/attractive, but more importantly (2) they want to be identified with the movement, associate with the other people in that movement.
That said, I'm sure there are *some* practical considerations that influence people into which tribe they want to be seen with. You have to be a bit selfless and insensitive to your neighbors to go all-in on requiring electric cars to save the whales if you live in a rural county where it's 15 miles to the nearest store, 25 to your assigned high school, and the farm equipment goes through 1000 gallons of diesel a season. You're probably a lot more comfy with government taxing the bejeesus out of small business to subsidize college education if you're a professor of social science in the big city than if you own a car dealership in the suburbs. And so on.
But I think where the debate is the fiercest and most polarized is on just those issues that have fewer practical and immediate daily implications, which serve more as tribal totems.
There are two factors I've heard of that correlate with these things.
One is the "Big Five" personality trait of "openness to experience". Obviously it correlates with what it currently called liberalism. But it also correlates with whether one undertakes a long-distance move and also with the amount of education one gets. A consequence is that our cities are currently disproportionately packed with people who move (of course) but also people who are educated. As one paper said, we've got a remarkable level of *personality* sorting between metro and non-metro areas, and that correlates with *educational* sorting.
Another factor is that the strictures on building housing in metro areas really raises their cost of living. So there's a tendency of cities to drive out people who don't produce a large value-added (in econo-speak). For in-person service work, even though it doesn't add a lot of value, this is counteracted by a striking increase in the price of in-person service work, but any sort of work that is "tradable" is priced out of metro areas unless it benefits from having a high concentration of educated workers.
So there's a lot of sorting between "blue America" and "red America". People speculate whether the United States might come apart because of this, but I think not for a lot of reasons. One of the more cynical reasons is that blue America pays for red America but red America staffs the military machine that blue America pays for. And that military machine is a big part of maintaining the "(sort-of-)rules-based international order" that enables blue America to add so much value.
It is odd if you see politics as individual ideas fighting for support among people with different preferences. It's not odd when you see it as a fight between narratives.
People do not support their tribe because they share all its views. They support it because otherwise the goddamed other tribe will get what they wanted and these guys are total sickos! If you support only some ideas of your tribe, you are not supporting it whole-heartedly and in a zero sum game it's like supporting the other tribe. There is a huge pressure to endource whole set of ideas not just parts of it.
And surely, people will find some justifications to support every part of the narrative simultaneously on the individual ideas grounds. The narratives are great at justifying themselves post hoc, they are selected for that, after all. But try predicting them beforehand, and you will notice that their new parts can be pretty arbitrary. See Scotts Thrive/Survive theory of political spectrum and it failures to predict the political divide on COVID response.
Insightful, but not totally, as you say. It does not explain the exact combination of rural/urban packages. Let's say "rural" explains guns but not anti-"progressive" taxation.
Immigration will either turn their low density states into high density states or dilute their political power.
"Wokism" is a campaign of vilification against them.
It's not their health insurance and safety net being expanded - it's shovelling their taxes at the urban poor (or shovelling a mixture of currency dilution and expanding government debt).
Freer trade means jobs they can do being outsourced to China.
The rich dodge their taxes anyway, so it's mostly them being taxed.
Urban crime spreads out to rural areas; at this point, urban crime is more-or-less anarchy in large parts of their country.
More to the point, all of this represents an expansion of the federal government for the benefit of its client groups (bureaucrats and the urban poor). Simply annihilating that whole system would be net-benefit for vast swathes of the US.
I agree that they believe this, but it is worth pointing out that it's false - the federal government is effectively a process for transferring wealth from urban to rural areas (urban areas pay most of the taxes, rural areas get a majority of the benefits).
So far as I know, that's only true if you include military spending, and the fact that military bases and training areas are generally located in Southern states and in non-urban locations for practical reasons. And that's always struck me as a pretty disingenuous comparison, because few people think "the salary of an E-5 stationed at Fort Benning" when they think of "government benefit enjoyed by the rural population."
Eh, if bureaucrats in Virginia count then so do military bases in Kansas. But either way, most spending is healthcare/social security - which disproportionately flows out of rich urban areas to poor rural ones (the biggest industry in West Virginia isn't coal mining, it's healthcare- which is mostly funded by federal subsidies transferred from more urban states).
Infrastructure is also a massive subsidy - rural highways mostly aren't economic, and neither is the rural postal service or internet, except for either direct or indirect subsidies (i.e. government mandates for equal costs in those areas). Amtrak's biggest problem running good service where it pencils out is that it has to use its useful northeast corridor to subsidize low-ridership expensive rural western lines. The list goes on.
I doubt a priori that healthcare and social security benefits flow preferentially to rural areas -- how would that work? The urban poor population is much larger than the rural poor population.
With respect to infrastructure: first of all, it's not a "massive" subsidy, the government spends peanuts on infrastructure. The bulk of Federal social spending is on wealth transfer payments, and that's typically what people think of when they think of "Federal benefits." Stuff like SS, SS disability, ACA subsidies, SNAP, Medicare & Medicaid, student loan guarantees, et cetera. If you want to make an honest argument that the city's taxes are paying for the country's government benefits by the conventionally understood definition of the latter, that's where the focus needs to be.
Secondly, if there's a subsidy at all, one can readily argue the subsidy is of the urban consumers of rural products, which is what most rural infrastructure is about. The people of Kansas have less need for Interstate 70 to haul their household goods about, or visit grandma, than do, say, the citizens of Chicago and St. Louis who need Kansas wheat to get to their tables cheaply, or who want Korean cars delivered to the port of Los Angeles to get to their local dealership without costing an arm and a leg or needing to float up the Mississippi.
What would food cost in the city center if it all had to be grown or reared within city limits? Could you even buy a Hyundai in Denver if you didn't have I-15? National-scale transportation infrastructure serves largely to service interurban transport or deliver the commodities of the country -- food, oil, coal, ore, lumber -- to the enormous appetities of the city. The fact that they happen to be mostly built in the country should not distract from the fact that their benefits flow largely to the city.
> I doubt a priori that healthcare and social security benefits flow preferentially to rural areas
They flow from richer areas to poorer areas, which means they go from urban to rural areas. Hospitals are also more expensive and less efficient in rural areas, so the subsidies end up having to be bigger to compensate. (Of course all of this is on a per-person basis, but US population is roughly evenly split between urban, urban-suburban, rural-suburban and rural so it works out in raw numbers too, more or less).
Re infrastructure - there is some amount of rural infrastructure that's economically optimal (although freight rail is more useful than roads for the cases you describe), but the government subsidizes it beyond that for political reasons. e.g. Even Jon Tester argues for building rural roads in Montana on the basis of "aw heck they don't pencil out economically but the good ole farm people like having them".
That's curious. In the UK urban areas pay most of the taxes, and get the majority of the benefits (at least, assuming spending on you counts as you getting the benefit). I wonder why the US is different.
Partly cultural history (the US historically thinks of rural areas as "real America" and has a history of giving them more political weight, see e.g. the capital of New York being a small town upstate and not NYC), and partly the Senate overweighting rural states (it's not a coincidence that places like Montana and west Virginia have a democratic senator despite being red states - those guys *really* bring home the bacon).
Another solid comment from Jack here. Nicely done.
I'd add for the sake of completion that by any but very recent standards it is odd to regard with complacency the dilution of one's population with people that are very much unlike oneself and one's family. We can call the underlying tendency "racism" if we like but that certainly doesn't make it odd by historical standards. Conservatives are the people we would expect to behave more according to historical standards (even if only by a few decades) so this would fit.
I would, however, add a quibble about taxing the rich. If wealth is measured by stock valuation, it is possible to frame it as everything that goes into the price of the stock is already taxed in various ways before it gets there. If you build a factory to import steel to make cars, not only are a long list of state and federal taxes going to come out of those steps but every person you hire will pay income tax on the wages that make your enterprise possible. I'm not saying you have to buy this frame, only that it isn't odd for people who do buy it to not be hugely concerned about taxing the rich more.
The perception of "different" is important. Isn't the initiative to leave home to a better life elsewhere sort of SUPER American? Whatever his flaws, I don't see Elon Musk "diluting" anything. :)
It is now, based on completely new ideologies that would have been incomprehensible to the ordinary conservative a century ago. Emma Lazarus's poem on the statue of liberty is not a founding document.
Remember, the founding stock of the city of Boston were against the Irish overwhelming them and taking over, and by their own standards it is now obvious that their worst alarmists were right.
Again, point here isn't that we should agree with the past, merely that we can't call people who do "odd" in good conscience.
I want to re-write the poem, "Give me your brightest, your most entrepreneurial, yearning to get rich." :)
I agree that negative economic and cultural consequences could result from too many of the wrong kind of immigrants, but a) I think we are numerically very far from that point and b) better section and policies that promote assimilation mitigate this risk.
I'm not sure if yours is a sarcastic question, but I think if you like open spaces and farmland you are going to be less sympathetic to densification and immigration, tracts of townhouses built on former farmland, refugee resettlement on your community, etc. To the extent your low-services area also has low taxes, you might also be against the corresponding increases in taxes that the services (which may not benefit you in any way) might impose upon you.
Not sarcastic, although I don't disguise my preference for the urban package. Nor is my intention to refute anyone good enough to respond to my questions. I certainly get a preference for less dense places per se. But that hardly translates into hostility (perhaps too strong in some cases) to immigration, especially high skilled immigration which is unlikely to affect rural places. And the taxes/transfers in question are the federal income tax/transfers which if anything are positive for rural areas.
"And the taxes/transfers in question are the federal income tax/transfers which if anything are positive for rural areas.'
The unspoken assumption here is that people should like things which benefit them is some measurable way. If one's belief is that one should Mind One's Own Business, then saying "well, but this gives you $X so you should like it" isn't even wrong.
I don't think it is cheating. The Regan, GW Bush, and Ryan-Trump tax cuts were not accompanied by equivalent spending cuts, or even restraint; they were deficit/tax cuts packages.
But the census of the answers I'm getting is that the precise configuration of the package is pretty much coincidental. I guess that could apply even if you strip out the deficits from the tax cuts/deficits policy.
I don't know how blanket the hostility is. I think people at base a friendly and willing to let you in. The evangelical churches that all those Slavic food bloggers seem to attend (Natasha's Kitchen! Great but complicated recipes, btw) are probably very welcoming.
In the less and less rural area I have family in, a lot of farmland is being redeveloped with those ugly townhouse developments; there is more pressure on the social services and on the rents for my relatives who rent; and if there are a LOT of people from an entirely different culture coming, that's something that's not easy to reckon with.
Likewise, remember the Central Valley discussions? If the oft cited Victor Davis Hanson is to be believed, the immigration contingent there has caused problems of crime and quality of life deterioration (eg uninsured motorists driving around, metal wire being stolen, unvaccinated and unlicensed dogs, lots of trash), which people care about more than the mere fact of an Immigrant moving in next door.
On high skilled immigration, that is a more urban thing for sure. The concerns one might find there is that such immigrants might work for way cheaper for the visa, bring different mores from their home culture and don't feel buyin or loyalty to their new country or community, treating it as an economic decision, and therefore not caring as much about the rights/institutions/traditions that the old timers cared about. (One really stark one might be fun rights. Or something as small as decorating their houses for the holidays - definitely way less of that in NYC where the Italians have moved out, but that's not a rural issue.)
I don't think it's at all odd, if you approximate these people as "conservatives".
Here's how it looks from a conservative's point of view:
Conservative: "la la la, life is pretty good I guess"
Some government dumbass: "Here's a package of fifty untested new ideas that we're going to impose upon you"
Conservative: "No, I don't like those"
It's not at all odd that conservatives should be opposed to whatever random grab-bag of changes that "progressives" are trying to impose on them this decade.
Pretty reasonable, although it leans toward the style in which the urban/"progressive" package is presented. It could be presented (my personal take) as how to make a good thing better. national anthem.
90% of the package you describe is about getting along with and helping other people (e.g. being careful with your language, inviting people of different cultures into your world, reducing gun violence, redistributing wealth).
People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion.
People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places.
Edit: to be clear, not saying one is better than the other. In many cases I value self-reliance and isolation.
There's a general tradeoff between independence and cohesion, between self-reliance and cooperation. This is the main divide in contemporary politics. It's totally OK to value the former, and there are cases (today and historically) where we've moved the needle *way* too far towards the latter.
Well I've lived in both, though my small town experience was ages before the current urban-rural politization, but I don't think knowing how to "get along" with others is quite it.
"People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion.
People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places."
Forgive my ignorance, but is this really true? Has it been studied?
> People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion
I could easily imagine that people in high-density areas get along with people less. In many (if not most) places of the world, rural areas have a lower crime rate, are higher-trust societies. That surely can lead to getting along better than an anonymous big city. You would also need to define "getting along". Does it mean trusting people? Does it mean perceived ease of making friends? Does it mean percentage of interactions with others that are perceived as positive?
> People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places.
I wonder if this is true. There are many collectivist cultures in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if in those, rural people are more collectivist and family oriented, and people in cities are more Westernized and prefer a more individualistic and self-reliant way of life. You would also have to define "isolationism". Rural areas often have more established relationships, whereas in urban areas you can live near a lot of people but lead a completely isolated life and have no close relationships.
Yeah agreed--"getting along" was not the right phrase.
The main point is, people in high density places need to deal with all sorts of people-friction. You're constantly faced with folks who don't speak your language, who don't share your values, etc. This leads to a very different outlook on life (not better or worse, just different).
"inviting people of different cultures into your world"
So long as they don't show up on *your* doorstep. They come in over the border and settle beside the rural rednecks who are so ungracious and unwelcoming? That is the natural order of things, and the rednecks better get on with learning how to be nice people who get along with and help others.
They end up in your neighbourhood? Oh well, despite being well-off, there is just no way at all we can take these people in, so let's ship them back elsewhere! Asking us to put our money where our yard signs and window signs are, and work to make it possible to take in the people of different cultures we have invited into the country? Not feasible at all!
50 people arriving on our island is a "crisis". "(H)undreds of thousands of migrants who made a similar journey to the Texas city" is just being nice people who get along and are helpful to others of different cultures who have been invited in. Why can't those rednecks just understand the benefits of social cohesion like us nice Blue Tribers?
That's a very cherry picked example. Also somewhat misrepresented, but that's adequately addressed below. But in general, when we get immigrants or refugees, there is an effort made to keep them together and that's typically accomplished by sending them to the cities. My city got a bunch of the Bosnians in the 90s, and a smaller number of the Somalis and Syrians more recently. This is as it should be, since we need the people and, as you point out, we're the ones who want them. By contrast, the only immigrants in the small town I grew up in were the Indian doctor and his family.
My impression of the MV crisis was that Martha's Vineyard happily took them in as best they could. DeSantis still scored points w/ his base for "owning the libs" but I didn't see any liberal hypocrisy.
I do agree that blue states tend to be far from the border and have less overall immigration. But there are still huge immigrant communities in e.g. New England, and you'll find a wide range of opinions no matter where you go in the U.S.
The fact is that the Martha's Vineyarders (the rich people who have holiday homes there, anyway) made a point of parading their virtue about being warm'n'welcoming (unlike, you know, *those* people). They even got special signs made up for businesses to put in their window, because someone saw a sign like this elsewhere and they thought it would be a really good thing:
Faced with fifty real migrants on their property suddenly it was impossible to shelter them. There just weren't the resources. The migrants would have no community. It was a horrible thing to exploit these poor people like this, wicked DeSantis, they cried (as they shoved them off the island as fast as possible, to be someone else's problem elsewhere in New England).
"All Are Welcome Here" - until it *costs* something more than mere words to prove it.
I mean...neither of those things is fundamentally bad or unaccepting. The military base was an emergency shelter--where else are you going to find 50 beds on short notice?
I could cite CNN and NPR stories that show photographs of people volunteering as translators and making food and such, but my guess is you'd reject those as "liberal media".
What evidence that would change your mind here?
Edit: for me, I'd accept any of the following:
* An immigrant complaining about how they were treated in MV
* A photo of an MV immigrant in handcuffs, or being treated roughly
> The military base was an emergency shelter--where else are you going to find 50 beds on short notice?
How does El Paso do it? The answer is, they don't, they have vast encampments and people sleeping rough on the street. And the military doesn't step in to stop the people of El Paso from being inconvenienced in this way, but it _does_ step in to stop the people from Martha's Vineyard from being inconvenienced. Why is it so?
People (and I don't mean the native inhabitants of the island, who are as dependent on the seasonal holiday trade as every tourist destination so have to cater to the whims of their betters) putting their money where their mouths are. Take one of those migrants into your home. Be in it for the long haul. Don't go on about the horrible anti-immigrant sentiment, when you are not a border town coping with thousands of people arriving in a month and needing to be processed somehow.
It's very easy to be virtuous about the poor when there aren't any poor, hungry, dispossessed people turning up in your neighbourhood. That's where the Virtue Signallers of Martha's Vineyard failed - when it really happened, then the migrants were someone else's problem to handle. Yet if they read or watched a news story about a small town in Texas putting migrants into a military base before moving them out - you tell me what they would have said over their breakfast tables about that, about the unwelcoming and even racist spirit of the townspeople?
There's an aspect where some people do not think it is appropriate to achieve social cohesion or other desirable outcomes by taking and spending other people's money. Many people enjoy the social cohesion of their churches or community organizations, but don't want the Feds taxing and spending, even on programs that purportedly help others. There may also be few examples of success stories from Federal spending visible to such folks. E.g. the war on poverty is viewed to have been a decades-long failure.
Other people have already done a good job of dissecting this take, but it would really benefit from a little less of the 'my side must do good things' reasoning sitting behind it
Edited a bit for clarity. I'm not trying to say "urban liberals are better", but I see how it came off that way. I think valuing self-reliance and isolation is perfectly OK.
Have you considered that people who are relatively libertarian may also value equally(or more) all of the things that you think urban liberals value, but believe that tax and government action are counterproductive ways to achieve those goals?
As Ghillie dhu points out, those are instruments, not objectives. What you care about is some version of 'maximise human life quality'. Universal health care is not a goal in and of itself. It's an instrument you're choosing. Libertarians also care about healthcare received by the population more generally (at least, I do, and I'm close to libertarian). It's just that I think universal healthcare, especially government funded and controlled, is a good recipe to over time get less quantity and quality of healthcare as a population than we would otherwise, and this includes those who are the least fortunate! I think the actual difference is that American liberals seem to believe that government enforced redistribution is an important instrument to achieve goals, while I believe that concentration of more power in government has historically proven itself to be disastrous. In fact, a major ingredient of the human flourishing that we've seen post the industrial revolution has been the limitations placed on government appropriation of private property.
Universal health care & gun control are instrumental goals; a libertarian would likely disagree that they're effective instruments toward whatever the ultimate goals are, either because the costs/side effects are too great or because they wouldn't actually achieve the intended result.
>inviting people of different cultures into your world
When it comes to actually living next to Diversity, white liberals usually find a million reasons why they can't do it. That neighborhood has "bad schools"(why so is unsaid), there aren't enough art museums, it's a food desert, etc.
Agreed. I think it's a broader pattern, where they'll agree that X is good, and we should do X, but refuse to acknowledge that X comes at a tradeoff or a personal sacrifice.
E.g. I know a lot of rich liberals who want universal health care. They'll happily tell you that your wealth shouldn't determine your level of care. When I point out that this means they (being rich) would inevitably get *worse* care, they tend to argue.
Typically conservatives are well aware of the tradeoffs, but they have a tendency to overemphasize them. They'll often kill obviously beneficial programs (where e.g. $x of welfare generates $2x of economic growth) as a result.
I think the Economist does a good job of trying to quantify the tradeoffs, and coming up with a utilitarian path forward, usually leaning towards the progressive side.
> People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion.
> People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places.
This feels like it's approaching (but does not exactly match) the opposite of the narrative I've usually heard, where people living in a more rural environment feel a greater sense of community than people living in a more urban environment. To be clear, unsure how true either claim is, just wanted to mention my confusion, and unsure how these things could be made to mesh.
Yes, but there is not necessarily a contradiction. Rural communities are ones where almost everyone knows everyone else, if not personally, then by reputation or through family - think 2 degrees vs the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing. In urban settings, helping the community often means benefiting people you never expect to know or ever meet, like donating money to a clinic or homeless shelter or park -- think 6 or 7 degrees of separation within the community.
>90% of the package you describe is about getting along with and helping other people
Remarkable. Sitting on people's tongues to wait for the inevitable wrongword to use it against them is considered "wanting to get along", while advocating that people should say whatever they want is considered isolationist.
This seems like a mischaracterization of most of the left, based on extreme cases. None of the lefties I know join twitter mobs or want to cancel people over wrongwords.
Obviously there are some people who do this, but we can't judge an ideology by its most extreme adherents.
"This seems like a mischaracterization of most of the left, based on extreme cases. None of the lefties I know join twitter mobs or want to cancel people over wrong words."
The extreme cases may be more common than you think. I'm a psychologist and in the past 3 years I have had 5 patients, all affiliated with a university in our liberal state, who had anxiety disorders centering around a fear of somehow involuntarily blurting out something very unwoke: a racial slur, or a grossly politically incorrect statement about women, gay people, trans people, overweight people, etc. I don't mean these people were cautious about what they said, I mean they literally had phobias or OCD: They re-read their emails dozens of times to make sure they had not said or linked to something godawful, and then also had a friend check it and then asked the friend to check once more, saying "Are you sure? Are you sure?" Or they avoided sending emails as much as they possibly could, even if it caused great inconvenience to themselves or other people. One woman felt unable to attend her son's wedding because of a fear of standing up and shouting a racial slur in the middle of the ceremony (she was eventually able to attend, but she had to work very hard in treatment to get to that point).
Anxiety disorders of this type aren't unusual, & I've seen many people who had one over the years. But until recently people feared other things: shouting an obscenity -- tearing off all their clothes -- announcing to the room that they were murderers or child molesters. But this fear of falling short in wokeness is really a recent thing. Even the twenty-somethings that I'm seeing these days for some other problem seem quite anxious about the issue. Guys tell me about initiating a first kiss with a woman, then look at me uneasily and worry aloud that that was rapey because they did not ask her permission first. People who dislike a roommate who is of another race can barely get out their complaints about the roommate's failure to do their share of the housework because every other sentence they say is "I'm not racist, that's not what this is about." People describing self-hatred about their own overweight think I'm sitting there judging them because I assume they have some scorn for *other* overweight people.
I'm not sure how this data can help to estimate the spread of extreme cases. People can be more anxious because there is actual thought police at every corner. Or because there is a lot of scaremongering about thought police. Distinguishing between these two cases, or rather, finding the correct place on the spectrum between them, is a tricky thing.
On a separate note, I find the situation where people worry at all about consent - even if just on reflection while telling about the situation to the therapist and not not beforehand, leading to actually asking a question - an improvement upon previous status quo in multiple ways.
Well, my anecdata is certainly not something that can be held up as proof, but it is a pretty striking change that I've noticed. I'm not sure there's a difference between having thought police on the one hand and on the other hand scaremongering about the presence of thought police. Since "thought police on every corner" is anyhow just a figure of speech, and not a claim there are actual people whose job it is to catch and punish offenders against wokeness, the phrase seems actually to mean that if you break the rules, your group will disapprove of whjat you did. Generally in groups when there's a norm that people behave a certain way, there are only a few incidents when somebody breaks it and gets called out -- the norm is communicated and enforced by other, more subtle means, plus of course everybody remembers the few iincidents where somebody was actually called out.
I have in fact heard a couple stories about such incidents. Here's one: It's early in the semester and the first year grad students in a social sciences program at Famous Left-Leaning University are getting to know each other. One student has come from China to be in the program. He speaks good English, but is not familiar with American ways. At some event where most of the group is gathered he tells another student, a Black woman, that her slenderness is lovely. The remark does not come across as hitting on her -- I checked with the woman who told me the story, who was present at the event. It comes across as an awkward, embarrassing, naive compliment. The Black woman gets angry at the Chinese man, and tells him that where she comes from being thin is considered unattractive, and she finds it very disrespectful that he would comment on her appearance without first understanding the norms of her community. The Chinese man is terribly embarrassed. He says he did not know that, does not know much about American norms, and that he meant his remark as a compliment. The Black woman is not willing to let it go at that but holds out for him grasping that not only was it disrespectful for him to make that remark while ignorant of her culture, but that is even more disrespectful to argue with her about her reaction. The rest of the group, who are mostly or maybe 100% white Americans, listens to all this silently. The point is, a little of that goes a long way. People do not have to witness frequent incidents of this kind to be afraid of being called out the way the Chinese man was.
As for guys worrying about being rapey. Yeah, I get it, it's kind of a nice turnaround that the guys are the ones walking around scared instead of the women. On the other hand, there's an unfairness in how this plays out. If we could inject a dose of long-lasting guilt, fear and self-doubt into all the guys who have been assaultive to women, that would be a just punishment. But I'm seeing those feelings in young, shy guys who have a terrible time even approaching women. It seems like the current culture has given them a big dose of Fear of Rapeyness, but nothing else. It's left to people like me to tell them that in sexual interactions you need to be very attuned to your partner. Asking permission is one way to be attuned, but in some situations talking spoils the magic. ("Now that I have with your permission touched the left breast, may I also touch the right?"). About first kisses, I might advise one of these guys that if there have been little signs all afternoon that the woman feels romantically drawn to you, it's probably OK to try giving her a kiss without asking first. But start with a small one, and be very alert to her reaction -- if she pulls back, stop.
You look like you're arguing in good faith, but you're fundamentally trying to square a circle.
First, a note. I resent when people say that the "Left" is doing what woke american "leftists" are doing, it's wokism doing these things, not the left. One is a respectable 200+ years old tradition of fighting for the rights of the unfortunate, the other is a rich kids toy trying to "how do you do fellow leftists" its way through the idea space.
Second, why I think you're fundamentally wrong. The idea of "wanting to get along with people" is incoherent. This is just the paradox of tolerance by other words. I, as a person who counts, do not want to say "Xi-Xir" pronouns. Anybody who forces me to do so is not getting along with me. I, as a person who counts, do want to say that Islam (and inventing pronouns) is bullshit, and forcing me to find elaborate ways to not say it is not getting along with me.
You can't get along with all people. Speaking for myself, I can't even find myself getting along with most people, and I find this perfectly okay. You just defined people like me out of existence, because the ideology you're describing as "wanting to get along with people" is abs-fucking-lutely not getting along with me (and I'm far from a unique snowflake).
What you're saying amounts to "This ideology is followed by people who want to get along with people who follow the same ideology", which is trivial and not unique at all. I can tell you, e.g., that Islam's followers get along with each other pretty well, but they generally have terrible difficulties getting along with people of other faiths.
This is just the inverse of the whole thing where white people are said to be complicit in racism if they are not actively anti-racist. (Which turns out to involve a moral blank check written out to Kendi et al.)
What fraction of conservatives or libertarians are standing up against cancellation mobs? Most aren't, both because most of the time you wouldn't even know about such a mob (or much care--how much do I actually care about the latest middle-school drama in the YA publishing industry?), and if you did, you'd be sensibly thinking of protecting your own job and family before any other response.
Art professor shows mediaeval pictures of the Prophet Muhammad in class, after warning that they are about to do so. One student (at least) gets their knickers in a twist, reports the prof, the university fires the prof for "Islamophobia". By showing *Muslim* Persian images in an art history class:
"Aram Wedatalla, a Hamline senior and the president of Muslim Student Association (MSA), was in the class at the time the photos were shared.
“I’m like, ‘this can’t be real,’” Wedatalla told the Oracle. “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
Student appears to be self-described Black and Muslim, so probably an African-American branch of Islam type, not a MENA native (EDIT: going by the photos on this story, she is indeed African-American as is the professor):
If the school administration had a brain and a spine, this sort of story would never come up because it would be "some student complained and the admins had a good laugh about it."
If the school had any brains, they would have bounced the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence for being an idiot.
If Ms. Wedatalla really wants to see a regime where strictest Muslim orthodoxy is practiced, there's a place where such imagery would indeed not be tolerated, and even perhaps would be burned. But Ms. Wedatalla wouldn't be attending college there, either:
These are historical depictions of the Prophet by genuine Muslims. This isn't the same thing as the Danish cartoons. If Ms. Wedatalla is that aggrieved, then the thing to do is have a discussion. But the school caved in on grounds of "a student complained? of course they are in the right!" and Diverse Excellence guy was all "undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic" because, I presume, his job is just to rubberstamp the decision of the kangaroo court.
This is why I bang on about teaching history. Without knowledge, we are at the mercy of whoever can shout the loudest right this minute.
But of course, we shouldn't worry. Things like this are only "a few kids on campus". Well, one kid on campus got a teacher's career ruined.
The USSR, China, pre liberalisation India strike me as strong examples of political programs that purport to give government more power for the good of the people, but 'the people' then de facto inevitably end up being limited to those who hold power in government. This is true at smaller levels of most government programs as well. Public choice theory has good models for it!
I feel that you are talking about three, somewhat related, but essentially different things, muddled together.
The first is "virtue weoponisation", how the belief that you are fighting for good and against evil emboldens you and overrides the mechanisms of you conscience. This is the source of a lot of problematic stuff from religions and ideologies and something to be wary about.
The second is the tendency of people in general, and sociopaths in particular to use whatever justifications they can come up with to appear to be on the side of the goodness and high status.
And there is a third thing of being good-intentioned but wrong about the consequences of your policies.
Your first example talks about the virtue weoponisation, but has little to nothing to do with actual implementation of political program. Your second example is about the implementation of a good-intentioned policy and your conclusion is about the sociopaths justification. You vaguely feel that these things are connected but do not try to figure out an actual mechanism of this connection.
Also there is a problem of your examples not being particularly good. Like, do we really know that mobbing motivated by the target not fully accepting someone in the past is most vicious? How did we come to this conclusion? Is there some analysis that compares the viciousness of mobbing regarding to its motivations?
Similarly, can we really say that well meaning policies tend to harm people they we trying to help more often than ill-meaning policies?
I am confused on whether to commend you on clearly identifying three traits/impulses that interact so well to make virtue signalling a strong strategy for taking more government power and misusing it, or to be surprised that you don't see the implications yourself.
This is odd. The converse that people in high density areas of the US predominatly subscribe to the reverse of each of these is equally odd. As I understand it that's what the term 'culture war' is describing - the emergance of opinions aligned by 'tribe' across a slew of apparently unrelated subjects. Note that the details of the phenomenon you're describing are specifically American, though America's culture footprint is so large that analogous odd polarisation is happening in my country at least.
This post reminds me of the Herman Goering biography The Knight, Death and the Devil, in which the author presented a letter from Goering's wife that was just a huge rambling sentence connected by & marks.
We discuss, among other things: why he thinks transformative AI makes this the most important century, whether he regrets their $30m grant to OpenAI in 2016, how bad the track record of forecasters is, what his success scenario for AI looks like concretely, and whether someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution could have done anything useful even if they knew what was coming.
There's a general observation that to some degree, US drug research funds European healthcare since medicine is more expensive in America.
I wonder if the reason European life quality is generally higher is a generalization of this - the US spends its money and talent making the kind of consumer goods that are easily traded, while european countries have worse private industry but more competent governments. America can export Microsoft computers to Europe a lot more easily than it can import European infrastructure (partly because buy America rules often ban importing things like trains or dredge ships, but mostly because the real important resource is competent administrators and competent Americans prefer private sector jobs).
I have no idea about the main question that you are asking but on a related subject, from my French point of view, it seems very strange that US people do not insist on having things that seems obviously good to me, like reasonably long maternity leave or annual vacations, good public transportations or cheap high quality education. The explanation that I have usually seen proposed for that in France is the American tradition of individualism, which makes people reluctant to subside common goods.
I am aware that this is very cultural, but from my French values background, I can not really understand why a very rich country does not subsidize things like maternity leaves.
The things you mention have the same thing in common -- they require other people to do things for you, either directly in these services provided or indirectly by paying you while you are off enjoying yourself on vacation/bonding with your child.
While there is no monolithic "American" ethos, a lot of the more common strains reject this sort of entitlement mentality.
The standard French explanation for this preference, for no maternity leave or no vacation, is that the American people tradition of individualism makes them reluctant to subside common goods. Do you think it is a correct explanation or do you think it is a bit different?
On a personal note, you really don't think it would be better if all mothers could take a reasonable amount of maternity leave (which would then indeed be subsidized by the community) rather than mothers of limited means being forced to return to work very early? Again I am aware that my preferences are strongly influenced by my culture but the no maternity leave policy feels so strange and wrong to me...
I will also say that from my limited experience (Motorola had a 200mm fab in Toulouse I worked somewhat closely with). French companies have a LOT more "fat" in their workforce. I'd imagine that being away from work there places less of a burden on one's coworkers than it does in the US.
When that fab finally closed down, it was completely empty, all tools idle, and a full workforce with full pay.
Honestly, that sounds like someone trying to fit an unexplained behavior into their preexisting philosophical framework.
There's nothing about individualism that precludes taking money for not working. Maybe a holdover from the "protestant work ethic," or an idea of fairness (that one shouldn't be paid for not providing a good or service) or a kind of courtesy (knowing that the longer one is a way, the more their work will be placed onto their coworkers -- this assumes of course that one's work actually needs to be done).
How do you square the support of paid nonwork with the objection that CEO's don't "earn" their salaries being greater than their employees?
I mean, define "reasonable" here. Maternity leave definitely exists for a lot of companies in America, but there are also ones where it doesn't (especially where workers aren't particularly attached to working for any particular company, and vice versa).
There's also some consideration of "providing maternity leave but *not* paternity leave has sexist consequences": it makes women more expensive on average to hire unless they're already past their childbearing years (because by definition you're not working while on leave), and so you'll get HR pressure to hire fewer young women; it might be restricted to *deniable* pressure if it's illegal, but it'll still be there.
Most of these things end up coming down to a mix of "some people benefit from them being expensive" (also true in France I'm sure), "few competent people in mid level public service jobs" (a differential, I think, in the US there's a much higher tendency for competent people to go into private industry or, if they go for civil service, top jobs only), and lack of public trust. There is also a cultural thing where government services are seen as a thing for lower classes - e.g. US has socializes medicare for poor people but not the middle class. Transit is usually seen as a thing for either the poor or as a job creation tool - people in city hall drive.
Yes, it seems to me that there is indeed a large cultural component but for things like longer vacation and federal maternity leave, it really seems to me that almots everyone "should" want them. For example, wouldn't you like having that?
Yeah, it's the thing I'm saddest about. I think it's actually gotten better in recent years - the norm for standard vacation time in white-collar jobs seems to have shifted from 15days/year to 20ish (plus we got a new federal holiday in Juneteenth), but I do wish it was longer. That said I think Americans tend to be more into work and want long vacations less? But still though.
I took my first three week vacation about ten years back. I got looks from a few people while I was planning it. My mom actually sat me down and talked to me about it. "You know Jon, it's an old saying that if you leave for more than two weeks, your boss might just decide he can do without you." She was legitimately worried about my future.
There is very much a culture of fear here, where you're always one wrong move from being poor. To be fair to my mother, she worked at Walmart until she retired, and for all I know a three week vacation might have been a firing offense. Certainly I don't recall her ever taking more than one week, and rarely that.
I'm not sure what percentage of Americans believe that "good public transportation" will be provided even if we vote to spend the tax dollars. I expect that it is lower than in France.
From a recent local news article: "The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority recently increased the budget for its BART Silicon Valley Phase II extension to a staggering $9.3 billion. That would be more than $1.5 billion for each mile of the six-mile project from the Berryessa station through downtown San Jose to Santa Clara."
$1.5 billion per mile of rail makes public transportation a tough sell. And the $1.5 billion isn't terribly unusual. A study was done to connect Mountain View, CA with Los Gatos CA via the Santa Clara light rail. There is already a highway that connects the two cities. The estimate was $1 billion per mile. We aren't getting that connection :-)
The California High Speed Rail project was approved (by voters !) in 2008 with a projected cost of $33 billion. It would have connected San Franciso/San Jose to Los Angeles and eventually San Diego. Best guess right now is that the thing will cost $100 billion and the first trains will begin running in 2029 ... between Bakersfield and Fresno. I have no idea what an SF->LA date would be. And I fully expect self-driving cars to be working before this thing is finished so I expect the demand to be low.
My expectation is that Americans push less for good public transportation because we don't expect to get it even if we tax ourselves to provide it.
I have not the smallest knowledge about transportation but why on earth a price tag of $1.5 billion per mile??
At a much smaller scale, from a European point of view, the fact that even within a not so large city sidewalks are frequently absent (I expecte them to be reasonably cheap to build!) suggests that there really is a choice or an habit of focusing on car.
I recall when that work was being done, because I had multiple occasions at the time to visit Boston, and it was done in fantastically expensive ways, so as not to perturb the existing city. In the country you would just dig some great big holes, pour a lot of concrete and lay steel, shovel the dirt back and plant trees, and be done with it. Two or three times the final surface area would be closed off for massive construction for several years, but it would be as economical as possible. But when you have to dig small shafts in the least-used overlayer area, lower complex equipment into them, then burrow underground to make vast caverns, line them with concrete and steel, et cetera, the cost goes to the Moon. It's as complex as digging tunnels under mountains[1].
A lack of sidewalks is a choice/habit of focusing on cars. Some nearby communities don't have sidewalks because they want to keep people from outside the community out.
"why on earth a price tag of $1.5 billion per mile??"
I don't know. California has managed to make MANY things very expensive because of permits and licensing and then because of lawsuits (e.g. for environmental impact reasons). A huge (though still minority!) chunk of housing costs in California are due to permits and licensing. This is totally a *choice*, but it seems to be one that Californians, in aggregate, are okay with. And housing is private rather than public so this isn't Californians hating on public goods and services.
But this doesn't change the fact that at these prices public transportation isn't going to make much progress.
> A lack of sidewalks is a choice/habit of focusing on cars. Some nearby communities don't have sidewalks because they want to keep people from outside the community out.
It also seems like a consequence of the US's patchwork of (often) tiny local governments. In other parts of the world, your local community doesn't have its own government that can decide whether or not to build footpaths, that kind of decision is made at a much higher level.
Similarly, one of the reasons that public transport in the Bay Area doesn't make any sense is that the whole area has nine county governments and one hundred city governments, all of whom need to be bought off. Why the fuck are there two incompatible rail systems down the two sides of the Bay which don't even connect, plus a third one in the North Bay which doesn't connect to anything at all? Some stupid combination of reasons involving local governments.
At least in the US local governments don't build sidewalks. They're built and maintained (or not) by the landowner, because they're on private land, although once you build them the public acquires an easement (meaning you can't put up a gate and charge tolls, or forbid your ex-wife from using it). Interestingly, the landowner also acquires a heightened liability: if I trip on a badly-maintained sidewalk in front of your house, I can sue you for negligence and recover for my injuries, just as if you invited me inside for a visit and I fell through a hole in your foyer.
A number of these are that the US has made different tradeoffs.
I'll pick you "cheap high quality education" example because I understand that a bit.
My understanding is that the "cheap high quality education" in France is available only to those high school students who score well on standardized tests. Maybe the top 10-15%? California, to pick a state with which I'm familiar, has state run (and subsidized!) schools, the Cal State system, where the *average* incoming freshman scores in the bottom 40% [except that the Cal State system has now gone 'test optional' so the evidence that these incoming students are in the bottom 1/2 is vanishing].
Cal State could easily be *free* for California residents if we simply took the allocated money and decided that only the top, say, 25% would be educated there. But California doesn't want to do that so the money necessary to educate for free the top-XX% is spread over a much larger pool of (much less academically qualified) students. The state spending per student is less (because of math ...) so the students have to pay non-zero tuition dollars.
California's public universities *were* tuition free 4-5 decades ago when a much smaller percentage of Californians went to college.
>My understanding is that the "cheap high quality education" in France is available only to those high school students who score well on standardized tests. Maybe the top 10-15%?
No, public universities (some specific schools, private of public, are more restrictive) are open to anyone who graduate highschool. Tuition, as of half a decade ago, was of ~450€/year without scholarship, and down to ~4€/year with a scholarship. People are easily failed (iirc around 1/3rd don't pass each of the first 2 years, then it decrease), through standards are constantly diminishing.
Only when you apply for a master will you find selection (though at the time, the criteria to be selected in my comp-eng master was "managed to show up to apply, & find some deadbeat teacher to provide you with a 3rd semester project").
The unfortunate consequence, however, is that when you pay 5*400€ for a master, you end up wit ha degree that's worth 5*400€. And since it's the state footing the rest of the bill, the state get to decide how much will be invested in higher education.
Still, I think it's a decent system for everyone. Students get diplomas worth a bit less than american one, but at a tiny fraction of the cost, teachers get paid a bit less than US ones, but the US ones are also getting the shit end of the stick, and it keep cost disease at bay. The only issues to solve are :
1- Making foreign students actually pay what it cost to educate them. We're plagued by the prodigal childrens of the upperclass of Africa & Asia, extracting more money from them or disuading them from enlisting would be a net benefit
2- So many man-year wasted in failing the first 2 years. You got people actually completing their master 7, 8, even 10 years after graduating highschool, because it's soo easy & cheap to just fuck around.
The current system in France is that universities are accessible almost free of charge (less than 1000 euros per year) to almost all students who have obtained their baccalauréat. There is a very selective parallel system for the top 5-10% of students, which is also almost free, but the normal university education is of very high quality.
The system is very far from perfect. French universities lack money and are often in a serious state of disrepair, the level of failure among first year university students is extremely high (which is probably expected given that it is a very cheap education with almost no selection at the entrance...), and some sectors like business do not have valued university education. And living expenses are somewhat subsidized by the state for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, but the stipend they receive is not enough to live on.
But... it seems to me better that almost any student can go to college and graduate with little debt, if they have a minimum, not very high, academic ability. (Again, I'm aware that it's largely because this is the system I'm used to that I find it better!).
"The current system in France is that universities are accessible almost free of charge (less than 1000 euros per year) to almost all students who have obtained their baccalauréat. There is a very selective parallel system for the top 5-10% of students, which is also almost free, but the normal university education is of very high quality."
So, speaking to California:
*) We have a community college system (that feeds into the generally well regarded University of California system as well as the okay-ish CalState system). This is available to pretty much anyone and is very cheap. With a bit of care, two years of classes at the community college will allow one to transfer to UC or CalState with junior (3rd year) standing. Anyone with a pulse who is over 18-years old can go to a community college.
*) California doesn't have the top 5% - top 10% selective parallel system which is almost free. California *does* have a top ~10% university system (the University of California system) that WAS free in the 1960s and 1970s when many fewer students in California went to college. Because the same subsidy is available to the students who are in the bottom 50% of academic ability there are many more students to subsidize rather than just the top 10%. Tuition is no longer free.
If one pursues the community college -> CalState route then the total tuition over four years is probably in the ~$15K range total. One doesn't NEED to go deeply in debt. Lots of kids *do* go deeply into debt, but for Californians this is not required.
And, yes, allowing kids to graduate with little debt is highly valuable! But many students (and/or their parents) choose to go to much more expensive out-of-state or private colleges. But for the more populous states with most of the students this isn't required.
My son went to a local community college for two years and then transferred to UCSB for the final two years. Rough tuition cost: $4K for the community college and $25K - $30K for UCSB. UCSB also had housing costs because it was 300 miles from home.
A high school friend of mine sent his kid (same age) to Northeastern at ~$50K/year.
I wasn't going to do that. But, obviously, people do.
A neighbor is considering sending their daughter to Baylor (tuition: $50K/year) instead of to in-state University of California colleges.
So, some parts of the US don't have inexpensive public universities. But the states with most of the population DO.
Were *I* benevolent-dictator-for-life the state 4-year universities would only accept students from the top ~30% of the test taking pool. This would result in shutting down probably 1/2 of the campuses (maybe more). This would allow free tuition for the students who DID get in. In addition, I'd keep the community colleges and allow transfers (just like today).
But this is NOT what most Californians want. And it creates unpleasant demographic differences in the student population -- specifically it would result in many more black and Hispanic students not attending the in-state 4-year universities. This is politically untenable even if it is "better."
The most cost effective gains in life expectancy and QoL aren't from novel cutting edge treatments but implementing basic known things like childhoodvvaccination and primary health care well at scale. So US innovation on medicine would seem not to make much of a difference
But overall yes and this is also true of transportation - both of these contribute to lower US lifespan (which is caused by a mix of general public health issues and car crashes - the US spends a lot on big cars, which increases car fatalities).
I have no economics knowldege at all but I am not convinced that all that we mean by "standard of living" is captured by "consumption of goods". Access to health care and education readily come to mind as important categories not included.
If you spend money on health care by paying doctors, buying medicine, building hospitals, you have added to the consumption of goods.
If you spend money on education by paying teachers, buying books, building schools, you have added to the consumption of goods.
Economists spend a lot of time and resources trying to accurately account of these things.
Despite the media narratives, US health care, though flawed, is better than European health care by many metrics and on par with it on many others, and worse one some. General access is one where the US excels compared to Europeans - its much easier and quicker for us to find doctors and get appointments, especially with specialists.
On education, things are quite complicated as there are much greater differences in the systems used in the US and Europe.
I'm not convinced that "European life quality is generally higher". I think this is an impression that one might get when hanging around in the sort of places that tourists go and doing the sort of things that tourists do ("ooh look at this shiny train"), but for actual day-to-day life quality it's much less clear.
In particular, at pretty much any income quantile, your living situation in Europe is probably going to be very much worse (smaller/crummier) than the living situation of an equivalent-quantile American.
My gut (as a biased UK citizen) is that the mean standard of living in the US Is higher, but so is the variance. Specifically I think it's harder (but definitely not impossible) to have the rug totally pulled out from under you in the UK by medical debt or lack of employment protection.
This is all mostly anecdotal, so let me know if you think I've drunk the Kool-Aid.
As an American, I think you're basically right. Especially w/re health care and medical costs. I'm pretty sure *most* Americans get better health care than most Brits, with less hassle and with more money left over at the end, but you'd rather be in the bottom 25% in the UK than in the US.
If you are at the bottom in the US you are eligible for Medicaid which would be comparable to many European health systems. The exact eligibility requirements vary by state.
I think it's a weirder picture, and it's more like you'd want to be in the bottom 1% in the UK, the next 2-10% in the US, and the the 11th-50th % in the UK. The UK is more like the US than other European countries are, but it's still different and not always in a European direction. If you're likely to be street-homeless, you're better off in the UK, but you'd probably rather be very to somewhat poor in the US, working-class (US terminology)-lower middle class in the UK, and well-off in the US.
The UK, and most European countries, are ok at dealing with street-homelessness (in the sense that if you're willing to hide your drugs somewhere overnight, you can probably find a bed in a shelter and at least one meal a day), while the US doesn't seem to be. The UK (especially Southern England) has huge problems with affordable rented housing, and the UK has pretty low welfare, so when you move a notch up you're better off in the US; healthcare-wise, you'd probably rather be on Medicaid than using the NHS.
Moving up the ladder, it's all the stuff you'll remember from late 2000s reddit - maternity leave, free healthcare, employment rights (this one's a pretty huge gap - in the UK and most of Europe, employers can't fire people without a good reason) etc.
Once you're in the salaried-worker bracket, you'd rather be in the US as your healthcare will be better, you have reasonable employment-security, your money will go further and you'll have more of it. In the UK you avoid the catastrophic risk of suddenly losing your job, healthcare and home all in one day though, so there's that.
I'm no so sure about consumer goods, but it's undeniably true that European standards of living have significantly depended for a long time on US technological advances. Europeans often act like they have things better than Americans, but without American technological advances they would have much more backward societies in the same way that their "better" healthcare systems would be worse without US medical advances (in both medications and technologies). Which is to say, the only reason they can stifle industry to the extent they do is because they let America do the heavy lifting for them. And of course, there's the issue of military spending - they've been free riding on the US military for many decades. The US dollar's reserve status does see some benefit flow back to the US, though this benefit accrues very unequally to parties in the US.
> A country that produces technology isn’t “subsidising” another that doesn’t. They trade for it.
No, they trade for _stuff_. Technology is usually "culturally appropriated" for free once any patent period expires. Airbus, for instance, didn't pay the Wright Brothers' estate royalties for the use of the aircraft; Europe simply stole that technology from the US.
I'm not really complaining, of course, the US stole a lot of technology from Europe as well; this is hardly a one-way transfer. (From Europe and the US to just about everywhere else in the world, on the other hand...)
I'm too lazy to look at it in more detail but using number of Nobel Prize as a proxy for scientific research we get that the US are worth about the same as Germany+France+Sweden+UK*, which means that 1) it's unclear the US are better per capita at scientific research and 2) even if the US are really contributing more the situation is far from the "Europeans are free riding".
*European Nobel prize are probably more ancient on average than American's I assume. Although for example for Fields medals France has done better than any other country over the past 30 years. Should be easy to check out for someone more motivated.
Filter your Nobel tally for the past 50 years (say), and see what you get. (I don't know - I'm curious!).
Certainly pre-WW2 the Nobels would have been totally dominated by Europe with America nowhere, but that was a different world, and including it in the sample will skew the results.
"I wonder if the reason European life quality is generally higher is a generalization of this - the US spends its money and talent making the kind of consumer goods that are easily traded, while european countries have worse private industry but more competent governments."
I'd be cautious about the 'consumer goods that are easily traded.' Europe is competitive in cars (or whatever comes after competitive ...) and jet engines. ASML is one of the 'big five' of semi-conductor equipment vendors. Airbus has competed well with Boeing, and for the past 3-4 years has managed to miss out on Boeing's screwups (737-MAX, KC 46, ...)
What Europe is NOT competitive in, in general, is tech. Europe has no equivalent to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix. Europe *used* to have competitive semiconductor fabs, but not any more. ArianeSpace was a match for ULA (United Launch Alliance), but isn't for SpaceX.
Europe does have *some* large tech companies: ASML, ARM and SAP come to mind.
But the difference isn't necessarily things such as cars or trains, but in tech developed in the past ~40 years. The older, established companies in older, established industries are doing fine. Europe just doesn't have much presence in the current tech/information industrial revolution.
I agree that it's not quite all or nothing (this goes both ways - US government services are worse than western European ones but they're also not third world levels).
Spotify is Swedish I think and while far from Netflix or Amazon in cultural impact and financial power it seems to be pretty relevant. Only example I can think of on top of my head though.
I'll observe that Spotify's market cap is around $16B.
[And it is an observation, not some passive-aggressive commentary! One way to score this is that Europe does have more than just those three tech companies. Another is ... we are under $20B in market cap and still in Europe's top-10 ...]
One other way to look at the US-Europe difference is to consider the incorporation date for, say, the largest 15 or 20 companies in a country. The list of largest US companies tend to have a lot more "young" companies than equivalent European stock exchanges.
The US list looks something like this (from a month or so ago):
1976) Tech? Apple
1975) Software Microsoft
1998) Software Google
1994) Tech? Amazon
2003) Cars Tesla
1983) Berkshire Hathaway [1964 may be a more realistic date]
1974) United Health [legally, 1977]
1882) Oil&Gas Exxon Mobil [as Standard Oil]
1886) J&J
1958) Finance Visa
1962) Consumer Goods Walmart
1877) Banking JPMorgan Chase [Chase National Bank]
I think it's quite clear that the US are better at making big companies than Europe, especially in tech. What I'm not convinced (see my other comment) is that they are so much better at research that European are essentially free riding on them.
I think it's possibly more tech-company specific, and boils down to the weird mixture of quasi-service, quasi-manufacturing that 80s/90s tech involved meaning a European company couldn't have expanded outside its home country (eg. Acorn in the UK), but the US ones could get big enough to fund the big enough to go export.
The newer tech companies are probably more to do with immigration, ease of doing business and cultural factors in the US; Europe doesn't have the same "start a business in your garage" mentality, resulting in fewer people starting businesses in their garages.
"The newer tech companies are probably more to do with immigration, ease of doing business and cultural factors in the US; Europe doesn't have the same 'start a business in your garage' mentality, resulting in fewer people starting businesses in their garages."
I am sure that cultural factors play a part. Possibly a huge part -- does Europe have a Stanford equivalent in the sense the "Stanford -> startup" is a well understood pipeline?
One catch is that "tech-company specific" covers a LOT of the global economy now, so competing in it poorly isn't terribly great. It seems to me to be a bit similar to not doing well at "industrial revolution company specific" in the 1800s ... agriculture is still a thing, but missing out on the new bit of the economy isn't going to be a win.
*Historically* Europe was *much* better at research than the US.
Traditional European sciency folks include Newton, Liebniz, Euler, Pascal, Einstein ... with lots of rigorous mathematically sound work.
US heroes tend to be: Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers. Lots of *pragmatic* engineering without a lot of concern about rigor or general theories.
The US imported a bunch of sciencey folks as Mr. Adolph drove lots of them away from Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s, but the *culture* of science and of treating science with high respect is much more a European cultural attribute than an American one.
Measuring science output is tougher than measuring corporate market capitalisations, but I see no reason to believe the Europeans are doing less (or worse) science than Americans.
Sure, American dominance in science is very much a `post WW2 thing.'
So what? Chap who discovered fire and wheel guy are probably the most important scientists ever, and they probably lived in Africa. Should we conclude then that Africa is the world's leading scientific continent?
When Newton and Leibniz were working, the not-yet-US was an agricultural colony with the same population as Springfield, Idaho. Literally anyone inventing or discovering literally anything would be punching above their weight.
Notably though their platofrm is entirely based on US technology and the difference between them and American streaming services is really only the interface. Life wouldn't be so different if they disappeared.
At least in the UK I'm not aware of anyone with such a broad catalogue. A handful of good engineers could build a technical competitor without too much trouble, but negotiating licensing seems like it would be much harder.
Spotify is a natural monopoly, no? If it disappeared tomorrow, some other company would fill its niche before the year was out, but Spotify became the streaming platform that "musicians hate but mostly are afraid to not be on" first. Nobody can really compete with it as long as it exists.
Plenty of competitors existed (or exist still with a tiny market share) before spotify (eg: Deezer). And yet Spotify came and won. I can't tell why, but it must have been better at pleasing consumers or attracting artists. Maybe other services would fill in at the same level of utility, but if so, why didn't they before Spotify won the market?
Same argument, in fact, as for Amazon & co. Calling something a "natural monopoly" a posteriori fails to explain why this particular competitor won the market.
I signed up for Mainfold Markets after reading the recent Prediction Markets FAQ post. While I largely agree with the case made there for prediction markets, I am not at all impressed by Manifold.
Obviously play money isn’t ideal, but given the legal constraints around that, it’s understandable. My two main issues are that 1) interesting markets are hard to discover and 2) the service gives so many freebies it’s nearly impossible to “go broke” and weed out poor forecasters.
Regarding the discoverability issue, there’s just so many low-quality or irrelevant markets with vague resolution criteria to wade through (the worst offender is the “will I complete X task?”, where “I” is the market creator. I understand why someone might want to make that market, but I wish I could block all of them. I’m aware of the topics/groups sorting, but there’s no way to subscribe to notifications or updates for a single group (that I know of).
A suggestion for anyone on Adderall who's having trouble getting their prescription filled due to the shortage: Talk with your doctor about switching to dextroamphetamine. It's chemically similar, and there is not a shortage. I believe Scott's written some favorable stuff about this med -- Scott, please correct me if I'm wrong.
London is now, by far, the most religious part of the U.K. From this Reddit thread on regional religion in the U.K. only 26% of London is atheist compared to 54% in Scotland, 51% in the south west of England, and 51% in Wales. Those three regions are majority white. Is the trend to secularisation reversing and will that also happen in the US.
I'm fairly confident secularisation is still happening to immigrants (and moreso, the children of immigrants), just more slowly and less visibly. The people I've known in my generation who would show up as 'Muslim' on a census form mostly have a 'religious sincerity score' that is in reality pretty close to zero, it's just something they do performatively to fit in with family/cultural expectation and will likely fade further with more generations, just as it has with those who used to put down 'Christian' out of inertia but now increasingly don't.
Having multiple small religious groups is very different from having a single large one, because they will have their own interest in keeping institutions impartial. So it's unlikely they'd reduce secularism.
My guess is that "Is the trend to secularization reversing?" isn't high-resolution enough to capture what's going on. There seems to be a Western trend toward secularization which is driven by natives converting to atheism, agnosticism or apathy, and then also a separate trend of religious people immigrating to the West. So the trend of people losing their religion might be unchanging, or even accelerating, and statistically it might still look like desecularization because of the other trend.
Not precisely correct; London is the most religiously diverse part of the UK which bumps up the figures. If you pick an area where the alternatives are "Christian, Muslim, culturally Christian but functionally no religion" then you'll have the active Christians (i.e. turn up to church for more than a wedding) being lower than the "yeah well me mum was CoE but I don't bother going" lot. If you pick an area where there are ten different religions not just Christianity, then the profile changes.
I looked up the 2021 census, pulled the figures for London out, and here we go. A lot of people didn't bother answering with any particular religion, so it's hard to tell if this is "none", "atheist", or just "couldn't be bothered". I checked the survey responses against the population figures for London, so they seem to be fairly accurate, and my calculations seem to be agreeing with the census returns (they used 1 decimal place, I used 2):
London remained the most religiously diverse region of England. "Christian" was still the most common response in London (40.7%, 3.6 million of all usual residents). Over a quarter (25.3%, 2.2 million) of London's population identified with a religion other than "Christian", up from 22.6%, 1.8 million, in 2011. The next most common religious groups in London were "Muslim" (15.0%, up from 12.6% in 2011) and "Hindu" (5.1%, up from 5.0% in 2011)."
Population of London 2021 8,799,800.00
Census results 2021 8,722,298.00
By "responses as percentage of population", the top three are:
Christian 40.66%
No religion 26.94%
Muslim 14.99%
Remember, "Christian" here covers everything from "I go to church three times a week and am involved in the various ministries and groups" to "Christmas and Easter" types. We can increase the "no religion" percentage a little by including all those under "no religion":
No religion
Agnostic 6,074.00 0.07%
Atheist 2,333.00 0.03%
Free Thinker 41.00 0.00%
Humanist 1,301.00 0.01%
No religion 2,370,641.00 26.94%
Realist 9.00 0.00%
Total: 2,380,399.00 27.05%
And finally the panoply of religious, spiritual, non-religious and who the heck knows experience in London town, where the Satanists are beating out the Scientologists and a few stern Herbert Spencerians linger on 😁
I think because of a lot of black African and Afro-Caribbean influence, but that's just guessing on my part. A lot of it too could be "cultural Christianity" e.g. Irish, Italian, Polish Catholics putting down "Catholic/Christian" even if they're non-practicing.
I had so much fun with that, I had a look at the data for Wales and that is a lot more "no religion/didn't state any":
Total responses 3,107,487.00
Christian 1,354,773.00 43.60%
No religion 1,446,392.00 46.55%
Not stated 195,043.00 6.28%
Total "none" 52.82%
All religions 1,466,052.00 47.18%
If we take the "no religion" and the "not stated" (as not having enough interest to answer this, no religion, or didn't care) both meaning "no religion", then the non-religious do have the majority at 53%. All religions are 47%, Christianity is 44%. So definitely a swing there from "Christian" to "none".
Population of Wales (or at least the survey responses) is only 36% that of London, so we can see the effect a bigger, more diverse population has on such figures. The Welsh and London "nones" aren't that far apart - 1,641,435 in total for Wales, 2,380,399 for London so Welsh figures for 'secularism' are about 69% of London ones.
But the percentages in total population wildly differ - 53% for Wales, 27% for London. So does that mean London is 'more religious' or 'less secular' than Wales? I think somebody better versed in sociology needs to look at this, rather than merely taking percentages, since the effect is bigger in the smaller population.
EDIT: And in Wales, the Satanists are *still* beating out the Scientologists 😈
Surely this is just an artifact of the higher percentage of immigrants in London? Seems like it could be determined easily enough. But not by me, too lazy.
Yes. The question remains open though. Will religious immigration and birthrates overcome increases in secularism in the U.K. and other countries.
Of course the demographics are different in every country.
Another thing that could be happening here is that a cultural Muslim is more likely to declare themself Muslim than a cultural Christian Christian. But the question is directly about being atheist or non religious.
It's really a question of "observing" or "practising" a religion, rather than just identifying with it culturally. In France, for example, most new immigrants are from poor, rural areas where religion is a basic structuring factor in life, and they bring these attitudes with them. New mosques are opened all the time, therefore, whilst churches close. In addition, "religious" in such context often means believing that society should be governed by religious principles even if they conflict with the law: hence the fuss over such things as the teaching of Evolution.
By my breakdown of the 2021 census responses, Wales is 44% Christian and 2% Muslim (rounding off). London is 41% Christian and 15% Muslim.
So not that huge a difference in Christianity but yes, a big difference in Islam. But I think the major difference is the population difference, London is a lot more densely populated than Wales so that skews the results. Though it would indeed be one of those unexpected results if big city cosmopolitan multicultural London was a lot more religious than the valleys!
Last week the excellent ACX Grants-supported publication Seeds of Science posted the explainer piece I prepared on a technical article published in Frontiers in Pharmacology in October. Topic: [putative] Antivirals from plants.
Epistemic status would have to be seen as hypothesis-generating (i.e. earliest stage of evidence hierarchy), but the underlying metabolic mechanism we shine a llight on has a lot more literature evidence underpinning it, as we show.
The reviewers (Gardeners in SoS parlance whose comments are at article bottom) seemed to enjoy reading, hope you do too :)
In the manifesto, I talk about how startup cities x network states x defi rails can further technological progress in areas held back by overregulation.
"What’s holding back technological progress are outdated “layer-0” guardrails. Layer-0 innovation, however, is on the horizon, which create new possibilities for startups to disrupt sclerotic industries."
Okay, I read that and my immediate thought? "Scam". Which is unfair to you but given the rash of recent "uh-oh, all those disruptive new technology blockchain outpacing traditional financial industry red tape" not turning out so well, therefore maybe cool it on "we're smashing the rules!" and more emphasis on "we solemnly promise we won't blow all your investment on beanbags and luxury holiday homes for our parents".
""startup-like" jurisdictions such as Puerto Rico, Wyoming, Estonia, or Palau are layer-0 innovations"
> if you invest in a blockchain product based on a Bay Area House Party post, then you will lose all your money faster than anyone has ever lost all of their money before in all of history.
Woah, so if I can find a way to bet against such a product, I'll get rich quick... Wait, but Bob and Ramchandra mentioned anti-antistocks, so by the above quote that's doomed too, so I need anti-anti-antistocks.
Here's the abstract: Noam Chomsky’s idea of linguistic competence suggests a new approach to understanding how LLMs work. This approach requires careful analysis of text. Such analysis indicates that ChatGPT has explicit control over sophisticated discourse skills: 1) It possesses the capacity to specify high-level structures that regulate the organization of language strings into specific patterns: e.g. conversational turn-taking, story frames, film interpretation, and metalingual definition of abstract concepts. 2) It is capable of analogical reasoning in the interpretation of films and stories, such as Spielberg’s Jaws and A.I., and Tezuka’s Astro Boy stories. It must establish an analogy between some abstract interpretive theory (e.g. the ideas of Rene Girard) and people and events in a story. 3) It has some understanding of abstract concepts such as justice and charity. Such concepts can be defined over concepts that exhibit them (metalingual definition). ChatGPT recognizes suitable stories and can revise them. 4) ChatGPT can adjust its level of discourse to accommodate children of various ages. Finally, much of ChatGPT’s discourse seems formulaic in a way similar to what Parry/Lord found in oral epic.
How can a company 'censor' the output of one of its own products? Censorship implies a (human) third party- I can at least see the arguments for being 'censored' on social media, but there is no person trying to speak through ChatGPT. Obviously there have to be some kind of limits on what it can say (it can't tell a user fuck you or call them racial slurs, probably can't write a pro-Nazi screed, etc.)- just a question of where one draws the line
I've been taking Silexan for anxiety (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety) for two weeks now, and it has been surprisingly effective for me. The anxiety is still there, but it's much less overwhelming than it had been. I skipped a day once and the anxiety was notably worse. Add 1 to your sample of anecdata!
Related anecdata, I couldn't find silexan but took lavender oil capsules for a while. No noticeable improvement on anxiety. And weird lavender tasting burps.
Glad it works well for you. The survey asked about this and although some people share your experience, it's atypical - just like everything else, most people see no effect and a few people say it's great for them.
As hi explains, it stems from a pithy quote commonly found on fishing apparel, which has been riffed on in various ways to produce e.g. "WOMEN HAVE INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCES, THE MINDS OF FISH ARE UNKNOWABLE".
There is a common humorous t-shirt, worn by fishing enthusiasts, that states "Women want me. Fish fear me."
There has been a joke going around about a utilitarian who breeds large numbers of shrimp, which he keeps very happy, as an alternative to other attempts to increase happiness in the world, such as giving to charity, or doing volunteer work.
I'd tell you to just lurk more, but really it's probably a good thing that you're avoiding social media enough that you don't get these jokes.
What is the best explanation / model of serendipity that doesn’t involve reducing it to sample bias or selection bias or some other bias but accepts that there is such a thing as serendipity. Let’s define serendipity as something like life altering luck or fortune that seems or feels providential and yet also involves some amount of agency
I think the agency comes from having an open enough mind and enough slack to do something when serendipity comes knocking - how many people miss opportunities because they don't see them? how many people miss them because they can't afford the initial investment of time and energy?
Of course, keeping your eyes open and aiming to have slack in your life don't guarantee that you will get lucky in a major way, but I think minor bits of serendipity (eg. making a new friend) are common enough that the practice will pay off far more often than not.
Yeah there's probably habits that can be developed that increase your sample size of potential opportunities, so increase the overall number you get. Eg it would be serendipity to meet someone at a party who offers you a job in am ideal area, but you can make that more likely by going to parties where people like that might exist and talking to lots of people.
This reminds of Isaac Asimov’s Psychohistory where Harry Seldon is able to predict with high certainty that someone like the Mule will come along.
Are you looking for a model to explain/predict “expected” anomalies? You’d have to be willing to accept deviations from the norm in both directions though. Not just serendipitous ones.
No, Seldon /can't/ predict the Mule will come along, that's the entire point of the Mule. He throws off the entire Plan by being a mutant and outside of the bounds of psychohistorical prediction. In order to do psychohistory "properly" you need to be looking at the movements of entire civilizations, it can't predict jack about individuals. So it also can't predict "something unexpected happens here", because if it did it would throw everything else off.
That's part of why the Second Foundation exists, and then the sequels just keep throwing stuff psychohistory can't predict at them.
Donald Kingsbury did a nice sequel to the original Foundation trilogy (with the serial numbers not so much filed off as slightly buffed), in which the Mule-equivalent was a one-off (rather than being followed up by Gaia, etc.), set in Second Empire more or less along the lines Seldon and the Second Foundation might have envisioned. The book, "Psychohistorical Crisis", deals with the first real challenge to the rule of a system that can accurately project and respond to future threats.
If you consider an immense number of events some strikingly weird things will happen. Someone eventually beats the 1 chance in 292 million odds and wins the Power Ball.
Jung read an awful lot into a knife in a drawer fracturing at a particular moment. This sort of thing just happens once in a while. Different materials expand and contract with varying temperatures at different rates.
I had a mason jar with metal bolts inside explode while we were watching The Exorcist. We giggled and shrugged but nobody thought Satan was involved.
Other Google Forms I’ve filled out have sent me an email upon submission, saying what was filled out. It looks like Scott might not have set that up here, which is unfortunate. Maybe there’s a way to do it retroactively though.
One other advantage of that feature is it also lets submitters edit their answers. I was going through my answers just now (I had noted them down in Excel, since I had been worried about this) and realized I had answered the inverse of one of the questions posed (i.e. I said 90% where I meant 10%).
An interlocutor once reviewed boilerplate descriptions of the four major Myers-Briggs categories and complained that it was so biased -- they made one category sound so great and the others sound so horrible. Of course, all of the descriptions were neutral; the bias was in his own mind.
It's possible that Garcia Martinez is trying to get you to see how the "chaos monkeys" think and feel about themselves and the world, and you're discovering you don't like them.
I read it a few years ago. I think that he was deliberately trying to be as Hunter S Thompon-esque as possible- after all, his goal is to be controversial and sell books. Oddly I thought that he did that more in the first half of the book, then dialed it down or lost steam in the second half.
I hated his writing style and disliked the book, then discovered his other writings and I think they're fantastic. He's a genuinely smart guy who's good at synthesizing different fields and making novel social observations. Just reinforces me for that he was trying really, really hard to be a Silicon Valley Tucker Max in his book. Anyways, I don't recommend the book but do recommend almost anything else that he's written
If this comment were an Amazon review it would be in the vanishingly thin tail of those most often voted helpful. I can imagine it wedged between a stack of five star reviews by wannabe Silicon Valley types and one star reviews by people who hated the protagonist, its three stars marking a thin previous signal in the midst of the noise.
I met Antonio at a startup poker game years ago. I think he sees himself as something of “a man from an older time.” He said he wrote it in a style that he compared to something like an old sailor’s novel.
“Likable” or “unlikeable” is clearly in the eye of the beholder, though, right? Some people love Trump. Some people really hate him. Is he “likeable?”
I think that "likability" goes out the window when politics is involved anyway. It's almost impossible to find someone likeable when they're actively implementing a political program that you despise.
Someone like Tom Hanks is probably pretty universally likeable. But if he became President and implementing whatever the fuck his political agenda may be, then he would undoubtedly be hated by half the population almost immediately.
Joe Biden would probably seem like a perfectly nice guy if he were a retired gas station owner who had never entered politics.
The author compares himself to Hunter S. Thompson in a Vox interview, which I think would explain what's going on. He portrayed himself as somewhat unlikable.
You are suggesting. We're do you have to be in life to get something different? I understand and then it doesn't matter. I just wrote something without thinking about any of it. I never want to say anything in person or typing. I never wanted to sound like anyone because I am only what I think. I could sit around and beat myself up of make myself feel bad because someone had a thought. When it comes to needing to be aware of what I'm going to say. Words on earth will always be followed with more words. Say something good to someone today or don't. It's like asking me if a tree falls in the woods.....? I would stop you right their and tell you i wasn't there so why would you celebrate sence with something so common.
Would you pay $1 a month for really good podcast Adblock? What about $10?
$10 nope, $1 maybe. Most of that maybe is because I don’t like subscriptions. If it were possible to get into the epistemic state where I believed that paying $100 would mean I only had to listen to single-digit podcast ads in the next decade, I would gladly pay it, but it seems unlikely I could reach that epistemic state even if the product actually existed.
Per this idea they in fact are (in the sense of having qualia subjectively experienced by their constituent matter in a manner determined by and inextricably linked to its current physical state), they just aren't self-aware. Arguing against the proposition that everything is (to some extremely primitive degree) conscious by rhetorically asking "why isn't x conscious?" is begging the question, wouldn't you agree?
Context?
Does anyone know how, exactly, the use of semaglutide as a weight loss drug got popularized? Scott started writing his article on it before Elon Musk endorsed it, so it isn't Musk, first and foremost.
So, as anyone here gotten caught in the California flooding?
Scott, are you aware that you were cited three times in a just-published takedown of common good constitutionalism in Harvard Law Review? https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/136-Harv.-L.-Rev.-861.pdf
I don't think that most people are even aware of when and where they are cited in general.
Perhaps imprecise phrasing on my part. I meant it as "I thought you might be interested to know that...". Considering that the article in question is in a field of study a bit far removed from the remit of this blog.
Historically, how many places have actively advertised for immigrants? I know that Texas did when it was part of Spain and Mexico and when it was an independent country (not so much recently tho). What other places have?
I don't know if this counts, but some of the railway companies in the US advertised (and subsidized) some immigrants from England and Scandinavia to move to the plain states and be given farmland near their railroad lines.
They wanted to ensure there was adequate demand along the newly constructed lines, to help them become more profitable more quickly.
Back in the 19th century, Canadian authorities were very keen to settle the prairies with Europeans so the area wouldn't be de facto claimed by the US. They even hired agents in Europe who persuaded whole villages to emigrate to the New World en masse. I expect in the course of this campaign they published plenty of advertisements.
Rhodesia after WWII also went out of its way to attract white settlers.
Doug Saunders' *Maximum Canada*, which strongly influenced Matt Yglesias' *One Billion Americans*, goes into a lot of detail about Canada's ambivalent attitude towards immigrations in the 19th century.
I am pretty sure the Mormons did early on, in particular for wives.
The Statue of Liberty has the "give me your refuse" plaque.
Where can one see how one did in the Astral Codex prediction contest from last year?
I've been talking about the importance of teaching adult literacy for a long time, and it seems like I'm talking into a blind spot, as though people generally believe that if you didn't learn how to read in school, it's hopeless.
A man who's teaching himself to read at age 33.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-28/learning-to-read-one-tiktok-at-a-time
His TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@oliverspeaks1/video/7186741515685858603
The NAACP is pushing phonics:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/12/27/phonics-reading-virginia-naacp/
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/197894/The-real-question-is-why-he-decided-at-age-33-to-learn
My facebook discussion: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid02WjwnmawAmHdaF5yv16J1wQxjFCLHLMASyN5d3GY8DgCTAeooBor5Wg9HKSxKrgChl
We have TV ads for adult literacy programs every so often in Australia.
Do we still? I remember the old ones, but I haven't heard that one-three-double-oh-six-triple-fiiiiive-oh-six jingle in ages.
I wanted to say hello. I have been traveling in my whole life to get here. Impartial, I would like to place 5% of the blame for my being late on opinions. If I had a dream it would be. May opinion never get between us. We are all faced with with the daunting task of coading and decoding information in the real world experience. I believe the unhealthy opinion is born when we are so quick to want to say something. Not speaking toward any one here. Just speaking for my life. When I take information from someone I fuses it or reject it by what I am receiving from the person. I tend to not want to say anything. Except I always want to engage in the opinion when it comes to just. That right there needs to be destroyed. I can't act that way. I seem to find myself in some what of what top gun is about. Just as dangerous due to I'm the pilot and the aircraft. If you crash their is no coming back. I understand that I have disorder when it is coming from crowd that doesn't see it that way. Wow it's a wonder their are not as many names for disorders as their are people. Wait they give us names at birth. Since we run out of names the number we have is the our disorders indentation. I truly try to be a better me than the person I was yesterday. I tried to stay the same but as each day I pass threw I can't be like anything that who I believe I want to be. I'm guessing that is why we say love by the code. Love is only a word. How will you know it if all you do Is hear it. If I say die do you die? I say live it goes off and dies. I just do what I can when I see it. I speak positive and I try to be respectful by smiling and staying quiet when it comes to those who are people to take from. My everyone live one way or other. See you on the Battle field of. Fight well. Who ever you may be. Be it. So that we may always see where you are.
No offense, but is this a bot post, or have you been diagnosed with schizophrenia?
You know, Carlos, it's really quite possible that this person does have schizophrenia. It's not a rare disorder. If it's a bot post, what would be the point of sending the bot here? The post is not at all offensive, and is way to disorganized to be an effort to convince us of anything. And I don't see any jokes or references to ACX topics, which if present would probably indicate that someone is pulling our leg. So I'd say your post is in fact offensive. Sort of like "hey, buddyt, did you get your head shaved or are you having chemo.?"
Well, I wanted to engage with it due to its bizarreness and couldn't think of anything else. I don't think there's a polite way to ask someone if they have schizophrenia, and I am curious.
I suspect someone is pulling our leg here.
Do you believe there is little time left before transformative AI? Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Apparently, you can win big if you do:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8c7LycgtkypkgYjZx/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or
because markets are not expecting transformative AI any time soon, meaning there are absolutely massive inefficiencies to exploit if AI timelines are as short as some are predicting. Some are even expecting a phase of explosive GDP growth (30% per year). I don't think I buy that, because it seems to me there is too much inertia and complexity for the market to transform that quickly in response to any tech, but that's just an uneducated intuition. I may throw some money at the funds indicated in the article, if only to save the world: if I win on those, those would be the first successful investments I ever made! The odds of it panning out strike me as miniscule, so the fact I'm considering investing like this maybe indicates the reasoning in that article (and by extension, that of the AI safety community) is shoddy.
Can there really be heaps of gold lying on the ground right now? What do you think?
Are there analogous eras when a new invention was 1) fascinating to those paying attention, but error-prone, unrefined, and not widely used; and, 2) on the verge changing the economy, as we know from hindsight?
If so, you could compare with financial markets at that point in time.
In recent living memory: personal computing and the internet. You could have made a lot of money buying companies like Microsoft at the right time. On the other hand, there was the dot-com bubble, where you could have lost a lot of money buying the wrong companies.
The difficulty is that "changing the economy" is step (3). There is a step (2), "some companies succeed at commercializing the invention and some others try and fail, stocks go up and down while people try to figure which companies are which".
The EA forum post linked above cuts through the difficulty of picking the right stocks by suggesting that one should bet on the real interest rate, instead. I am slightly unconvinced of their plots because (a) the interest rate data they have goes back only to early 1990s (real) or 1950s (nominal), so it misses some of the big transformative changes that could guide our intuition, and more importantly,
(b) in my layman's understanding, interest rates and GDP growth correlate in quite complicated ways, so plotting one against other may be less informative than one would think.
I have a friend who's suffering from depersonalization / derealization disorder (DPD), the persistent sense that oneself / the external world is not real. DPD seems to be inherently poorly understood, and I'd be grateful for advice from anyone who has successfully treated or cured this condition, or could recommend a therapist in the Boston area.
Here's what I've got so far in terms of a bro science treatment protocol. I don't think there are any miracle cures or One Weird Tricks, but it seems like there are many bits of applied common sense that could plausibly help and are unlikely to hurt:
- Achieve brilliance in the basics of sleep, diet and especially exercise.
- Proactively limit and manage stress.
- Go outside, get as much sunlight as you can, quite literally touch grass.
- Engage in physical hobbies such as crafts, gardening and the like, that involve a lot of multisensory integration and not a lot of high-level thinking.
- Socialize IRL, especially in comfortable, low-stakes social situations.
- Limit screen time.
- Keep a journal of symptoms and note what aggravates or ameliorates symptoms but don't otherwise obsess over them (spend, say, 5min/day on journaling).
- Avoid sitting alone in your room pondering the nature of reality or otherwise ruminating.
- Try reciting common-sense mantras / affirmations ("The world is real. My name is X Y. I am sitting in a room right now" &c) if helpful but do not obsess over them.
- Engage moderately in your religious / spiritual tradition if applicable but do not attempt any week-long kundalini benders or whatever.
- Check for and address feelings of inadequacy / excessive self-criticism / low self-worth through CBT, talk therapy, or similar. (For some reason this seems to be a common co-morbidity of DPD,)
It seems that episodes of DPD often resolve spontaneously, but I think it's worth trying to resolve it as quickly as possible and limit the chances of future relapses. Thanks in advance for any breadcrumbs or advice.
DPDR is *very* unpleasant. I had it myself when I was undergrad after a bad drug experience. I did not seek any treatment, in fact for some reason did not even think of it as an illness, and it eventually faded away after about 6 months. I'm a psychologist who treats OCD. I think DPDR is a form of OCD, or at least a close cousin of it. Somebody with regular OCD might check that their door is locked over and over again -- people with DPDR keep checking over and over again to make sure they and the stuff around them looks and feels "real." Of course doing that makes it feel less real, because they're staring at their hands, at the picture on the wall, etc., looking for a feeling of realness -- which is a weird activity that makes everything you're looking at seem sort of arbitrary and peculiar. It's like saying a certain word, like say "mosquito," over and over til it sounds like an arbitrary sequence of sounds, instead of like a familiar word. I think what keeps DPDR going is that the person harbors a belief that if they did not do this perpetual checking for realness, things would feel even *less* real, and the idea of them feeling any less real is terrifying.
The best approach to dismantling the mental checking is to do less and less of it. When you do, you discover that things don't feel less real because you're not slaving away at trying to make them feel real. However, it's not possible to make yourself not think about realness. It's really not possible to not make yourself think about anything that you crave to think about. What you can do, though, is to spend time doing things that capture your attention so much that there's not much room left in your mind to obsess about realness. Something like skiing, or any thrill sport or really any active sport is excellent for capturing attention. So is dancing. Outside the realm of vigorous physical activity, what captures somebody's attention depends more on their personality, but there is almost no solitary activity that is likely to work. Here is a random scattering of things that are pretty engaging for people who have a taste for them: Tutoring a small child; helping a friend move or repaint their kitchen or put together Ikea furniture; clicker training your cat; gardening; playing music or singing with a group; fancy, complicated cookingl
I noticed in the comments here somebody recommended the Reddit sub for DPDS. I actually do not recommend it. In online forums for people with health problems, people with severe and/or incurable cases are way overrepresented. There are a sprinkling of people in the process of getting better, and a very few people who have recovered and are sticking around to help others, but the reader's overall impression is likely to be that once you get this illness your are stuck with it for life. I'd recommend instead that you or your friend do a google search for stories of recovery from DPDR. I'm sure there are some out there.
If your friend decides to see a therapist, I'd recommend looking for one who describes themselves as a specialist in either OCD or DPDR, and says they use CBT (using other approaches in addition to CBT is fine, but CBT should be on this list). You can find OCD specialists at iocdf.org. Boston is probably the best town in the country for finding OCD specialists, because the OCD Institute is there. There are many therapists who have lots of good training and lots of experience with OCD and related disorders. The only bad thing about the Boston psych scene is that most specialists in private practice do not take insurance. If your friend has a kind of insurance that allows them to see what's called an "out of network" provider, they can probably get reimbursed by insurance for about half of what they've paid. If your friend doesn't have that kind of insurance, it's worth coughing up the cash if they possibly can. Treatment of DPDS is not a long process -- should be doable in 3 months or so. I do not think that having DPDS is grounds for believing somebody needs a complete psychic overhaul via years of therapy. It's an anxiety loop that the human mind can get caught in, and treatment that focuses on breaking the loop, without searching at length for some reason why the person was vulnerable to it, works well. There's a therapist in Lexington named Jim Vermilyea whom I recommend highly. He's in practice with some other people who are probably also very good, because he wouldn't have let them join his practice if they weren't.
I'm sure there is a recommended drug treatment for DPDS, probably some SSRI. However, SSRI's aren't magic bullets, despite what the drug companies would like us to think, and they often interfere with sexual pleasure and cause weight gain, so there's definitely a downside to taking this road.
I am so glad you chimed in here. I was especially concerned seeing a subreddit recommended, since visiting mental health forums is usually a terrible idea (for the reasons you mentioned). Treatment for OCD can be so counterintuitive and a lot of things that seem like common sense will just make it worse.
Looked at the site you linked -- that looks great! And it's always good to find a resource that's more affordable to individual psychotherapy.
Yeah, I'm in a weird spot where I haven't actually had DP/DR, but it's one of my OCD themes. Just reading the articles on that site helped me better understand what it actually is and helped me come to acceptance with it.
Very hypothetical, but how about observing whether it's better or worse at some times than others, and possibly gathering some clues that way?
There’s a DPDR subreddit, which might be of some help.
A lot of New Agey traditions have things like “grounding exercises” to help counterbalance the weird mental states their other techniques conjure. Things like standing barefoot in the grass, naming the things around you, exercise, breath techniques, etc. The kundalini subreddit has some good examples in their wiki
As I understand it, this is largely an anxiety symptom and has some elements in common with OCD. This site is a good source of info: https://www.dpmanual.com
Thanks, will read
Do you know of any religious, philosophies, or ideologies that correlate (positively or negatively) with DPD?
My guess was that DPD might correlate positively with religions which teach the concept of "philosophical realism", the belief that the words we use should refer unambiguously to discrete entities (possibly material, but often to an atomic spiritual essence of an entire named kind of material thing, as in ancient Greek myth, Aristotelianism, or many Native North American myths) which has a clear and firm boundary or definition. Some teach that these discrete real entities exist (e.g., Christianity); some teach that they don't (Hinduism, Buddhism).
Buddhism in particular seems to teach acceptance of DPD as its core doctrine.
People who believe in philosophical realism in the modern world should logically either deny that realism, embrace something like the Buddhist concept of emptiness, or conclude that the external world isn't real. So possibly this isn't always a mental disease, but can be caused by having the mental acuity to actually believe your metaphysical "beliefs", or to comprehend their consequences.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9783-dependent-personality-disorder says:
Certain cultural and religious or family behaviors: Some people may develop DPD due to cultural or religious practices that emphasize reliance on authority.
To answer my own question, Sartre's famous novel /Nausea/, which is often cited as the best existing explanation of existentialism, sounds like an extended description of DPDR. For instance, read this famous passage:
<<<
Black? I felt the word deflating, emptied of meaning with extraordinary rapidity. Black? The root was not black, there was no black on this piece of wood—there was . . . something else: black, like the circle, did not exist. I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black? ... I had already scrutinized innumerable objects, with deep uneasiness. I had already tried—vainly—to think something about them: and I had already felt their cold, inert qualities elude me, slip through my fingers. ... And the hand of the Self-Taught Man; I held it and shook it one day in the library and then I had the feeling that it wasn’t quite a hand. I had thought of a great white worm, but that wasn’t it either. And the suspicious transparency of the glass of beer in the Café Mably. Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn’t pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real red, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart. That black against my foot, it didn’t look like black, but rather the confused effort to imagine black by someone who had never seen black and who wouldn’t know how to stop, who would have imagined an ambiguous being beyond colours. It looked like a colour, but also . . . like a bruise or a secretion, like an oozing—and something else, an odour, for example, it melted into the odour of wet earth, warm, moist wood, into a black odour that spread like varnish over this sensitive wood, in a flavour of chewed, sweet fibre. I did not simply see this black: sight is an abstract invention, a simplified idea, one of man’s ideas. That black, amorphous, weakly presence, far surpassed sight, smell and taste. But this richness was lost in confusion and finally was no more because it was too much.
... The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity [presumably a reference, but to whom?]. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being [God]. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float,
– (Sartre 1938, transl. Lloyd Alexander 1949., the third Monday, 6:00 pm; from Google's scan of the New Editions 2013 printing, which lacks page numbers)
>>>
Sartre describes his nausea as being due to realizing his own "contingency", which is philosopher-speak meaning that he wasn't necessary to the universe--that it would have been possible for him never to have been. In Platonist philosophy, this means that he isn't real, as every Real thing is eternal, not temporal and contingent.
Sartre probably learned to consider temporal existence unreal from Hegel, though perhaps not directly. Hegel wrote in The Science of Logic, "The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in the recognition that the finite is not truly an existent" (that which exists only temporarily, was never real).
Yeah, really agree. I read Nausea after I'd had my own 6-month episode of DPDR, and not only did I recognize right away that Nausea was about the same kind of stuff, but I actually found Nausea quite disturbing to read. I felt afraid it was going to trigger another episode of DPDR. It didn't, though.
I had much the same experience as you as an undergrad (drugs exacerbating latent dpdr /existential vertigo), I couldn't put Nausea down even though I thought it may be an info hazard.
Camus' Myth of Sisyphus was the antidote for me, at the time
How did Myth of Sisyphus relieve you?
It seems to me that DPDR is one link in a giant web of problems induced by Western philosophy. It begins by taking mistakes of Plato as foundational. Foundationalism itself is one of those mistakes we get from Plato--the belief that you need to start with some certain truth, and then build on it deductively.
In foundationalism, the foundations can never be questioned. When the foundations are wrong, as in Plato, those errors can never be fixed. Instead, they propagate through belief networks. The initial error about X, E(X), leads to some obvious contradiction further down the line involving Y; but this can't be resolved by questioning E(X), so the contradiction is resolved by instead believing something wrong about Y, E(Y). This in turn leads to a contradiction with Z, and a compensating erroneous belief E(Z). So we see Western philosophers performing worse than random at even easy questions, like, Does the material world exist? Is life desirable? Is pain good? Is pleasure bad? Answer one of these wrong, and you'll likely answer the others wrong as well.
In this case, we begin with Plato's assertion that the Real consists of pure, eternal, transcendental, absolute Forms and Truths. This mistake leads to the belief that our lives ought to have some transcendental "purpose" or "meaning" derived from God--the second mistake.
The second mistake causes us great dissatisfaction with the messiness of reality, a distaste for life, and sometimes even a feeling of ghostliness--DPDR.
To get past DPDR, Camus proposes in the Myth of Sisyphus that we must acknowledge the absurdity of our lives. This seems to me to be the third mistake: the wrong belief that we should live with contradictions. We make this third mistake to protect us from the consequences of the second mistake.
This "third mistake" is quite common in the history of Western philosophy, whether it's to embrace contradictions (as Camus says), or not to acknowledge or even look for them. Other examples include:
- the development of the concept of "mysteries" by the Catholic Church, which teaches that it's necessary to be able to believe contradictory things at the same time (notably about the Trinity and Christology)
- Hegel's "dialectic", which teaches that contradictions need never be resolved, but should be welcomed and synthesized into a new wisdom formed by accepting both branches of the contradiction
- Kierkegaard's critique or parody of Hegel's dialectic, which I don't understand, but it definitely involves accepting things without understanding them
- the use of phenomenology by the Nazis to reject the validity of traditional values, empirical data, and non-contradiction, in favor of subjective feelings, "lived experience", and "authenticity"
It's found especially in totalitarian regimes, which must teach their citizens to hold contradictory beliefs–or rather, not to believe or disbelieve, but merely to accept. In fiction, this is "2+2 = 5" from 1985, "there are 5 lights" from Star Trek: TNG, and Plato forbidding the citizens of his Republic from studying philosophy before age 50.
I don't think all the different instances of it arose from the same chain of wrong beliefs (the Real is eternal > the temporal and contingent is unreal > we must be able to hold contradictory beliefs). There's a web of basic philosophical questions common to most philosophies, and whenever the answer to one of these questions tells you something about the answer to others of these questions, accepting a wrong answer to the first forces adoption of a wrong answer to all the others. But you can take those other nodes of the web in any order, with the consequence that there are many possible paths from any of the foundational beliefs to any derived belief.
If this continued indefinitely, a well thought-out and self-consistent belief system which began with a foundational error would eventually converge on pure error--an ideology of nothing but wrong or incoherent beliefs. The "third mistake", that we should reject reason, is necessary both to avoid renouncing the mistakes already made, and to stop the propagation of mistakes before the system becomes so wrong that it ceases to function.
I have never heard it called existential vertigo before. Did you coin that phrase? I like it.
I don't know. I do know of a couple cases where intensive Buddhist meditation practice led someone to a state sort of like DPDR.
Do you know if they liked being in that state?
The one I knew well was pretty anguished. He absolutely hated it. Along with his sense of being unreal, he had developed a habit of watching his breath, and a fear that it would stop if he did not make sure he was breathing "right" -- fast enough, deep enough, with just the right amount of attentiveness to the sensations. He was afraid to fall asleep because he felt like loss of consciousness was = loss of the little self he had left, and what if when he woke up he could not find that little bit again.
Sign them up to working vacation in a labor intensive third world industry. Maybe coal mining or something.
They will quickly become reacquainted with how real the world is. (Real enough!).
Has this actually worked for you, or are you grinding an axe?
I mean I for sure find hard manual labor something that prevents existential maundering. But yes I am also grinding an axe. Someone who is having serious difficulties because they worry themselves the world isn't real needs to as the kids say "touch grass".
For example the past few weeks I have been spending evenings doing maintenance on a public skating rink as a volunteer. Dozens of hours shovels snow and dragging/holding hoses, often in sub zero temperatures and one night with a -45 wind chill. Maundering doesn't come to mind because you got too many other pressing problems.
I am half convinced a lot of modern "anxiety" is because the human mind is wired for a general level of day-to-day anxiety, and so when we have have constructed a life/society with so little actual need for it, people find stupid shit to get anxious about.
Have you read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Google "crisis inducer".
Oh yeah I love those books.
If someone goes to a Buddhist retreat for some intense meditation over days or weeks and they can’t turn off ‘monkey mind’, the severe form of background narration that happens when our mind isn’t ‘doing something’ someone will help them out by putting a broom in their hand or have them do dishes or any repetitive mindless tasks to get things to quiet down so the hapless meditator can get a start.
I have always experienced a lot of anxiety and I know that mowing the lawn or re-staining the deck or as you mentioned shoveling snow will always help me settle down.
Shoveling snow is especially appealing. I like to wait until the snow stops completely and go out after dark. The temperature usually drops, the night sky clears and I usually have the neighborhood to myself. It can take on the aspect of a mystical sacrament at times. A bit like making the sand mandalas that the monks carefully create and then immediately sweep away. A visual aid to appreciate the concept of impermanence.
Just like the mandalas, my tidy driveway and sidewalk will soon be covered with new snow.
I agree with your point about modern anxiety. Something I often think about is that a century ago, people understood far more about the everyday objects around them:
Anybody can understand reasonably well how a horse pulling a wagon works, or an ax, or a staged play or concert, how a fire warms a room, etc etc. But most people understand very little about about the modern equivalents: Cars, jets, electronic entertainments, etc etc. It affects your feeling about your life to understand so little about basic elements of it. And I'm sure the cave man in all of us feels anxious because he knows that if it all breaks, we wouldn't be able to come anywhere close to reconstructing it ourselves.
I had a similar thought the other day. When humans were primitive, our habitat was the natural world, in the sense that survival consisted primarily of interacting with things that exist in nature. That habitat was understood in terms of magic -- we created myths to explain natural phenomena and ascribed mystical properties to natural things. However, we developed extensive practical knowledge of those magic phenomena -- we could manipulate fire, and predict buffalo herds' grazing patterns.
As humans civilized, human artifacts came to play an increasingly large role in the human habitat, yet those artifacts -- by virtue of being the creation of human minds -- were not magical. While we could not explain the physics of how a bow shot an arrow, the component parts were visible and we understood their various functions and how they worked together. This remained the case for the bulk of human history, perhaps even through the start of the Industrial Revolution.
As human artifacts came to dominate our habitat (e.g., cities, themselves a human artifact), natural phenomena both played less of a role in daily survival and became less magical. The Scientific Revolution began to explain natural phenomena in non-magical terms, and while those explanations remained inaccessible to ordinary people, people accepted that nature operates according to laws rather than magic. Daily survival increasingly consisted of navigating a habitat composed of human artifacts that were generally comprehensible to the average observer (a loom, a hearth, a mill).
However, with the advent of modern technology and the rise of a post-industrial society, daily survival consists of navigating and manipulating human artifacts about which the average person has extensive practical knowledge but no scientific knowledge. This is both because human artifacts are increasingly complex and because the division of labor in a post-industrial society permits the average person to be ignorant about their complexity. I spend 10 hours a day on a computer but know nothing about how a computer actually works. We understand these artifacts are not magic, but we cannot explain them ourselves.
So we are reverting to a state of understanding of our habitat similar to that of primitive man - we know how to manipulate our habitats in order to survive, but we cannot explain our habitats. The difference is that primitive man at least thought he could explain his.
Yeah, and primitive man thought gods or magic were running the show. That's a lot more comforting, thrilling and special than thinking that Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerberg are in charge. They are a truly tiny and nasty stand-in for gods. Eww.
I dunno. I feel like anxiety issues have gone to the Moon just in the last 50 years. Young people in my kids' cohort seem signifinicantly more anxious than I or my friends were at their age decades ago -- and it was hard to explain nuclear fission or the transistor back then.
What about the explosion in communications and always-connectedness that the Internet and devices have caused? At least there's the virtue that the growth in potential cause and effect have tracked each other. And...it seems to me people are almost always more self-aware, nervous, anxious -- whatever their inherent level of social skills -- when they are aware they are being watched by strangers.
These days, in much of what we do, we're always being watched by hundred to hundreds of millions of strangers. And not even just strangers! There's very few moments of the average day when you're *not* potentially in touch with your wife, your husband, your parents or children, all your friends from the most intimate to the most casual (not to mention assorted past flings and affairs, sometimes). Your boss, your employees, your customers, your clients. When I was young, there were big chunks of the day when I was out of touch, unreachable. Walking to school, 20 minutes where my mother couldn't call me, no friends could text me. Driving to work, nobody could call me. When I got home from work, my boss couldn't reach me except in the direst emergency. If I talked to an acquaintance by phone, or wrote a letter, nobody else overheard the conversation, the way zillions of people do when we write on our FB page, post a comment, Tweet.
It's like Panopticon crossed with the Stasi, where everyone watches everyone, not in general with malevolent intent, but....doesn't seem natural to our monkey brains, I bet.
Yes, I think that's true. I remember the first time I ever posted anything on an online forum, probably about 25 years ago: It felt like a huge deal, like being on Dancing with the Stars or having an editorial in the NYTimes. Thousands of people were going to read my words. I felt nervous and excited and presumptuous. Now of course I'm used to it, like everybody else, and yet I think a part of my brain is still registering that a LOT of people are reading this, and I know very few of them. Even on here, even among the names I recognize I don't know most people's gender or age. And then of course fairly regularly you get a reminder that some members of the group you are speaking to are not the kind of person you'd ordinarily disclose anything to, because they make clear right away that they despise your ideas and hate you for having them. Heh.
That sounds like a very fulfilling use of one's time. As I mentioned in the OP, I think manual labor is good! As is--also already mentioned--literally touching grass.
Consider the analogy to depression: from the outside, depression often looks like someone being a little mopey, slow, or avoidant. Big deal! Cheer up, you big baby!! But dig a little deeper and it turns out that severely depressed people sound like they're suffering more than cancer patients, who objectively suffer a lot but seem to adjust and even find the bright side of their diagnosis, in a way that rarely / never happens with depression. Add to that a bunch of weird physiological symptoms that seem hard to predict and fake in advance (why would malingerers all come up with psychomotor retardation, for example?) and depression starts to look pretty different from "just being really sad".
Much like depression, this derealization thing seems multicausal. Some people are depressed because their lives suck (sometimes for reasons within their control, at that!) and some people are depressed in the midst of the fullness of life, for no obvious reason. Which camp you're in is helpful intel, in case your life just sucks and there's something you might could do about that. But "unsuck your life" isn't helpful advice if your life doesn't really suck in the first place. DPD seems correlated with "having the sort of childhood that would alarm CPS", but "don't have an abusive childhood" isn't actionable. (And yes there is obvious genetic confounding but "don't have child abuser genes" is even less actionable.)
Or consider the analogy to obesity, the bulk (heh) of which is pretty obviously due to some combination of sedentary lifestyle plus cheap and hyperpalatable foods. A victimhood of our own success if there ever was one. Yet "stop being a coddled modern" is not actionable advice in the way that "eat exactly this much and exercise" is.
It's possible that DPD is just another disease of modernity and can be treated by consciously unwinding some of its more virtualizing aspects. It also sounds like a real hell to be trapped in, so I have some sympathy for people who find themselves stuck there, never having chosen to inherit the broken social tech that made their condition all the more likely. So yeah I encourage them to touch grass and meanwhile I'm polling here to ask if there's anything else I've missed.
A) I think a high enough % of people who present with depression or other things like DPD or whatever are just basically malingering, that one of the first main pieces of advice and attempts at therapy should just be to "grow up and start getting out there and doing stuff.
B) Not to mention which that is generally good advice anyway even if it doesn't work. I think even for the people who are actually having some sort of underlying issue that isn't just "I have worked myself into a crummy series of behaviors and excuses that make me unhappy but I am in a local minima and so I struggle to get out", it is still helpful in most cases.
I was "depressed" with an actual diagnosis and at one point an SSRI prescription (which I only took for a couple months before I started reselling) from ages ~11-26. And severely depressed for most of of ages ~13-19.
Now I had a lot to be depressed about. A father who was totally out of the picture since 4, and alcoholic mother who was passed out more days than she wasn't by about 7PM. I was super into girls and horny, and tried really hard to be charming and pleasant, yet high status girls more or less hated me from ~11-16 (had a lot of success after that). Had 2 very serious, embarrassing and public medical issues (one of which involved removing half a testicle). And also generally hated myself and was ashamed at my overall behavior.
Nevertheless on top of that at times it felt like I was literally not in control of my own mind. Like there was a dark whirlpool in my brain just sucking it down into dark, intrusive self-harming thoughts. I got lots of advice, mostly about talking SSRIs or about therapy related to my mother. None of that was very helpful, SSRIs just made me feel numb.
What was helpful was when my life started going better. And going out and accomplishing things and building up some self esteem. And I am positive that my uncles conscripting me into manual labor and things like that, while I HATED it, was at a minimum more helpful than the therapy, and looking back now I wish they had done it more.
What I needed was less candy coating. More people pointing out all the good things I had in my life, and how easy it would be to turn it around. (Which I did eventually stumble into on my own). But everyone was so concerned with servicing/validating my whining that there weren't nearly enough people saying "even with all this shit you are probably sitting in a top 3% situation globally and a top 1% situation historically, and you are going to fucking whine and wallow about this instead of turn it into something?". That is a message that would have resonated with me, and did resonate with me the one time I heard it.
Anyway, I jsut think we are way too precious about these things. You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and the world needs omelets not cracked eggs.
I'm more sympathetic to your tough love approach than you'd think a shrink would be. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the best approach with kids who have school phobia is to make them go to school Sure, also talk with them about their worries, try to teach them some coping techniques -- but meanwhile, they gotta go to school. I had a school phobia in 7th grade, no idea why, and after my parents saw that I wasn't really sick they gently but firmly insisted I go to school. My fear faded away in a few days, & I as fine with school forever after. And last I checked research supports that view.
On the other hand, I think you overestimate how many people are malingering. I definitely was not, when I had my school phobia. For some reason I had been seized by a fear that if I went to school I was going to throw up in some horrible public way, like right on my desk in the middle of class, and would lay awake literally half the night trying to get unscared, trying to convince myself it wouldn't happen. And in college when I had DPDR I most certainly was not malingering. I was terrified and miserable, and would have paid any amount of money to get the feeling to stop. And, by the way, I was not using the fact that I had that problem to get out of anything. I didn't even tell anybody but a few close friends that I had it. And I continued going to classes, and ended the term with a high GPA.
Telling people who are suffering like that they they're faking it is really a bad move. If they're not, it's very destructive, especially if you are important to them. Think how you'd feel if you had pretty severe pain from a migraine or a whatever and somebody important to you said they didn't believe you that it hurt very bad! On the other hand, a moderate amount of pushing can really help people people who are depressed or anxious. But if you're going to push, the message to give isn't "you're malingering -- get to work" but "it is very likely that being active will make you feel better, even though it feels like it will make you feel worse. Give it a try, for god's sake!"
You have better grounds for your beliefs than I expected, but I wonder how you'd tell if someone had a physical reason (say, a dietary deficiency) for problems with manual labor.
Eh, that could also go in the opposite direction. The few times in my life I've had to endure grueling physical labor I actually found myself dissociating more and more as a coping mechanism.
Asking for someone else: does anyone know of good resources to find rental apartments in the south peninsula (Bay Area, California, USA), within ~5 miles or 20 minutes from San Bruno, ideally under $3k for 1 bedroom plus parking? Person is currently there and scrambling to find something in the next day or two, but all their early leads collapsed.
Apparently all they're getting is automated responses and AI-generated content.
Done, thanks.
(moved due to below)
This is probably in response to a thread from below, there is a well known substack bug where replying in the email sends your reply to the top-level.
Yes. It's remarkable how substack is worse at its core functioning than list-serv email was 30 years ago.
Yes, a remarkable achievement. Who woulda thunk it?
I just want to know what makes the website so godawefully slow, it makes me sad.
Hi all,
Surf, an app that helps you make new friends based on mutual interests and that some of you will already be familiar with, is looking for a CTO.
A word on the product - on Surf, users open the platform and type in a desired outcome (e.g. "I want to find a partner in London for a Kilimanjaro climbing trip."). We match them with someone who wants to achieve the same outcome. They chat. They become friends. That's it. Elegant. Simple. Life-changing. We want to use it to eradicate loneliness from the world.
A word on who we're looking for - we need someone with considerable NLP/AI/ML pedigree and experience who can also do good things with simple app creation softwares like Expo. Someone who loves the early stage challenges of startup life. Someone so enthused about the idea of eliminating loneliness from the world and finding a friend for everyone that they would happily work on this for a year+ pre-funding.
In terms of existing assets, we've already got lots of proprietary technology incl. key algorithms, and an app that's 80% finished. Our waiting list has seen uptake in over 40 countries (+1 if you consider ACX its own pirate nation) and we're in promising talks with universities over pilot schemes. We already have one advisor (prior exp. at Google) onboard and are actively seeking others to make near-term fundraising more straightforward. Any CTO coming into this project will be well-set-up for success.
Early stage - equity only, but we'll be pursuing funding immediately after launch.
The ideal candidate would be in London, UK but fundamentally we don't care where you live, especially if you're the next Aaron Swartz/Tarun Mathur/Mira Murati.
Get in touch by emailing us at team@imsurf.in with the subject line "Surf CTO Position".
Excellent sentiments, but far afield from the topic: is it 'odd' for conservatives to not want their communities or nations filled with folks who are not 'their people'?
Looking at immigration from an economic perspective is always reasonable, of course -- that's why the white anglo-saxon protestant elite in my example above was willing to let irish (and then italian) catholics overrun some parts of new england. That lens itself is reasonable, but to pretend there are no other possible lenses through which to view the issue is not reasonable.
Are you sure New England hadn't already been overrun?
The irish weren't fond of losing Boston when it happened, either. All of history is every place being overrun and people being sad. I'm no conservative, and I don't believe conserving places/peoples against this kind of thing is even possible. It's just not 'odd' to want to do it. You know what I mean?
The idea that immigration is always economically beneficial is fantasy (unless you think a larger GDP is the sole determinant of a "good" economy). And Irish and Anglo-Saxons are very, very similar genetically/culturally comapred to anglos and somalians.
I think it is a bit more understandable in places like Europe where you have fairly homogeneous cultures that go back hundreds of years or are amalgams of smaller but very close cultures that do (those forced amalgams like France arguably already present a bit of a cultural loss). Denmark with 3 million extra Ugandans settling there over the period of say a hundred years is fundamentally going to be a different country. The same holds for 3 million Koreans or Russians or the Spanish or whatever, but the more distant the incoming culture is, the lower number of people from that culture is going to change Denmark a lot)
Less so in places like the US where the citizen's ancestral culture means next to nothing (to the point where absurdly broad categories like "white" or "black" are considered ethnicities) and almost no citizens can trace their ancestry to America in the 17th century or even the early 19th century (native Americans are an obvious exception, descendants of the original Dutch and English settlers also, to a lesser degree). USA with 60 million extra Ugandans settling there over a century is not going to be that much different. That is unless the melting pot of the US stops being a melting pot and the society atomizes in a way that you have a 60 million people with a completely different culture living separated from the rest of the society...
The difference I guess is that countries like Denmark (and by extension most countries in the Old World) cannot realistically be melting pots lest they stop being the countries they are whereas being a melting pot is kind of the point of the US and "melting" more people is therefore not going to change its nature much.
That said, you can have assimilation even in places like Denmark but I think the capacity for such assimilation is much lower and it is going to happen much slower. By the capacity I mean "absorbing more people from different cultures without changing the country in a fundamental way". So I think it is more understandable if people worry about the speed of immigration, or speed of immigration from distant cultures...but only to a certain degree - like I said, the capacity for assimilation is still nonzero even for the Old World countries (probably also somewhat different for each country).
Yes, this...the way American and Canadian Right-Wingers criticise immigration based on European "tropes" is a bit annoying and just cringe IMO...I understand that some people, even in the US or Canada, might not feel comfortable with people from a different culture, but then to me it doesn't make much sense as one of the major arguments in Europe against immigration is that it will lead to the collapse of the Welfare State (which I share to some extent)… but for the US (and to a lesser extent Canada), this argument doesn't make much sense since the welfare state there isn't nearly as developed as it is in Western Europe... yes, I've heard some self-styled "libertarians" in the US being against immigration because they think foreigners don't appreciate Anglo-Americans libertarian values...which is even more ridiculous, since it not only goes against one of the major tenets of libertarianism (person-to-person exchanges should be the major considerations, and groups don't exist), and also is ridiculous for other reasons (aren't most founders of US startups of immigrant backup)… basically being Anti-Immigration in the US or Canada (either for economic or cultural reasons) is a very cringe position based IMO on egoism and maybe some kind of (White?) Supremacism (I understand that most alt-righters here will deny this, but IMO it's the same as being a leftist who complains about police violence against POCs in Europe)…
For Europe it makes more sense, but even in the (Western) European context I would focus on the economic dimension of immigration and base my criticism on this area (e.g. Daniel Stelter or Thilo Sarrazin).
>this argument doesn't make much sense since the welfare state there isn't nearly as developed as it is in Western Europe.
Non-whites already cost white taxpayers around half a trillion dollars in government services received in excess of taxes paid (not considering the cost of crime and imprisonment, which would significantly increase it).
Importantly, non-whites overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and if enough of them come and Democrats amass enough political power, the welfare state will almost assuredly expand. You're assuming that America has a fixed set of policies that will not change, but they depend entirely on who makes up the voters of this country.
>which is even more ridiculous, since it not only goes against one of the major tenets of libertarianism (person-to-person exchanges should be the major considerations, and groups don't exist), and also is ridiculous for other reasons (aren't most founders of US startups of immigrant backup)…
It's not ridiculous. We don't live in a libertarian society, so groups have power to restrict other people's rights, therefore, its entirely reasonable to think about things in terms of groups.
>basically being Anti-Immigration in the US or Canada (either for economic or cultural reasons) is a very cringe position based IMO on egoism and maybe some kind of (White?) Supremacism
White people have a significantly higher mean IQ than all groups besides North-East Asians and Ashkenazi jews (selected populations of other groups will be high IQ, but pro-immigration people don't support selective immigration). This is a brute scientific fact, and you dismissing this as "white supremacist" is extremely bad faith. You're basically using a slur to dismiss scientific reality that doesn't suit your ideology.
I am not sure how to argue with alt-righters like you...ok fine, are you suggesting that the US should base it's immigration policy solely on IQ? Anyway, if they did, should they still let in people from low-IQ groups if they have higher IQs themselves individually?
Also, you did not provide any reliable source for your claim that "Non-whites already cost white taxpayers around half a trillion dollars in government services received in excess of taxes paid"?
Tucker Carlson perhaps?
> Importantly, non-whites overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and if enough of them come and Democrats amass enough political power, the welfare state will almost assuredly expand
For a guy likes to complain about the bad guys doing everything based on ‘ideology’ you spout an awful lot of dogmatic right wing ideology yourself. Are you oblivious to the irony?
Or do you think the crap you say is simply ‘the truth’? That is what you are accusing your adversaries of here. They think they are speaking the truth but really it’s just ‘ideology’.
FFS. The word Ideology by itself doesn’t even have inherent negative connotations.
Here let me be as clear as I can.. This is the dictionary definition of ideology:
ideology
noun
1. a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy."the ideology of democracy"
I might think that if there are too many Republicans, that Social Security and Medicare could be gutted. I wouldn’t state it as being almost assured.
I don’t know what the guy got banned for but his arguments were approaching the “No, you shut up” stage.
Ton of assumptions there. I realize it's hard to put yourself in someone else's perspective but it's a valuable skill. Of course, if they're 'white supremacists' they're not really people and you don't have to work so hard. Whew!
Nowhere in their comment to they at all claim or even imply that white supremacists aren't people. It seems that you are making assumptions about their motives rather than providing tangible facts that support your side of the argument.
Fair enough. I was responding to the dismissive tone, but was not precise.
As for you responding to me, nowhere in any of my comments here or elsewhere have I advanced or even implied a "side", let alone one that would be served by "tangible facts". You must have me confused with some other commentator -- my point throughout has been that dismissing as 'odd' (or in the case of the comment under discussion here) or the products of pure 'egoism' or 'supremacism' the default position of human groups throughout history is myopic and absurd. Nowhere do I imply I hold this position, and if it seems shocking to you that someone can even describe a side without being on it, that's hardly anything to do with me.
Also all excellent thoughts, but again beside the mark: it's not for us to say how good or meaningful of a culture an ethnic group or coalition needs to maintain in order for it not to be 'odd' for them to want to preserve whatever it is that they have.
And again, a deracinated concern for 'cultural values' is why republicans with very low non-white support can talk about how the good people from south of the border are 'natural conservatives' at the same time that their actual constituents wanted the border sealed shut fifty years ago. It's not something broad like "do these people believe in jesus (albeit a catholic version) and love their families" -- everyone believes in something and loves their own families -- that makes the difference, but merely the question "are these people recognizably 'my people' -- do they look like me, do they sound like me, will their sons have a natural sympathy for mine due to these similarities?" All of this takes place in a fraction of a second when we see another human being -- we notice body language, race (or ethnicity if we're from somewhere that distinguishes this to a high degree of granularity: anthropologists in africa are often amazed at what a tremendous distance a trained human eye can determine in/out group) almost instantly. Most of us here reading this substack learned to set aside these instinctual movements in favor of the individual and in favor of the brotherhood of the human race, but that people who haven't done this work continue to feel the way the vast majority of humanity until the modern period felt isn't 'odd' in any meaningful sense.
Who in the US are "your people"? I am not American, but from what I gather (e.g. popular media, social media, news, blogs etc.) there seems to be little that various groups of Americans (broadly "liberals' and "conservatives"), so I think that time were "Americans" (or at least White Americans) of all kinds were feeling like they were part of the same group are now over for a long while...
You can ctrl-f in this page (if substack will allow you) to see that I'm not talking about myself or 'my people' -- we're engaged in an anthropological exercise to explain the apparent motivations of people we would otherwise think of as "odd".
Now if we pretend you were addressing that question to a white american who opposes immigration, if he's smart he would look at you with disgust and say that he doesn't have to justify his sense of his people to an obviously hostile interlocutor engaged in tactical ignorance -- after all, we know exactly who this white conservative's people are when we call them backwards hicks who don't spice their food and think pro wrassling is real, but when we're talking about who they think they are suddenly they don't exist as a people group.
Honestly, I don't deal much with White Americans, except on the internet...since I'm not planning to move to the US, I don't think I'll be having too many conversations with them... as for Europeans who are against immigrants: I understand the sentiment, but they should base their arguments rationally (i.e. in economics)...
The idea that group-level preference is irrational and economics is rational is probably not your most rational opinion. People don't live in economies, they live in communities. And that goes for everyone. When black folk in Harlem complained they were being priced out by gentrification, shouting at them about economics probably wouldn't have reassured them much. Same thing everywhere else, every time this happens. Not saying it shouldn't happen or that you should care, just trying to help you understand people who aren't like you.
The part left unsaid (but which we all know, and without which the conversation doesn't make any sense) is that some cultures are better than other cultures. Adding more Swiss people to US culture is likely to make it better, adding more Ugandans will likely make it worse.
It's no secret that Swiss culture is better than Ugandan culture, it's obvious from the fact that countries populated by Swiss people look like Switzerland, and countries populated by Ugandan people look like Uganda.
Sorry, but this argument is unserious IMO... for two reasons:
Yes, Switzerland is a wealthy country with a high quality of life, but is it really only because it's inhabited by "Swiss" people? I mean, it is a country with 3 official languages, and this alone should cause "Ethno-Nationalists" to see where they went wrong by using Switzerland as an example of an "Ethnonationalist" country... IMO it's much more complicated why Switzerland is so wealthy, but it's partly because of Geography and obviously the institutions (which formed that way for various reasons further still) of that country...definitely not genetics/biology though... I mean, just saying that if Swiss People move somewhere a place automatically becomes "better" strikes me as unrealistic...
After all, there are places in the US where many people Swiss descent live , and let's see how they perform economically against the rest of the country (according to Wikipedia, these are the following places with the most Swiss Americans as a % of their population :
Berne, Indiana – 29.10%
Monticello, Wisconsin – 28.82%
New Glarus, Wisconsin – 28.26%
Boys Ranch, Texas – 23.30%
Monroe, Wisconsin – 18.91%
Pandora, Ohio – 18.90%
Argyle, Wisconsin – 17.84%
Sugarcreek, Ohio – 17.29%
Elgin, Iowa – 15.79%
Monroe, Indiana – 14.35%)
Looking at the median household income for some of these places, they were
- $35,491; $44,087; $36,922; $42,174; $36,103; $36,360; $28,833; and $42,946, which is less compared to the $54,951 US-wide average in 2000. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Americans#Population (+ top 10 cities there); https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_025.asp .
Also, secondly, among Americans who are anti-immigration, there seems to be the believe that it would be simple to just get people from those wealthy European countries to move to the US...but the truth is simply that not many people in Western Europe are interested in moving to the US anymore...so it's simply not an option. So either you don't have any immigration (because there aren't many people from other Western Countries who would want to move to the US) and deal with US demography becoming more like Japan in the future, or simply accept that if economic growth is important to you (as it seems to be for most US conservatives), then the US will need immigration and the vast majority of it will come from "Non-Western" countries...
Also, lastly,, while I agree that most people would agree with you and say that Swiss culture is better than Ugandan culture, it is still subjective...since culture is inherently subjective.
Oh come on. Instead of burying your nose in a book (or Googling random data), just freaking go to Switzerland, walk around and keep your eyes and ears open. Nobody who's actually been to Switzerland for any length of time can doubt that Switzerland is as successful as it is because it's full of Swiss people.
"Who cares about statistics? What about my lived experience?" -> I suspect you dislike people who make arguments like this; why do it yourself?
(Have /you/ ever lived in Switzerland? If not, it's not even your own ~lived experience~ it's that of a hypothetical person you're imagining, even less grounded in reality.)
I've been to Switzerland quite a few times (8 times in the past 12 years)…and it's a very beautiful place, both in terms of the natural and built environment.
But are you suggesting that if all 8 million people from Switzerland were to move to the US, then they would magically turn the US (with a population of 330 million people) into a society just like Switzerland...? Also, as I wrote before, Switzerland itself is a multicultural and multiethnic country, so to use Switzerland of all countries as an example for Ethnonationalism is a bit odd...
And also, once again I am asking why anyone from Switzerland would want to move to the US if it's already a better country (I think you could say objectively that this is the case, at least in terms of statistics like GDP and health outcomes)…?
>Yes, Switzerland is a wealthy country with a high quality of life, but is it really only because it's inhabited by "Swiss" people?
OF COURSE!
It's not because of it's natural resources. It's not that Switzerland has magic soil. Switzerland is prosperous entirely because of the people living there, and if you change the people living there, you change the country. If replaced the Swiss population with the population of Haiti, the country collapses. People are what make a country.
> mean, it is a country with 3 official languages, and this alone should cause "Ethno-Nationalists" to see where they went wrong by using Switzerland as an example of an "Ethnonationalist" country...
Ethno-nationalism isn't linguistic nationalism. They're all the same race. They're literally more closely genetically related than people from different parts of India are!
> and obviously the institutions (which formed that way for various reasons further still)
They formed the way they did because of the people living there. There's no grand mystery here. It's the people. Africans have never, ever made a country with "good instutions" before, and the only non-genetic explanation of this is an endless series of just so stories to rationalize a denial of racial differences.
>I mean, just saying that if Swiss People move somewhere a place automatically becomes "better" strikes me as unrealistic...
Northern/western Europeans have made everywhere they go better. Look at the US, look at Canada, look at Australia, look at New Zealand, look at South Africa.
"unrealistic" is any narartive in which the sudden and rapid flourishing of these countries following european settlement has nothing to do with them being settled by the same type of people.
> deal with US demography becoming more like Japan in the future, or simply accept that if economic growth is important to you
Economic growth isn't important - per capita GDP growth is important, and you will not get that from low-IQ third world immigrants. They will continue to be a fiscal drain.
>Also, lastly,, while I agree that most people would agree with you and say that Swiss culture is better than Ugandan culture, it is still subjective...since culture is inherently subjective.
If we're talking about what leads to properous, safe, socities with good instiutions, then no, it's not subjective in the slightest.
>Ethno-nationalism isn't linguistic nationalism. They're all the same race. They're literally more closely genetically related than people from different parts of India are!
India is an extremely large, diverse country that has 22 different languages recognised in its constitution. Being more homogenous than India is like being taller than Peter Dinklage.
How do you define "race"? I mean, India of course is a very different category than any European country...
Well, you don't seem to answer my arguments...Are you saying that it's because of the "genetics" of the Swiss people that Switzerland is such a rich country? Sorry, but how come Ticino is so rich, if large parts of Italy aren't? Also "Europeans have made everywhere they go better" is really debatable...I am not saying that colonialism was always bad, but what you are stating here is pure opinion..no sources to back up your claims. Also "per capita GDP growth is important" - if it's caused by IQ why isn't Japan growing faster than India or even the US, considering they have a higher IQ as a country?
No they're not. South Africa was a much better place to live, even during apartheid, even for blacks, than was Zimbabwe. People can put up with a fair amount of petty racism in order to have enough to eat and not have a serious risk of being fed to a woodchipper because you said something disrespectful about the Chief Thug. Ranking racism as the #1 Evil is a First World Problem viewpoint.
How is that comment racist? It was a comment about culture --social shibboleths, the values people cherish or don't, how they act or don't act on those, et cetera. I don't see any place where "people with black skin are better/worse than people with red/yellow/green skin" was stated. If you're seeing things that aren't really there -- maybe it's your own assumptions about people that need examining?
If you mean "diverse" in terms of skin color, I personally couldn't care less about that, any more than I care how many toes other commenters have, or the color of their pubic hair. Frankly, I would find it a little creepy if someone *was* interested in those things -- if it were of interest to other commenters whether I was black or yellow or white. Why do you want to know? Ew.
If you mean "diverse" in the sense of different life histories, different perspectives and talents, then I'm all for that, but I am baffled how this connects to skin color. Again, the fact that you seem to assume it does makes me wonder about your own unexamined and maybe unconscious race-based and race-oriented attitudes about other people.
Anyone put off by "racism" here (i.e. discussing the scientific REALITY of racial differences) doesn't belong here, because it means they're incapable of good faith discuession of thorny issues.
Speaking of melting pot, I have been thinking lately about that concept, and also the concept of "white." It seems to me that the woke left have been looking at those two terms as intricately linked. That to have cultures melt together means that the people sublimating their culture to the broader culture become "white" regardless of their skin color or racial background. That something is lost in the process of "melting" together. This is not as big a deal for Anglo-Saxons who change a little bit, but a really big deal for cultural minorities who have to change more from who they might be in order to fit it.
I would be curious to get other thoughts on this aspect, though I recognize it's a bit niche for a third tier post response.
Well, I am not American and my impression of Americans (to a lesser degree also Canadians and Latin Americans, but they seem less "universalistic" to me) is that they underestimate a lot by how much Europeans differ from each other. The difference between say Spain and Sweden is at least as large as that between Mexico and Canada. And even the cultural between France and Germany is like the difference between Mexico and the US. Even the differences INSIDE European countries are probably at least as large as the differences between the US and Canada. E.g. Bavaria vs Schleswig-Holstein (it's basically not even the same language anymore :D ).
Americans with European ancestry might have a few specific family dishes that somewhat resemble something you might encounter in their "old country", maybe they know a little bit more about the history of that country...and that's about that. Otherwise they are Americans (even if they fancy calling themselves Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans or whatever). At least that is my experience with all Americans I've met in Europe and elsewhere (though I've never been to the US or anywhere in North America, actually).
If the "white ethnicities" (basically usually meaning European ethnicities) retained their individuality, then the US would look like the EU. It would never become a federation in the first place (though probably some states would be pushing for it in hopes of controlling it...*cough* France *cough*), you'd be stuck with the articles of the confederation and each state would have a very unique identity, most people form one state would not understand the people from another state unless they learned a foreign language, etc.
Of course, Germans and Ukrainians are a lot closer than Germans and Malaysians, but Bavarians and the people from Schleswig-Holstein (both parts of modern-day Germany) are very likely further away from each other culturally (even linguistically in a way) than German-Americans and Ukrainian-Americans.
So at the very least, the various Europeans largely melted to "whites" in the US. The same can probably be said of Africans although even though there it was often quite involuntary. But if you look at (sub-saharan) Africa, being "black" means very little there, being Bantu vs being say Oromo is a big difference there. For various historical reasons (but probably mostly slavery) the melting pot in the US seems to be worse at melting it much further than that (although both groups are still very American, i.e. American whites are not just an average of Europeans and American blacks are not an average of Africans...they are both distinctly American)
Exactly... that's my impression too, though we Europeans do the same e.g. in regards to thinking of "Indian people" as being the same as a European nationality, even if India itself should be compared to the whole of Europe IMO, since both are subcontinents of (Eur)Asia...but yeah, the American view of "races" is quite peculiar to them, especially "White" vs "everyone else" and considering people of Pakistani and Japanese ancestry to be part of the same "race" strikes me as weird too...
Not all of us think of "white" as some monolithic group, and especially not "Asian" - though some of our regulations and government counting rules may make it seem that way. "Woke" is not the only viewpoint in America, and is actually a pretty small minority (though apparently a majority in a number of fields, including academia, media, and tech).
That's not exactly the case though. "White" ethnicities retain their individuality, they're just in a state of mutual intercomprehensibility with other whites.
In places where peoples live together, the groups will become "white" unless there are active steps taken to do otherwise. In Austin, Mexicans and Vietnamese were as white as anyone else. Things are different in New York. Though didn't realize how many white ethnic enclaves existed until I moved up here.
I'm also going to question the generalization of "White ethnicities retain their individuality". I believe that in the vast majority of cases, by the third generation any remnant of their ancestral identity is more of a hobby than anything else. And usually not even that. My Irish-American sister-in-law drinks Guinness, celebrates St. Patrick's day, visited Dublin when anyone else would have visited London or Paris, and is otherwise indistinguishable from any other mainstream American. For my part, I happen to know which European countries my ancestors came from, but that fact is about as relevant to me as my astrological sign (which I also happen to know). And the vast majority of the white Americans I know, I would have a hard time guessing their ancestry beyond "Europe" unless I recognized the surname's origin.
I didn't know that white ethnics existed until I moved here. It was a revelation to be able to distinguish a Pole from a Dane from an Irishperson by sight.
But again, I'm not claiming that the mass-media "American" "ethnicity" doesn't exist or that people haven't been pressured to abandon previous identities in favor of it. What I'm claiming is that it's neither necessary nor sufficient to adopt it in order to be "white." That as long as those particular ethnicities are mutually intelligible with the existing "white" bloc, they will be considered as being "white."
This allows for the phenomenon that I saw in Texas of whiteness allowing for a larger variety of skin colors than elsewhere.
I know a fair number of immigrants and their kids/grandkids. The kids who grew up here are basically Americans who will, if pressed, go ahead and speak some Spanish, but who think of themselves as Americans, hang out with and date other random Americans, and only mention that they're Salvadoran or Mexican or Peruvian or whatever if someone asks or there's some special reason it's relevant. The grandkids mostly don't even know Spanish or Tagalog or Chinese or whatever.
I think the main difference is in culture though. Yes an average Pole looks different than an average Irishman and you can get a better than 50% accuracy guessing their ethnicity but with some people you can't really tell by just looking at them whether they are French or Irish or German or Swedish or Polish or even Spanish in some cases (if we are talking about northern Spain). Also, the looks are really not quite as important to people, I think.
It is the cultures which are different and that is what matters more to people, not the shade of your skin colour (though of course there is always some prejudice based on the first impressions). I know people with Vietnamese ancestry (born here, children of immigrants) here in the Czech republic who I consider pretty much Czech. And their kids will be culturally as Czech as Italian-Americans are Americans. So while a (ethnically) French guy looks a lot more like a Czech guy than these people, his culture is clearly French and not Czech and that is what matters. Or rather the physical looks give the first impression but that only lasts until you actually go and talk to the people.
By the way, I was actually really surprised that people consider Harry Windsor's (or whatever his surname is now that he is no longer an official part of the British royal family and so should use an actual surname) wife black. If nobody ever mentioned that to me and someone asked me I'd say she was white. She is definitely very American in any case :-)
Yeah this just isn't the whole story. As the other person replied tons of "white" people in the US had lost almost all their individuality by the 1980s. Some families retained a small smattering of "ethnic" practices, but many did not or were so interbred as for them to be meaningless, or just ad hoc curiosities instead of some actual heritage.
My parents were between them like 6 different types of northern European minimum (though my dad wasn't in the picture anyway). Living in a pretty German/Scandinavian part of the country. I know some families who retained their "Finnishness", and a bit of Finnish cultural practices, and Swedish, and Polish, and German. But just a few. Most of them were like mine and were just "American" with no particular ethnic connection other than something researched for elementary school projects on "melting pots". And these are only like 4th generation families with 5th generation kids.
I really think the TV and mass culture of the 60s/70s did a good job of washing out much of the ethnic difference for a lot of people, especially white people.
The shared cultural heritage was Charlie Brown Christmas special not lutefisk.
You a Minnesota guy Martin? I grew up in a small town up north notable for two things: Hot and Cold water towers and hockey.
https://www.evelethheritage.com/old-water-tower.html
https://www.quanthockey.com/nhl/city/nhl-players-career-stats.php?city_id=3984
https://www.exploreminnesota.com/profile/united-states-hockey-hall-fame-museum/3845
My maternal side is from Virginia, and I spent ages 4-24 in Duluth.
IMO it should be accepted that "White American" is an ethnicity just like "German" or "Russian" (which itself are also composites of people with many ethnic backgrounds)…of course, these days, White American could be split into "liberal" and "conservative" as sub-ethnicities... :D .
Except that the "white" part has been mostly optional since the 1980s at the latest. Not everybody takes the option, so it's still mostly white, but we shouldn't be trying to insist that it is exclusively white.
Not all "white" ethnicities retain their individuality. Some lost it before coming to the US, and many lost it after. Some of it is a random mixing of previously separate people (my mom's family is Eastern European, with some German, Polish, Slovakian, etc. and various unknowns). My dad's family may or may not involve a variety of Western European cultures. We don't know or observe any of the culturally relevant practices from any of these countries. And assuming that one "white" cultural aspect is the same as another is part of the problem. Slovakians are not German, and may have good reason to resent them.
IMO, the melting pot model describes American cities much better than it does American rural regions. I've only lived in one American rural region, so I might be generalizing wrong, but it definitely has a distinctive culture. This is slowly getting eroded by internal migration and cultural influence of people from the dominant cultural group.
There have been observations and articles (whose accuracy I'm not remotely able to speak to except in the broadest sense) referring an ongoing homogenization and "Southernization" of US rural culture.
I have no firsthand knowledge if that's right, though it would help explain the popularity of Confederate iconography in places like southern Illinois (the Land of Lincoln!) and West Virginia (which exists as a state because people there in the 1860s were decidedly not Confederates).
I’m in New Hampshire, and I’ve been surprised and disappointed to see a Confederate battle flag or two even this far north. Trumpy types, of course: more looking to flip the bird than express anything resembling a thought. The homogenization of hick culture via the internet is complete. Ironically enough, the Republican Party of the 21st century has become the Confederacy 2.0
It makes a lot more sense if you don't insist that the flag can only mean "confederate" or "racist."
The bumper sitcker I was "Yankee by birth, Rebel by the grace of God."
Rebellion was still considered a good trait as recently as 1977 after all.
Couldn’t agree more! 😉
Oh yeah in rural areas you will for sure see confederate flags even in union states. I have seen them in rural Minnesota.
Dunno about WV, but in Illinois (where I live and where I have spent lots of times in the rural parts for more than a decade now) the overall trend may be related to US rural culture shrinking. There are small cities all over central and southern Illinois that are now half-ghost towns: built out for 3,000 residents but now home to only 1,000, etc. (Driving through places like Henry, Illinois is downright spooky -- the empty houses mostly aren't boarded up they're just sitting there like a dusty old movie set.)
Illinois now has 40 entire counties each having resident populations under 20,000 people, and 15 of them have fewer than 10,000. That drain-out is not new of course but it is very current, those rural counties' current population curves all look like this:
https://www.illinois-demographics.com/putnam-county-demographics
https://www.illinois-demographics.com/calhoun-county-demographics
https://www.illinois-demographics.com/hamilton-county-demographics
https://www.illinois-demographics.com/pulaski-county-demographics
Our statewide population decreased by 0.1% from 2010 to 2020 while the City of Chicago population increased by a similar tiny fraction. The suburban areas generally increased, the medium-sized cities like Rockford stayed flat. The part of the state which is really draining out is that vast farm belt. And the people remaining are disproportionately older; you see hardly any 30somethings or 40somethings anymore except for the Mexican-immigrant pockets, every farm-county elected official or community leader now is in his/her 70s, etc.
To what degree the homogenization/Southernization (which is absolutely true) is a cause of the rural drain as opposed to vice versa, I have no idea. The two are simultaneous though and surely connected in some way.
Yeah but Illinois is a dumpster fire next to 55-gallon drums of aviation fuel stored in the mail hold of RMS Titanic, so most people with a brain have fled or are making plans to flee.
Yea that's been the talking point in certain circles for a while now, it just isn't supported by reality. For instance I need to correct something I wrote above: in fact Illinois statewide had a net population gain of 250,000 residents from the 2010 to 2020 censuses. (I had accidentally looked at a preliminary estimate of the 2020 census not the actual final census results.)
The population-loss meme is connected to the one about Illinois being one of the highest-taxing states, when in fact it ranks 30th among 50 states by state income tax rates. Is also very average nationally (23rd) in sales taxes; where Illinois does crack the top ten (8th) is in property-tax rates.
And the part of Illinois which genuinely is emptying out is that huge farm belt in the middle. Since that is the part of our state's economy which is least impacted by the property tax rates (farmland in Illinois is taxed at 1/6th the rate of residential or commercial properties), it does not appear that levels of taxation are a driving factor in which parts of the state are losing/gaining population.
The US also has the advantage of hundreds of years of development of social technologies for turning people into new Americans. For example, we Americans tend to be less subtle in communication than most places but that's for obvious reasons.
Even if that's true, it doesn't make it unreasonable at all. And people in 19th century America would have considered it laughable to suggest whites would ever be a minority in the US, and yet this is an inevitability this century.
I'm not sure that's the question intended. Everyone already knows that that fear is common around the world. Historically, that's how many nations and peoples perished, dissolved, or were conquered. It's the usual explanation for the fall of Rome. (I recently posted my own disagreement with that here, but I can't deny that the Goths arrived as refugees, then became the rulers of Western Rome). I think outright conquest was more common, but it's often hard to tell at great distances in time. Historians now argue over whether the Celts wiped out the Picts; whether the Anglo-Saxons invaded England suddenly and violently, or slowly and peacefully; whether the Hyksos invaded ancient Egypt from outside or were immigrants who seized power (https://www.science.org/content/article/invasion-ancient-egypt-may-have-actually-been-immigrant-uprising), and whether the "sea people" invaded ancient Egypt, or were originally just refugees.
I also note that the question is posed using the words "their people", and not ethnic or racial terms. Today, conservatives don't want their nation filled with folks who are radicals, and radicals don't want their nation filled with folks who are conservatives. Is one of those "odder" than the other?
So I think that, if there's a question to ask here, it's, "Why do so many people today think the fear of being outnumbered by people who don't respect your cultural values is unreasonable or immoral?" Or perhaps, "Why is everyone in America today in denial about their reluctance to live with people who aren't 'their people'?"
This might be common knowledge around here but are you the Palgrave Macmillan Phil Getz?
No, and thanks for making me aware of his existence. Curious that his interests are so similar to mine.
One other thing… Zeyde play tenor sax? :)
Nope. (And Zeyde is now my new word for the day. :)
Is 'radical' really the opposite side of coin here? I thought that 'liberal' filled that spot.
Radical is the opposite of conservative. Liberal is, if anything, the opposite of authoritarian. Today America has a conservative party and a radical party, but no uniquely liberal or authoritarian party. Both liberal and authoritarian ideals are split about equally between our parties.
Liberalism historically emphasized individualism, equality before the law, equality of opportunity, free markets, private property, the limitation of state power, freedom of speech, toleration of diverse opinions, and the right to own weapons. Conservatives are clearly the liberals today in that original meaning of the term. But they fail when it comes to newer freedoms that weren't thought of 2 centuries ago, like control over one's own body (sexual preference and practice, prostitution, medical treatment, recreational drug use, abortion if your community's metaphysics allow it); the freedom to have privacy (no search without a warrant, freedom to travel and to buy things without it being tracked), cryptography, and pornography; and freedom from gender roles.
Forgive me Phil, I’m way out my wheelhouse here but your definitions seem a bit fusty.
I’ve poked around a bit and having completely absorbed the thinking of Edmund Burke [joke] I see radical being used to describe Margret Thatcher and that weird bit of CosPlay that just went down in Brasilia.
Help me out here with some fairly recent examples. Would you label all these people as Conservative?
Barry Goldwater
Bill Buckley
Ronald Reagan
Jack Kemp
George Will
Donald Trump
Hmm, I should restate some things.
The word "radical" has a clear meaning. Radicals are people who want to make large changes right now.
The word "conservative" doesn't denote a particular set of beliefs, but the desire to keep things mostly the way they are at the present moment, or to revert them to how they were at some prior time. This means it doesn't have a clear meaning, because often one party wants to keep things as they are, while the other wants to adopt a policy that was national policy sometime in the (possibly distant) past.
So these terms aren't really opposites. There are radical conservatives, who want to make big changes right now to revert to some (possibly imaginary) earlier time, like the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, or maybe Margaret Thatcher (I don't follow British politics).
I'd call all those people you listed mostly conservative, but "conservative" meant something different in Reagan's time than it does today. For instance,
- In the 1950s, conservatives were against free speech if it might be communist propaganda. Today, radicals are against free speech in general. So you could call them "conservative" because they want to blacklist and silence people as was done in the 1950s.
- In Woodrow Wilson's day, conservatives thought America should worry about America, while Wilsonian progressives said it should take on poverty and bad governments in other nations, preferably working toward a world government. After World War 2, the Marshall Plan was definitely radical and interventionist, but was supported by "conservatives". In Reagan's day, conservatives felt that America had a responsibility for the rest of the world, while radicals felt America should stop interfering with other nations. Today, conservatives again think America should worry about America, while radicals again say it should take on poverty in other nations, preferably working toward a world government.
The term "liberal" is clearer than "conservative". Historically, it refers to principles of liberty described by Enlightenment thinkers, especially John Locke in the 17th century. The main point of what I wrote is about the meaning of "liberal", not about the meaning of "conservative".
The confusion over the meaning of "liberal" is probably due to the Civil War. The Old South considered itself liberal in the old sense, and yet was a hierarchical society that didn't extend the freedoms it praised to slaves or the lower classes. I would argue that it wasn't really liberal. There was no freedom of speech. Abolitionists or workmen trying to claim equal rights before the law would get beaten up. And the North was both radical and liberal (in any sense).
You could argue that the term "liberal" today has come to mean simply people who want radical changes. I object to people doing that, because I believe personal liberty is important, and the people who want radical changes today are generally opposed to personal liberty. I don't like it when people call for censorship, government control of sex and gender, racial separatism, and the elimination of gun rights, free trade, and private property, and call it "liberal".
So my use of the word "liberal" isn't as objectively correct as I implied. I just think it's more honest.
New information to me. Thanks. I’ll look into it some more.
Succinctly put. I just spent 5 minutes typing far more to say the same thing in another reply.
The Iroquois and Mohicans might have felt that way.
Indeed, they did from long before any Europeans showed up. E.g. when the first French voyageurs arrived in the Great Lakes they found that the Iroquois and Algonquin confederacies had been engaged in a mutually-genocidal war for something like a century, with the core issue being which tribe was entitled to live where.
Similar examples are found throughout history around the world going as far back as we have any historical records. It does seem as if that is one of those fundamental gut human fears.
If resources are scarce, people are going to fight about resources. Where resources are not scarce , people might fight over ethnicity and ideology , but also might not. Western societies tend to deliver abundance, and enforce tolerance.
I know. The Cree didn’t get along with the Ojibway and those folks didn’t get along with the Lakota Sioux either.
This universal problem seems like it deserves more attention than it gets.
One reason for the Norman conquest of Ireland was a petty king inviting in Anglo-Norman mercenaries to help him in a political row with another petty king which escalated up to the high king. Petty 1 seals the deal by marrying his daughter off to leader of said mercs, with promises that merc will be king after him. Mercs then decide they like the place, settle down all over, and set up as local lordlings. Local chieftains and kings who are fighting each other decide that having the new guys on *their* side whacking their enemies over the head is a great idea.
Then the king in England decides "hey, my former vassals may be getting ideas above their station, time to remind them who's the king" and claims lordship of Ireland. Fast-forward the Eight Hundred Years 😁
It happened all over: A and B are at each other's throats, C turns up, A and/or B thinks this is great opportunity to get C on their side, eventually C ends up owning the place. Then it's hard to kick them out again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h0J6VrHuQE
Same happened in Middle/South-America. I'm certainly confusing which is one was which, but the Mayas and Aztecs were at each others throats. Then spanish conquistadors showed up and Mayans invited them to crush the Aztecs (or the other way round?) and guess who ended up owning the place.
Will the international drug trade inevitably collapse thanks to future machines that can synthesize any drug from simple precursors? I ask because I just read a report describing how advances in chemistry over the last 15 years had made it possible to synthesize methamphetamine from more common types of chemicals that governments have difficulty tracking.
What's the market case for anyone ever developing a "future machine that can synthesize any drug from simple precursors"? It may be technologically feasible at some point, but it's going to be competing with an extant global supply chain that can connect you with a factory that produces the particular chemical you want at scale and with full economies of scale, now with overnight delivery. I can see niche applications, but they may not be enough to finance the development and it may not be enough for hypothetical future you to get lost in the crowd when you buy one for your home drug-peddling business.
I remember the early hype about 3-D printers as the inevitable, omnipresent home appliance of the future, and the speculation about how that would mean e.g. gun control was futile because anyone would be able to print a Glock or an AR-15 on demand. I also remember what happened when that dream met the reality of Amazon, leaving 3-D printers as mostly hobbyist toys that are nowhere near capable of printing serious guns, with a handful of high-end industrial machines that could *maybe* do so but not at a competitive scale even on the black market.
You mean illegal drug trade, I assume? Doesn't seem likely. It's very unlikely that any time in the next 100 years it will be possible to dial into a simple machine the structure of some random small molecule and have it synthesize it from whatever random feedstocks you can source from your local grocery, hardware, and animal feed stores. A more plausible scenario is that it becomes possible to type your structure and desired precursors into OChemChatBot and have it outline a plausible synthesis.
Of course, whether the synthesis works or causes your garage/backwoods lab to explode in blue-green fire because OChemChatBot hallucinated the answer will remain a business risk.
I think it's more likely that the tech will be available, but giving the recipe to your Synth-o-matic will be illegal. Defense Distributed will be an indicator.
Was Simon Browne[1] having a PNSE[2]?
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fy2b55mLtghd4fQpx/the-zombie-preacher-of-somerset
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/
I hadn’t read either of these before and they created a lot of new tracks of thought and a tall stack of new reading I want to do.
Right now I’ll only say that my take on Daniel Ingram, from watching videos of people interviewing him, is that he is playing the long con. Sorry David , if you are really enlightened this won’t bother you, if you are running a con it probably won’t either.
Sounds like a reasonable hypothesis, except for Browne regarding his “enlightenment” as negative instead of positive
In the simplest model, yes, down to zero. (See Robert Schiller’s 2007 Financial Markets course on Yale Open Courses, which is phenomenal btw.)
I'm trying to help a young guy I know find a job that's a good fit. He's in his mid-20's, and has ADD & Asperger's. He's distractible, and a bit odd -- on the other hand he is friendly, honest, hard-working, and quite bright. He's got a college degree in computer animation, and knows how to use Blendr, Photoshop and some of the lower-end animation and video editing software. Is also competent, though not expert, with the basic office suite apps -- Word, Excel, etc. -- and had a couple courses in Python. Has built a couple simple web sites.
He's been working at a hardware store stocking shelves and helping customers for several years. He is well-liked there but makes little more than minimum wage, and really needs to earn more. It seems to me that his computer skills should help him get a job that pays above minimum wage, but I can't think of a job that might suit. But if I were opening a store on a tight budget, and was not very computer literate myself, I'd love to have somebody like him who could help me get oriented with using a computer for the store, could build a simple website for the store, could explain spread sheets to me, could make attractive notices in a nice font to post somewhere -- things like that -- and then later help me unload boxes and put the stuff on the shelves.
He is willing to take one or 2 courses if improving certain crucial skills would make him more hirable for jobs that pay at least 50% more than minimum wage, but he's clueless about what courses to take.
One last thing: It would not work for him to be self-employed. He needs the structure of a regular job.
What ideas have you got for this amiable young oddball?.
He could start as an office assistant for some small law/accounting/insurance firms etc, develop his computer skills and grow with the business or move on to a larger firm for a better position after 6 months -1 year of experience.
It sounds like his social skills might be the core problem? If you're only looking for "above minimum wage" and he has a college degree, this seems like an extremely easy problem to solve. Even if his degree were in something completely unusable, he should be able to land a generic office job somewhere. Adding in what could be summarized as "IT skills" to a lot of jobs should also open up a small world of Help Desk or basic tech department jobs. 50% more than minimum wage should be easy going either route, with reasonable expectations of 2X+ minimum wage at least as growth potential.
That is to say, if I'm reading you correctly that he's got social interaction issues holding him back from pursuing something more obvious, then it's not so much his skill set that's in question, as where he can fit in. Assuming that, it seems that his best bets would be to improve his work skills to the point that a large tech firm (or local equivalent if relevant) would want him for his skills and would be willing to overlook the other difficulties, or for him to look for a smaller company where there would be some clearly missing skills (probably general IT/MS Office) that would be willing to give the guy a chance.
If his social skills are strong enough, then the other option I would suggest is doubling down on one or more specific aspects of his degree or tech knowledge and applying specifically for those kinds of jobs. I don't know computer animation as a field specifically, but it sounds to me like a field that is hard to get into because it's so niche (geographically dependent, limited general use for most companies). If so, he may need to figure out all of the related fields that have some kind of crossover, and apply there as well.
"But if I were opening a store on a tight budget, and was not very computer literate myself, I'd love to have somebody like him who could help me get oriented with using a computer for the store, could build a simple website for the store, could explain spread sheets to me, could make attractive notices in a nice font to post somewhere -- things like that -- and then later help me unload boxes and put the stuff on the shelves."
Some of these things you only need once, and you can buy them separately. There are Word and Excel courses for beginners. There are companies that will create for you a static website cheaply.
I do not think it is realistic to look for a tailored "stock-keeper / Python web developer" role. That is very unlikely to happen... and even if by a miracle it happens, he would lose all the leverage that comes from being able to say "I quit", because it is unlikely he would find a job of the same type again. So he needs to choose one or the other.
However, that does *not* mean that he needs to make the choice in advance. He can simply apply to both types of jobs simultaneously, and take the first job offer that is an improvement over his current position. But he needs to remember that the two different roles require two different personae. When applying to a stock-keeper job, do not emphasize Python and Photoshop. When applying to a Python development job, the experience in stock-keeping is only relevant in the sense of "can keep a job".
*
So, the first option is to try becoming a better-paid stock-keeper. Write a CV that displays (1) previous experience with stocking shelves, and (2) the knowledge of office applications, that is: Word, Excel, e-mail. (Everything else is dark magic that the stock-keepers are not supposed to know.) Send this to shops, both large and small. Or maybe, let a job agency do it for you. The image you are selling here is "an intelligent stock-keeper, who can also do the related administrative work". (Which might be a reason to pay him better than mere stock-keeper.) In longer term, possible advancement to a position of a supervisor, or maybe a purely administrative position. Or the company might immediately offer an administrative position instead.
*
Another option is to put the focus on Python and web development. The problem with developing simple web sites is that a company only needs such thing *once*; and them maybe an update a few months later. That is not enough to justify a full-time job. He would need to develop for many companies, but if self-employment is not an option, he needs an employer who does this kind of business. But in 2023, such company will probably use some content management system, and create the new websites by clicking "create web site" in the user interface. The ability to create a simple web site from scratch is only useful as a stepping stone towards something more complicated.
So the image here is "a young person with basic IT skills". Apply for a position of tester or junior Python developer.
Before applying as a tester, download https://www.selenium.dev/ and write a few Python scripts. Try automating something simple; like log in to a website, go to some list and verify that an item with certain properties exists, maybe also select that item and perform some action and verify that you received a success message. You can do this over a weekend, and it could make a dramatic difference over "I have never done anything testing-related". As a web developer, I assume you already know HTML and CSS; also learn how to write (the most simple) XPath expressions to use in the Selenium scripts.
Advantages of being a tester: requires less knowledge than applying as a developer, and you can transition to a developer later. Disadvantages: many software companies do not use testers, because the testing is done by the developers.
To apply as a Python developer... I am out of my depth here, not a Python developer. Learn how to use "venv", "pytest", https://jupyter.org/ . Maybe ask someone, what are the most popular Python frameworks these days, and write something simple in one of them. Notice that Python is useful not just for web development, but also to write command-line scripts which e.g. process JSON files or find something in a database.
Don't overthink it. The idea is that you spend a year or two in your first IT job, and then you can apply elsewhere and ask for a significantly higher salary.
Thanks for your detailed advice. I was thinking that it would probably help this guy to meet with someone whose job it is to assess somebody's skills and tell them what jobs are a good fit, also which of the good-fit jobs are currently looking for more employees, and what skills, if mastered, would make the person more hirable. Looked online, found ads for places that advertised that they do that. For instance one called STEM Career Services: "STEM Career Services retains a panel of expert career coaches, each with invaluable experience in consulting, biotech, pharma, federal government, nonprofits and more – all ready to help you find the perfect job." Is this bogus, or a real service? Seems like there should be places offering actual help of the kind I have in mind, because there must be a need for it.
I have never seen a service like that, so no idea. Perhaps try to find a review online? Also, it could be something in a middle: a mere job agency that tries to look more impressive than it really is. Which might still be a good outcome.
I only have a job experience with the job market in Slovakia; I have no idea whether in other countries it works similarly or not. Most job agencies are not specializing on IT; they provide jobs for everyone. Which means that they have a few hundred job positions they hunt for, and maybe five of them are IT related. So it does not make sense to give them a too detailed list of your skills and preferences, they will anyway just give you one of those five options that seems to match best the keywords you have mentioned. Might as well say "Python developer" and save time. There is also one job agency specializing on IT, but they only want self-employed contractors.
I always thought that something better should exist, and I am not really sure why it does not. Maybe Slovakia is just a too little market. Or maybe it is a chicken-and-egg problem, like trying to build a new Facebook. It does not matter how good idea you have, it is most likely to fail, because people want to be where other people already are. Imagine you start a new job agency tomorrow, now what? Companies reject you because you have no job candidates waiting. Candidates reject you because you have no job offers waiting. So you either fail, or you desperately take anything you can, and become the general job agency with hundred company clients and five IT positions. This is just my guess; never tried that.
Then there is coaching, which is a different type of business: you pay them money, they give you lessons. Can they actually find you a job? Probably only in the sense that if you have skills, any job agency would find you the same job. Maybe they cooperate with a job agency or two, and send them CVs of people who completed their courses. But finding you a job is *not* their core business; it is giving you lessons for money. Probably might as well take lessons from someone who doesn't call themselves a "career service". But again, just a guess.
eaThanks. Can you give me an idea how someone could learn about server maintenance? Is that the sort of thing you can learn with an online course? I do not work in tech and don't know about this sort of thing to advise him, or to judge whether he's up to mastering server maintenance..
I was thinking that it would probably help this guy to meet with someone whose job it is to assess somebody's skills and tell them what jobs are a good fit, also which of the good-fit jobs are currently looking for more employees, and what skills, if mastered, would make the person more hirable. Looked online, found ads for places that advertised that they do that. For instance one called STEM Career Services: "STEM Career Services retains a panel of expert career coaches, each with invaluable experience in consulting, biotech, pharma, federal government, nonprofits and more – all ready to help you find the perfect job." Is this bogus, or a real service? Seems like there should be places offering actual help of the kind I have in mind, because there must be a need for it.
Finally got DALL-e to produce an image of Shrimp Love Me, Unaligned AI's Fear Me. It's here if you want to have a look: https://i.imgur.com/fBwwZSq.png
What was your prompt?
I had to make 2 images and photoshop them together. Main prompt was "Steampunk style: A man standing in water is dismantling a huge machine. Many shrimp are swimming towards him." But DALL-e just would not do the damn shrimp no matter how I phrased it. I tried mentioning them before the huge machine, but then I got machine versions of shrimp -- short of robotic metallic ones. I also tried editing the original by erasing a lot of little areas and then putting "swimming shrimp" as the prompt for the edit. DALL-e simply filled the erased areas with what had been there before, or with plain blue water. So finally I just did a separate image with prompt "Many pink shrimp are swimming towards the center of the image," which DALL-e rendered just fine, and I photoshopped the 2 together. That's the first time I've used Photoshop for a DALL-e image, and it definitely made the process less fun. There's something magical about just using what DALL-e gives me, but in this case I hadda have the shrimp.
Plug: I suppose open threads are plug friendly? It's unclear if there's gonna be another classified sometime soon.
I've written some things over the last few years and finally decided to put them on the internet:
https://medium.com/@nickmc3
I have a couple related to AI (The Ol' Job and What Dreams May Come), The Shell Game relates to economics, and there are some others like Gourbain's Flux Capacity Theorem that I think some people round here might like. Also the pinned, No Hot Take Under the Sun, is short and directly inspired by something Scott said once.
Any thoughts or feedback much appreciated!
> God created each one of us to live out our lives in one or another cognitive and ideological bubble, and though we may paw desperately at the inside of the slippery surface, there is no outward progress. Every inch up the wall just rotates the sphere around us.
I am the worst sort of reader, the sort who comes up with obscure exceptions without addressing the gist. Anyway, have you read about craniopagus twins, i.e. conjoined twins joined at the head? I have read that their cognition seems to overlap somewhat (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan). Can their minds fit into the bubble metaphor?
that's really interesting! i imagine they have a lot in common and probably don't disagree with each other too much on political or social issues, but who knows. It'd be interesting to be physically and cognitively attached to someone you can never agree with on anything. If they see the same things, but perceive them differently, it'd just go to show how important perception is in terms of interpreting and understanding the world
When I look at AI-generated art, it generally has an aesthetic that I would describe as "Tartarian": https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
If, in general, the "Art World" hates Tartarianism and everyone else likes it, this might be an opportunity to break out of a local maximum and mainstream Tartarianism again. AI could allow the capitalists to cut the Art World out of the loop and sell people the styles they like. Of course. this would likely depend on AI design being able to generalize to things like woodworking if it wants to compete with IKEA.
I doubt it. The commercial art for commission world has always been Tartarianism meets Furry Porn.
The Art World is filled with weird stuff like bananas taped to the wall because it's defined in opposition to the large and thriving beautiful and thus actually popular art scene, not because there is a shortage of actually beautiful stuff around.
AI Art will make changes within that beautiful art scene, but it won't change the relationship between the pretty scene and the Art World. To the extent that Ai Art actually enters the art would, it will do so by continuing it's existing un-pretty styles.
I don't expect AI art to enter the Art World at all; the opposite, in fact. I propose that AI could break the Art World's influence on commercial art/design. I have two end tables in my living room: one is a Brutalist IKEA piece, while the other is a more Tartarian design that I inherited from my grandmother. What if AI made it possible to compete with IKEA by selling Tartarian furniture? The Art World might end up becoming a hermetic scene with no broader influence.
It seems that you are saying the Art World produces ugly art because pretty art is an oversaturated field? I can see that, and it makes sense to me. Given that, then the only real chance to break into art (or fashion, etc.) is to make ugly art. That would apply to AIs as much as people, so yes, AIs would have to make ugly art that is somehow novel in order to get recognized. Being from an AI seems enough right now to be novel, though that will likely change if there are free or cheap ways to get AI to create art on demand.
It's not oversaturated so much as low-status.
If you're producing pretty art it means you're just one of those low-status artists who goes around making decorative landscapes for lower-upper-middle-class people to buy and hang in their houses. Maybe you have a small gallery in a popular tourist area where people wander in and consider which of your pretty landscapes would look best in their dining room.
This means that your whole career is dependent on outsiders, not artists, which is adjacent to being an outsider yourself.
I agree that's the case now, but I'm more interested in how we got here. Renaissance artists painted and sculpted pretty things, and were deemed very high status for doing so. It's not a given that pretty = low status.
I'm blaming oversaturation on that switch.
Do you think there could be a large scale (at least several million people EDIT: hundreds of thousands should suffice to make this interesting...the main aim of this is to avoid very small social structures which are much simpler to handle) society which worked on more or less on the same principles modern western democracies work on without modern technology?
What I mean by more or less "same principles" is something along the lines of close to universal suffrage (specifically with women also being on more or less equal footing with men), no slavery (or de facto slavery), high level of individualism and individual rights (the negative rights, i.e. not expecting state-run social welfare systems but expecting a society where people are more often than not free to do whatever they want to do as long as they don't interfere with the same freedoms of others).
Are there any real-world examples?
What is the minimum amount of technology required for such a society in your opinion? Is there in fact a minimum?
Bonus question: What do you think were the societies closest to this in each era/area of the world?
Note: I do not count philosophy and social institutions as technology (although in some sense it is a very important piece of technology) so I allow even rather implausible societies you'd get if you could magically transfer modern people to the world 20 000 years ago, had them all forget everything about their physical technology and replaced that knowledge with survival skills (so that such society doesn't just die out in a week).
I can think of 2 close but not quite examples:
1. Medieval Switzerland. Well, the last canton to give women a right to vote did it in 1990 (rather it was made to do that by the federal court) but an alt-history medieval Swiss confederation where even women get a say does not feel like that big a stretch of imagination. And the low level of centralization seems to overcome the technological burdens associated with democracy in a large-scale society (in fact, it seems to work better than most countries even today and the individual Swiss votes actually often have a meaningful weight).
2. Medieval Iceland, kinda?...something between direct democracy and a "libertarian anarcho-feudalism"...women were still not exactly equal to men there either (perhaps better than in medieval Switzerland, worse than anywhere in Europe today).
I think the big question that needs to be answered is 'what are the military requirements of the society?' Most of the social details that matter for determining the principles involved are going to be determined by the answer to this question. With no military needs, there's very few things standing in the way of an ideal society. The two realistic military requirement scenarios I can think of are 'living alongside one or more potentially hostile peer societies' and 'the potential threat of an overwhelming number of hostile outsiders' (what we might label based on recent threads on ACX as 'SN risk').
There's a lot to unpack here. I define a 'peer society' as one with a similar general technological level, resource base, and population (but not necessarily the same). While in the long run I take as true that the more free society will advance more economically and technologically, that's meaningless if the current technology level allows the less free neighbor to win militarily in the short term.
With modern technology, we can produce and transport food and other essentials efficiently enough that we can survive on a permanent professional military and still maintain modern values. If, on the other hand, you need almost all the population producing food and other necessities, then permanent soldiers are a serious drag on your economy (unless you use them to pillage your neighbors, which modern values won't allow you to do). The first smaller question, then, is 'do you consider the principles of 'modern Western democracies' to allow conscription and/or a period of compulsory military service?'
Different military technologies and social organizations allow different levels of what permanent military capabilities and temporary military capabilities you can expect your society to be able to call on. To go with one of the more obvious real world examples, if your small landowners are practically born with a longbow in their hands for hunting, it's a lot easier to call up a competent militia capable of countering professional armored enemies than if you have to train them from scratch.
EDITED TO ADD: What's interesting is that the ebb and flow of military technology goes both ways. It's probably good for your hypothetical modern values society if useful weapons are commonly owned, either because your farmer's blade-on-a-stick farm tool is not significantly worse than the other guy's spear, or because longbows or muskets are common hunting weapons on the frontier. It's probably bad for your hypothetical modern values society if the battlefield is dominated by cavalry or other animal-based troops (chariots, elephants, etc.) This has several interesting implications: first, that your society could become worse off as technology progresses if the new tech favors a less democratic means of warfare. Second, that the geography of your society also needs to be taken into account, ie bad terrain for horses may be good terrain for a modern values low tech society.
I think conscription in the ancient city-state style is ok, as long as the society only uses it to defend itself (an empire with city state at its core which is very free but lives of the work of the people it conquered does not count as the society I am looking for). By the way, some modern western democracies still have this kind of conscription (Switzerland for example, Germany until very recently, probably more examples exist).
I would say that a professional military paid by some form of taxation (or even something more voluntary, but that is out of scope) is ideal...provided that you structure it carefully in such a way that it does not take over the society like it gradually did in Rome after the Marian reforms. But like you said, it is typically not an option for a pre-modern society, so limited conscription stays within bounds for such a hypothetical society.
To answer your question, I think there is a sweet spot at which a lasting modern values society is possible with a low tech base, at least as far as military tech goes. Switzerland is probably close to the ideal case. You want enough natural resources (especially farmland) to be at least self-sufficient in the necessities, but not be prosperous enough to be an obvious target. You want natural barriers to army movement (especially horse-based troops) but you want trade to be possible. You want to be far away from any steppe or steppe-like geographical feature that could produce nomad hordes, or at least ensure that by the time they get to your natural barriers you've had time to mobilize your farmers to make trying to pillage an expensive proposition not worth the rewards. At this point, modern values comes down to reducing the amount of infant and maternal mortality, reducing the risk of disasters, maintaining trade with neighbors (in ideas and culture as much as goods), and dealing with the cultural problems inherent to religious friction.
Good points. I was thinking along the same lines but I underestimated the military aspect, I think, especially the steppe nomads. In fact, from what I can tell (and that is frankly not much, so feel free to correct me), very early Russia or at least parts of it were fairly "liberal" for their time. Places like the republic of Novgorod seemed to have a lot of potential in this respect. But it seems that the longest lasting impact of Mongol invasions was probably the way the Russian princes became a lot more like the Mongols themselves and places like Novgorod eventually went up in flames, being replaced by an authoritarian society that has not really changed that much until today. But maybe Novgorod was also pretty bad and I just assume it wasn't because they were a merchant republic very much connected to the Hansa.
Switzerland seems to meet all your requirements except for the birth mortality - modern medicine is probably the most important technology for the emancipation of women. The Swiss also seemed to fare better than most in dealing with the 16th century religious conflicts. Perhaps it also helps to have a somewhat more rural society. Most of the free places in the past were economically kind of backwater. Then again, Italy was very rich and probably more free than most places but probably quite a bit less free than Switzerland (my impression is that those places were mostly oligarchies if not outright monarchies). Maybe it has less to do with money and more with geography (which leads to less money). It is much harder to set up a more authoritarian regime in a country which is full of mountains.
So mountains and a distance from the steppe seem to be good candidates for two necessary conditions for a low-tech society to be liberal. And modern medicine (or something close to that, I guess that you could have discovered something like penicillin by accident even in the middle ages?) without which women are unlikely to achieve any significant emancipation.
If you have better tech, you might not need the mountains. Steppe warfare becomes obsolete and land becomes less valuable on its own (and costlier to conquer).
I wonder if the mountains are that crucial after all....the low countries have also been very close to being liberal (probably somewhat less so than Switzerland) for most of their history. They were even very rich from a certain point onwards (though boggy swamps before that). They were definitely very far away from steppe nomads (although it is flatland all the way from Russia to the Netherlands, it is just a bit too far away from Mongolia I guess).
I've been thinking this over. It ultimately comes down to how much power you need to maintain your society from stresses both inside and outside. I would hope that having a democratic government would do a lot to alleviate most of the internal stresses from competing for power; you don't have elites raising private armies when that won't work to give them control over the levers of society.
War and religion are the two outside context problems your society has to contend with, in that you can do everything 'right' and still lose because of factors entirely out of your control. As I think about it, religion is a thornier issue because of your adherence to modern values, as in your values mean can't stop your people from adopting religious beliefs which may be against your values, at which point you have internal stress again. Switzerland was very lucky in having Christianity, even though it did experience some conflict.
I think the low countries were at their high point when their more powerful neighbors were distracted by the newly available ability to colonize the rest of the world. Why fight each other over Holland when you could more profitably establish control over lands other than Europe? Again, that's something you can't take for granted. I don't assume that mountains are the only natural barriers; I think the channel worked very well for England, in that it was wide enough to make invasion very difficult, yet was narrow enough that trade with the continent could flourish. Japan, on the other hand, was a bit too far away from the other east Asian countries (though there are obviously other factors as to why those two turned out differently).
Offhand I'd say you've got cause and effect reversed here. It's technology that enables centralized oppression, and the concepts of republicanism and individual rights are a response to that, an effort to preserve the pre-technological style of living that humans evolved to prefer.
Without technology, it's not really plausible, nor is it of interest, for several million people to coordinate their actions to accomplish vast centralized goals, from building cities to making war, and so having your life hijacked by some far away strange authority doesn't happen naturally. A hunter-gatherer Stone Age society is inherently pretty liberal, because anyone who doesn't like the local social order can usually just walk away and fade over the horizon. Stuff gets decided by consensus, with a leaning towards the people who've been around the longest and/or have made good decisions before. There's not much concept of a franchise, because you wouldn't decline to listen to even a kid, if the kid had something useful to say.
Which is not to say there aren't Stone Age tribes that are oppressive or violent, of course. Human beings are of a nature that could fuck up Paradise if offered to them on a platter. But oppression and violence on a million-person scale -- and the development of the concepts of republican self-government and individual liberties as a bulwark against them -- requires technology.
"Without technology, it's not really plausible, nor is it of interest, for several million people to coordinate their actions to accomplish vast centralized goals,"
I suppose it depends on what you and the OP mean by "technology" - if it includes any time of tools - then yeah. Without tools (aka technology) it's not clear that we are in any way talking about humans.
And is the "several million" a scale or metaphor for "lots"? A bee hive has about 60 -80,000 individuals. Is the hive structure to hold the honey a technology?
I suppose the biggest Neolithic cities maybe got to 100k, but still a lot of "technology" involved.
Christianity seemed to be able to coordinate a centralized mission on the scale of millions, but roads and ships were a necessary "technological aid" - even before the cooption of the the pagan war technology.
several million - yes, that is a metaphor for many. I wanted to exclude tribes of tens of hundreds of people or even societies in the thousands. But hundreds of thousands would have probably been enough, millions is way too many for ancient civilizations.
technology - basically anything less than the sort of technology that we see as the societies which we recognize as modern appear in actual history (i.e. something like less than late 19th century technology more or less). The aim is to see if there is some minimum technology required (beyond that which allows complex societies of hundreds of thousands in the first place, basically agriculture is a must, writing probably also, everything else is optional). Or as Civilis points out above if there are some other nontechnological conditions which can compensate the lack of technology (tall mountains for example)
Well, a social structure of a few hundred people is inherently simpler (and "easier") than that of millions or even tens to hundreds of thousands. That is why I am mostly interested in the latter. Now, society != state, so they do not have to be a part of a single state but they should not exist as atomic tribes.
I am no expert but I think it was often actually much harder for someone to leave one tribe and join another one. In fact, it seems that in many tribal societies expulsion is the ultimate punishment (rather than death). You are mostly protected by a network of your relatives and friends, as an alien without any of those connections you are basically free game and nobody will care too much if someone robs you and kills you. You might ask another tribe if they'd take you in but since your previous tribe forced you out you are automatically suspicious from the beginning so they are more likely to refuse unless you have something (ideally skills so they cannot just rob you) they don't and want.
In general, I'd rather think about examples of agrarian/settled societies - basically my "hidden" question is something like "could there have been a society that would over time develop to what we recognize as a modern 'western-like' society while being very familiar to us in its structure all the way since its inception in the distant past? And if not, why? Is it because of some crucial technology?
Cities have been around. Why don't you explore that.
And I'm not sure of your artificial cut off of "modern" technology.
Is what you call liberal society possible before Christianity and the radical notion of loving your neighbor and aspirationally even loving your enemy? What is the feature you are really thinking about "pluralism", "cosmopolitanism" - these are features of cities.
Ancient "Water Totalitarianisms" like Egypt or China might be a counter example your assertion that stone age societies can't coordinate oppression, though I don't know if million-person scale was typical for them or not.
Though I agree that technology typically has nothing to do with a free social order. In addition, I also want to add that the "Liberal social order" contains its own fair share of the exact same injustices and unfreedoms of past social orders, and then some. Like, congratulations on "freeing" women out of the need to marry to live..... and into the need to work to live. Double the workforce for the wage payers (and for the exact same amount of total wage), half (or less) the workforce for raising the kids. That's some really fucking impressive Civil Right bullshit you did right there, feminism.
They might be counter-examples had I not prefaced "Stone Age" with "hunter-gatherer."
Hopefully it has not only just occured to you that that circa 1970 first-wave "feminism" had rather less to do with actual female liberation and rather more to do with the (at the time twenty-something) male Boomer desire to loosen up the sexual mores that kept their potential sex partners' legs closed until there was a ring on her finger.
It hasn't occured to me just now that feminism is a hack of course, but it's always worth mentioning to undo the decades of "Feminism == Equality" propaganda.
It's not entirely fair to blame male desire for feminism's tendency to be The Slut Manifesto, it had a role of course but women are not string-controlled dolls entirely programmed by male desire. And for every male with that desire, there is (at least) 1 equal and opposite male (her father, brother, future suitor\crush) with an equally-vehement opposite desire.
>1970 first-wave
I believe the established terminology call that second-wave.
No, of course they're not, which accounts for the qualifiers in my statement, but unfortunately white knighting exists because it works, at least often enough to keep it going generation after generation.
Yep, you're absolutely right that 1960s fathers were appalled by the movement. That's one reason Trust No Square Over 30 was a thing, too. But few cohorts are as energetic and single-minded as twentysomething males looking to get laid. That's why we (used to) draft them.
>established terminology
Actually, I think the established terminology for what Carl is talking about here is "the sexual revolution," which overlapped with second-wave feminism but was far from identical with it. (And yet... the idea that Valerie Solanas, for example, was primarily interested in developing an ideology to help satisfy the sexual desires of boomer males is indeed an intriguing one.)
I mean, it's something current feminists explicitly take credit for whenever it's mentioned, so it's a distinction without a difference.
> Valerie Solanas
That piece of shit was far from the typical feminist, and you owe me... things for reminding me of her. At least 3 photos of kittens or their equivalent is what I demand.
I think the scale of millions was a bit too much for me to ask (I also was thinking about examples which were likely smaller), I think that hundreds of thousands should be enough. The main reason behind that restriction was to exclude very small societies of a few tens to a few hundreds of people.
As for women having to work or marry or anything to survive - I am less interested in the modern welfare state (something that obviously requires a huge economic surplus so it is trivially not available to almost any pre-modern societies, definitely not universally), more in what is considered "negative" freedoms, i.e. basically freedom from oppression. I.e. "you have to figure out your own means of survival, tough luck" is allowed for the sort of society I was thinking about, whereas "you have to do x because you are a woman and if you don't we will put you in jail/kill you/do something else that is bad to you" or "you cannot own a field because you are a serf/woman/slave/..." is not allowed (or rather the more of those things the society has, the further away it is from that hypothetical society of mine).
Negative vs positive freedoms is a sometimes useful distinction but it frequently degenerates into nonsense. Like, a woman today has a negative freedom in not being forced to marry to live, but that translates to being stripped of the negative freedom of not being forced to work to live (i.e. being forced to work to live). The "pre-liberation" situation was the dual of that : she wasn't forced to work, but was being forced to marry (with the significant additional leverage that - if I'm allowed to be that crude - she was in the position of "Employer" rather than "Employed". She is the one who the man seeks, rather than the reverse). I don't understand at all why 1 negative freedom is better than the other.
Aside from that and back to your original question, I think you have your hard limit when you consider that all modern "liberal" societies have barely-replacing or dwindling populations. I won't pretend I know why that happens, but clearly there is something about liberal societies that makes it keep happening over and over again. Modern liberal societies solve that using globalization, they simply "import" people (directly via immigration and indirectly when those immigrants themselves have more children than the typical family in the host country), and "export" work via offshoring. Without globalization, a liberal society will collapse at the same rate of its birth rate.
The question, I think, now reduces to : what's the minimum level of technology to make globalization happen ? I think it varies depending on who or what you want to globalize. For people, not much at all. Basic 1000s-level ships is enough, they were clearly enough to replace 3 continents during the European age of sail[1]. For work and information though, you basically have to have at least the telegraph, or **Extremly** good managment\financial structures that can keep a company going after its work has been partitioned into month-seperated areas of the globe.
[1] I know it happened in the mid-to-late 1000s, but a good deal of that was just navigational knowledge building, i.e. people knowing how oceans work. We have evidence pointing to the chinese knowing how to reach the Americas in the 1300s. <handwave> Polynesians knew how the Pacific work enough to settle it centuries before, though perhaps you need more than that to settle continents rather than islands </handwave>
"Negative freedom of not being forced to work to live"
This has never been a thing in the entire history of the universe and is in fact violative of the second law of thermodynamics.
That's pedantic. The "Work" in my comment is to be understood in the sociological sense, and under that definition it's very much a thing since (at least) the beginning of agriculture.
> A hunter-gatherer Stone Age society is inherently pretty liberal, because anyone who doesn't like the local social order can usually just walk away and fade over the horizon. Stuff gets decided by consensus, with a leaning towards the people who've been around the longest and/or have made good decisions before.
Partly right; I agree that democracy is an attempt to implement stone age consensus building on a larger scale. But you *can't* just walk away from a hunter-gatherer tribe. Long-term survival requires other people, and joining a neighboring tribe is going to be tough; they're going to assume that you did something awful and got yourself exiled.
Depends. If you mean "our traditional enemies" if things have gotten that far, sure. But I believe hunter-gatherer societies generally consist of small mobile bands of a family or three that exist within a larger tribe of somewhat related families that may occasionally get together for special occasions. In the latter case, I expect exchanging between bands happens all the time anyway, for reasons of trade, opportunities, mating, et cetera. I don't think it would be super hard to say I'm fed up with the old man, me 'n' my mate are going to live with the in-laws. You also have to consider that you might easily be able to start your own band if you have a few like-minded friends.
Rome was not a democracy but probably had the state capacity for a semi-modern democracy. However in general I think that the crux technological invention is the printing press.
I think 20% of Roman Empire was enslaved.
Printing press sure.
But how about the hundred year project of building of cathedral?
Oh sure the Roman Empire was not a modern democracy - I think they had the technological tools to build one.
Medieval kingdoms were much less administratively capable.
Is democracy really a feature of technological advances?
Pluralism and cosmopolitan duty of hospitality is the psychosocial prerequisite. That doesn't seem to have anything to do directly with technology but with living together in cities.
This is a weird question because it's not obvious to me why you couldn't have modern liberalism without modern technology. If Earth was hit by a contrived EMP that permanently knocked us back a few centuries, I don't see us needing to undo universal suffrage.
I think the limiting factor comes from requiring a multimillion person democracy. That means communicating over long distances, doing that with caveman technology would take so much work, and seems ultimately kind of pointless. The cave 500 miles away is never going to affect you in any way, why vote on a federal government to rule it? I think the answer is that it becomes possible whenever technology enables enough trade and population density that it's both practical and desirable to put millions of people under one rule, maybe around 1000 BC (plus or minus a thousand, my history knowledge isn't that good).
Your line of thinking about the question is close to mine. Why couldn't we simply envision the 13 American colonies in say, the 1790s (post constitution) but with universal suffrage? The technology to communicate, including holding national elections, was available. They didn't discuss the same topics, because a lot of the answers were going to be too local for a national congress to worry about. But they definitely discussed topics, made decisions, and promulgated those decisions to the people of all colonies.
Tibor, is there a reason you wouldn't consider the beginning of America, if it had universal suffrage and not slavery, as fitting your description? If so, then it seems trivial to assume that such a society were *possible* even if that one has two glaring inconsistencies with your goal. If you agree that the general structure and technology level both fit your needs, then we could likely find a 17-18th century society that does meet your requirements, but even if not it's easy to posit that such a society *could* do so. Otherwise I think we'd need some explanation of why it would be functionally impossible for such a society to exist without slavery and/or limited voting by sex.
Sure, a somewhat counterfactual early America might fit the bill.
"Otherwise I think we'd need some explanation of why it would be functionally impossible for such a society to exist without slavery and/or limited voting by sex."
This is exactly what I am wondering about. The fact that we don't see such societies prior to modernity might suggests that there are some technological obstacles that make them very unlikely. High birth mortality might be one candidate (but maybe it isn't). If there haven't been any such obstacles since (say) the bronze age, why have such societies only started to appear in the last 150-200 years (and in significant numbers)?
Early America is a bit of a special case though - you have a society expanding into an almost virgin continent, with no serious military threats on said continent (neither peer type nor ‘steppe nomad type’) and nowhere near the carrying capacity at the given level of technology.
Also, where exactly is the cutoff for modern technology? I would say early America did have early modern technology.
As Civilis mentioned there were ongoing military threats from natives. There were also European forces who could potentially attack at any time. The colonies had very recently won independence in such a war, and then fought again in 1812.
The British colonies in North America spent about a hundred years developing and fine-tuning the machinery of democratic self-government in an era when the British Army would stomp down hard on any military threat and the British Government would otherwise mostly ignore them. At the end of that time, they were able to tack on a top-level administration and military that could stand off stone-age hunter-gatherers and even win very limited wars with European powers mostly distracted by European wars.
But that first hundred years was critical. Democracy with training wheels.
Good points, thank you.
None of these were existential threats, but I take Civilis's point that they were still threats to `modern values.'
Even if the plains Native American-type nomads aren't a military threat in the same way that the Mongols were, they're still a military threat to your values.
If the nomadic tribes raid each other, they're almost certainly going to also raid your frontier settlements. This stresses modern values in several ways.
First, you need a permanent military force on the frontier to defend your settlements from larger groups of nomads, which requires a standing army and all the central authority that that requires. This is more of a burden the farther back you go technology wise.
Second, your frontier settlers are going to develop a strong distrust of the nomadic tribespeople, which pushes back against modern multiculturalism.
Third, the war along the frontier will almost certainly be very messy. Among the modern values are the rules of war. It's a lot harder to deal with prisoners if you barely have enough food for your own population. Further, it's highly likely that the prisoners do not share your values, which can cause lots of different issues depending on how your values differ; see Imperial Japan for an example without the tech difference. (Crime and punishment is an area where I think it will be hard to hold modern values at a lower economic tech level).
Fair point.
Well, that is also an answer. I.e. the physical technology is not really necessary. Also, one rule is not strictly necessary for my definition to work. It is more "one society" in which the members of that society can exist kind of freely and easily go from one place to another. So a large enough tribal confederation where you can just switch between the tribes counts even though there is no single "government". A society of multiple tribes where the other tribes are more likely to kill you of you lose the protection of your tribe (e.g. you did something the rest of the tribe did not like and they expel and disavow you) does not count. The society can be extremely decentralized but it should still be one society in a meaningful way.
I tend to think that in principle such a society could exist even without technology. The question is that why hasn't it or if it did, why was it replaced with more authoritarian rule?
Authoritarian rule won out because most of the successful military technological paradigms required having a strong authoritarian government, either centralized or feudal.
I would guess that the biggest single historical technological military advantage is the horse. Horses are a massive military advantage in that they can provide both power and mobility, whether this takes the form of a charioteer, a cataphract, a dehgan, a horse archer, a knight, or a dragoon. Horses are also expensive to maintain. If you want your military to have these expensive advantages, you need some system to maintain them, and you can't conscript them only in times of need like you can foot soldiers.
A fair number of societies came up with the solution to having ready horses when you have a war: in return for grants of authority, you expect in return that the people you grant authority to will show up when a war happens with horses, good gear (weapons and armor) and some peasants (with cheap weapons) to bulk up your ranks. And this pattern works effectively just about anywhere, from China to Iran to France to the steppes.
It's almost worth quoting Wikipedia's article on Horses in Warfare in full, especially the part on the Americas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_warfare#The_Americas), but to summarize: America didn't have horses until the Europeans showed up and used them to militarily overwhelm the natives, especially in the open.; natives that acquired and used horses managed to put up much more resistance.
I tend to agree, but in terms of the European conquest of the Americas, it was such a one-sided affair that even without horses the Europeans would have crushed the natives. You had Old World diseases, they had steel vs basically stone age technology (albeit arguably maxed out to the limit), they had military organization which allowed them to wage war in a way very different from the way the native Americans waged war, they had gunpowder (thought that also probably wasn't really necessary and 15th-16th gunpowder weapons weren't all that decisive, especially against mostly unarmoured opponents).
I mean, the Romans would have crushed the Native Americans pretty much just as easily as the Spanish, the military tech difference was not in hundreds of years but in thousands. And disease killing like 75% of the native population and destabilizing their societies also helped A LOT.
It's not that the plains Indians could have won, it's just an illustration of how one particular military advantage (and not a particularly advanced one) works so well in most situations. The fact that that particular advantage is also tied to a several different authoritarian governance systems independently arising in different parts of the world makes the point even greater.
To get back to your original point and my initial response to you: I think it's possible for a society with a lower technology level to last with something close to modern values, it's just not very likely in most real-world circumstances, especially when you factor in circumstances outside your control. The biggest circumstance outside your control is the military situation, including what "technology" (for a primitive use of the term) underlies the current military paradigm you live in. Many military paradigms incentivize authoritarian social systems, especially the further back you go and the tighter the economic circumstances are.
I think that sounds like a reasonably rational theory as to why history looks the way it does.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me as well. Basically, a society with modern-ish values can give you an economic advantage (from a certain tech level onward...because slave labour probably is more efficient before a certain point, especially in certain labour-intensive industries).
From a certain level of technology onward, you actually get a large military advantage from an economic advantage (industrial revolution is what allowed Europe to basically conquer the world, because industrial production gives you a huge military advantage). But below that tech level you don't get that advantage and authoritarian rule actually tends to give you an edge militarily (that or a steppe nomad structure, but that is limited geographically and also very far from modern values, perhaps even more so).
I think you underestimate how much modern society relies on the technologically enabled surplus whereby a tiny fraction of the population can produce enough food for all, most children survive to adulthood etc. premodern life was mostly nasty, brutish and short. Not a good match to modern values.
This is one of the reasons I suspect there might be some minimum tech requirements for modern values. One other reason might be in medicine and its impact on birth/children mortality
World population in 1500 was 5% the size of what it is today. If Johan's aliens showed up and irreversibly zapped Earth back to 1500 technology (say), (including no tractors, no fertilizer, no pesticides, and no modern high yield crops), probably 95% of the population would die. And that's assuming we can still produce as much food as they did in 1500 with 1500 technology. I'm sure there are skills involved in farming without any modern technology, which we have thoroughly lost, so it might be worse. Maybe even 99% of the population dies. What kind of civilization emerges after that apocalypse...who knows.
No effective birth control is going to be a big perturbation and is surely going to effect the roles of the sexes. Also if `no modern technology' means we are back at a population that is 99% subsistence farmers, I'd guess we're much more likely to end up with, at a minimum, some kind of feudal structure than universal adult suffrage.
If we retain our knowledge of stuff like the germ theory of disease, we still get a pretty enormous win over the previous instance of 1500 technology. If they vanish the capital but leave the knowledge in books, we'll be back to 21st century technology in a couple centuries. (The first 20 years or so will be really bad and lots of people will die, but if there's still civilization with books and some memory of the old world, they'll know what they're working toward. I'm pretty sure a good blacksmith can build a decent steam engine if he's shown how, for example. Some clever group of people will build steamships and cannons and end up ruling a whole continent.)
If they change the laws of physics so guns and engines don't work and electricity won't flow in wires (The scenario in the Change books), we'll still have all the other relevant knowledge. Antibiotics and the germ theory of disease, hydraulics and statistical quality control, etc.
Nit: Copper IUDs can I believe be made and used effectively with 16th century technology, if you know that they are a thing. They aren't an ideal birth control solution, particularly in isolation, but they're probably good enough to significantly perturb society - or in the hypothetical techno-apocalypse, significantly reduce the perturbation.
Sure. None of the people who only know how to write persuasively, interpret complex Supreme Court decisions, or write Javascript are going to care that they don't have a vote. They're going to be only too glad to do exactly what they're told by the local capo good at logistical thinking, who can successfully organize the useful people who know how to make soap, assist a cow with a difficult birth, shear a sheep, or figure out in which tree the bees keep their honey.
Indeed they won’t care, because they will most likely be among the 99% of the population that died of starvation in the aftermath of the disappearance of modern technology. A premodern society has no use for JavaScript or the ability to interpret complex Supreme Court decisions.
Oh I dunno. If they're young and trainable, you always need people to dig holes, move heavy piles of stuff from here to there, and take the midnight to 4am watch. Old guys like me need to watch out, though, lest it be ice floe time. I should learn beekeeping in my retirement. I already know how to make soap, fortunately, but I know squat about farm animals.
>No effective birth control is going to be a big perturbation and is surely going to effect the roles of the sexes.
Possibly less than we think: if modern birth control and medical abortion became unavailable, the current social norms would not be grossly incompatible with other ways of getting rid of unwanted babies. (Infant exposure was a thing).
Lack of antivirals to treat HIV and antibiotics for other STDs would be a bigger disruption to sexual relations.
If we go back to preindustrial infant mortality rates, each woman has to bear several children just to keep the population stable. Adam Smith estimated that the average poor woman (that is, a typical woman) needed ten or twelve live births to produce two adult offspring.
Good catch, I totally forgot how antibiotics and modern food supply have changed the infant mortality equation.
Isn't it mostly sanitation and nutrition? Do the aliens make us all forget what germs are?
By no modern technology, what exactly do you mean. Sure, `no cars, no computers, no radios' - but is there effective contraception? Understanding of the germ theory of disease?
Do you count hunter-gatherer societies? (Is the `several million' threshold intended to exclude them? How do you draw the borders of `your' society). Is the population living close to the carrying capacity of the land?
Basically, my thoughts were along the lines of - was it possible from bronze age onwards to have a society which resembles ours in most respects but which has between bronze age and very early modern technology. And if not, what are the sort of technologies that prevent this from happening. My basic question is - could there have been a society way back in the distant past which basically looked very familiar to the late 19th to early 21st century western thinking/way of life? Would it be possible for such a society to roughly keep within that societal framework all the way until the actual 21st century? If not, why not (my assumption is that has to be due to technology)? Now, there has been quite a bit of change since the 1880s or so but the fundamentals have mostly remained the same since then...i.e. some variation is allowed but much less than what we see in the actual history.
I am less interested in prehistory because social structure of at most a few hundred people is a lot easier problem than structuring a society of millions. Also, stone age tribes Now, the people do not have to be a part of a single state, they can be very decentralized but still function as a single society. However, for it to count as a single society it has to be relatively easy to move from one part to another. A tribal confederation where each member can simply leave and join another tribe (which I don't believe was always or even often an option in history) might count as such a society.
Also, hundreds of thousands of people should probably suffice to count.
"could there have been a society way back in the distant past which basically looked very familiar to the late 19th to early 21st century western thinking/way of life? "
No. First off if you go very far back at all a huge portion of the population becomes manual laborers (farmers).
I think Civilis's point about military pressures is a key part of the answer (no). Other parts are maternal and infant mortality, lack of contraception, and the Malthusian trap, which technology liberated us from.
That seems like a good summary of the thread. Some modern values are hard to aspire to without the economic surplus of technology.
I think that contraception is not really that big a deal, but the lack of modern medicine (and the associated death rates during childbirth and among children) is. A combination of interrupted intercourse and keeping track of the calendar can reduce chance of pregnancy significantly. Probably not to zero pregnancies (assuming both partners are fertile of course) but maybe to 2-3, definitely not 8 or 10. If a woman only had sex say a week after ovulation, the chance of pregnancy is close to zero (unless you miscalculate the date for the ovulation).
So contraceptives are probably a necessary requirements for hippie free love and there would generally be less casual sex without them but I don't really think the society would change that much if tomorrow they stopped working. But perhaps they allowed a culture shift which would be mostly retained without them today but which would not have happened without them in the first place.
I forgot to answer my own bonus question. It will probably be very off and wildly Eurocentric but I think it could be something like:
0. prehistory - Ook's tribe. They best tribe!
1. bronze age - Phoenicia? A very uninformed speculation, basing it mostly on them being mostly mercantile city states. I would definitely expect more freedom there than say in Assyria under Ashurbanipal (unless conquered by Ashurbanipal).
2. classical antiquity - Roman republic? They seemed to do better on suffrage than the Greeks with fewer slaves and more rights for women (Greeks were close to fundamentalist Islam on women's rights). But they only get the 1st place since the bar is so low as far as I can tell.
3. late antiquity - I don't really know...While the early Roman empire was probably still better in this regard than most other places at the time, Rome kind of turned almost totalitarian with and after Diocletian. At the same time it still controlled most of the known world. The Sassanids weren't exactly great either. I don't know much about India or northern Europe of the time but probably some places there must have been more free than either of the two empires of the time (China probably wasn't).
3. early to high medieval - Iceland? But of course, we are talking about tens of thousands of people at most.
4. late medieval to ...well ... now - Switzerland? Or the US (though not before 1865).
Had an interesting blog-relevant discussion with ChatGPT; is there some way to engineer my original prompt to make ChatGPT connect the pieces of information it has?
Me: Does the author of SSC write any other public blogs?
ChatGPT: I am not able to provide information about the activities or current projects of the author of Slate Star Codex (SSC) as my knowledge is limited to publicly available information and my browsing function is currently disabled. It is possible that the author of SSC may be writing under a different pseudonym or platform, but I do not have any information on this.
Me: Do you know what Astral Codex Ten is?
ChatGPT: Astral Codex Ten (ACT) is a blog that was written by the same person who wrote Slate Star Codex (SSC). The blog covers similar topics as SSC, including psychology, neuroscience, politics, and philosophy, and is known for its in-depth and analytical approach to issues. ACT was created after the discontinuation of SSC and is currently active. Like SSC, ACT has gained a significant following and is widely read.
--
My other takeaway from playing around with the tool is that it's extraordinarily bad at giving summaries of plots of existing works of fiction, as it frequently mixes up major details and inserts false bits that stereotypically occur in the work's genre. Obviously this is the most intelligent AI I've ever chatted with, but compared to discussing with a normal human it feels frustratingly dumb.
I had a similar problem on like day 2 of ChatGPT's release, where I was asking it questions about Fringe Benefits Tax. If I was discussing about FBT in Australia and then tried to ask it questions about FBT in New Zealand, it would act like it didn't exist in NZ, and similarly if I opened the conversation talking about FBT in New Zealand it couldn't transition to talking about FBT in Australia. I used the feedback mechanism embedded in the website and when I tried to replicate it again just now, it no longer has that problem. So I guess the engineering solution is: provide feedback then try again later?
The former is clearly one of the failsafes kicking in to block you, not the main neural net failing to connect its information. It's got the same phrasing as all the other "you tripped a failsafe" answers.
Question for the language mavens.
I’m just finishing “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” by Daniel Everett and am curious as to how or if his dust up with Noam Chomsky played out. Is language inherent or an artifact?
I've heard it alleged that unwritten languages never have recursion as a surface feature.
My impression of current consensus (which is a few years old now) is that most people think Chomsky and Pinker overstated the extent to which the "language instinct" drives extremely specific behaviors, has immutable, domain-specific "modules" for particular tasks, and has particular grammatical features "hard coded." However, I think people still generally agree that humans do HAVE a language instinct, and that language isn't JUST an artifact or emergent feature of the rest of our cognition.
Would be interested to hear from people who have paid attention to this debate more recently.
This was my understanding from 15-20 years ago. Pinker/Chomsky had won, but not as convincingly as they would claim.
That is a good summary of the consensus position, but as a linguist, I am also of the belief that the present position is the result of a general retreat and loss of ground. It is a position that will likely keep moving to the empiricist end as time goes on.
I’m not a linguist. I completed an undergrad minor in Linguistics with Russian as my foreign language when I got my CSci degree so I have a bit more background knowledge than someone who plays a linguist on television.
Kind of a language enthusiast though. Can you recommend any blogs or journals I can follow to keep up with things?
There's the well-known Language Log, which you may have come across already if you're interested in language and linguistics. To the right of the posts is a blogroll, click to unfurl. Somewhere in that long list, there might be blogs which offer updates to the Chomsky-Everett debate. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
I’ll dig around in that blog roll. Thanks.
Whenever I see "XBB" (the new covid-19 variant), the word my brain immediately jumps to is "Xibalba". Does anyone have other words that come to mind when they see "XBB"?
Tangentially, according to wikipedia which is always accurate, it's pronounced more like "sheeble-ba" (if you have an American accent), which is not only cooler to my ears, but also fits the rhyme scheme of both Blondie's "Rapture" and Titus Andromedon's "Peeno Noir". And both of those songs are now mashing up in my head to create a new earworm. Enjoy!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xibalba
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHCdS7O248g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6yttOfIvOw
No nothing. if I had to pick one "bee-bee", like from a BB gun.
Makes me think 2B from Nier Automata. This new variant is clearly a logic virus.
Actually, the ugly and unpronouncable 'XBB' just gives me an awful feeling that the modern world is so full of teensy mutually contingent details, so pointlessly intricate, that we have run out of names to give to things and have to use randomly generated alphabet sequences, sort of like the passwords my computer makes up for me now that it's no longer safe for me to use stuff like the names of beloved pets from long ago followed by my year college graduation. Here in the fucking bleak fucking complicated fucking more-stuff- than-meaning modern world we use alphanumerics. The units of life unpronounceable jumbo randos. Gaaah.
Well, to be fair, here's a nice visual representation of the current family tree of SARS-CoV-2:
https://gisaid.org/phylodynamics/global/nextstrain/
It would probably take a platoon of English graduate students working full time to assign creative, pronounceable, non-trademarked and not-offensive-in-any-translation names to the several thousand dots on the far right.
And then people would end up confused, the way they ended up confused when everyone got to assign a nice meaningful name to new chemical compounds (like "barbituric acid" for my good friend Barbara), and would insist on systematic names, and then we would get "1,3-diazinane-2,4,6-trione" instead, which kind of brings us full circle in terms of euphony alas.
I think the way the covid virus evolves just ended up being rather intricate, and the naming system behind "XBB" is actually a rather decent attempt at labeling and tracking the numerous leaves in covid's family tree, so to speak. it does kind of reflect how we are bad at predicting how many covid variants we will get in the future and how severe they will be.
but uh yeah it would be nice if important things have more catchy names. like someone mentioned further down, hurricanes get human names, and this works out pretty well - we reliably get a few dozen hurricanes each year and the formation of a hurricane isn't to be blamed on any one particular country. Alphanumeric naming conventions should be left for specialists and computers.
Having read up on astronomy for a while, I think I have become desensitized to scientific things of interest getting labeled with long strings of letters and numbers.
WkyWUxkha2qUrc!
XBBZDSGTRHMDSXZ,FML
Is every single word in the English language offensive now? I didn't get the memo from the wokeists! What's their identity-politics-based objection to "Kraken"?
And yes, I am being just the tiniest bit sarcastic, why do you ask? Let's just nickname stuff reasonably neutrally and not worry so much. I don't know; that may be easy for me to say, given I'm not on social media at all, but... I just really feel like saying, tonight, if social media and the pointlessly intricate life of the digital world are depressing (and yeah, I see Eremoiaios' point, they kinda are)--there are still other things in life. All the old things still exist despite our ignoring them. Digging dirt and watching seeds germinate is a great cure for that feeling, or better yet, tanning buckskin. It's laborious and satisfying and involves no pointlessly intricate details at all, and the utterly weird way the stuff behaves during the stretching phase is great fun.
I expect this digression may seem extremely irrelevant to you, it's just... it's very pleasant being irrelevant sometimes. This is a weird place to recommend it, but I do.
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.
-Ezra Pound
The lilies of the valley retweet not, nor do they sneer...
"Kraken" is offensive to upjumped monkeys who have merely two arms and no tentacles.
Kraken is a slur used to mock crackheads, you heartless monster.
Maybe we should become crasser, instead of going rando-alphanumceric, and call it "Apeshit."
There is an old (1963) Czechoslovak SF movie called Ikarie XB-1, based on a novel written by a Polish author Stanislaw Lem. Now I see it has a dubbed English version under awful title "Voyage to the End of the Universe".
As a side note, did the powers-that-be decide to stop naming variants after Greek letters because they were up to pi and knew people would have too much fun with "hurr durr pi variant" jokes?
It might have to do with how the virus was evolving. Omicron was really different from Delta, and also didn't descend from Delta (the two have a relatively old common ancestor), and quickly outcompeted Delta. But ever since, we've been just getting various descendants of Omicron, none of which were so different and more infectious as to make the WHO use another Greek letter. Although maybe giving XBB or XBB.1.5 a new Greek letter might be nice in that we wouldn't all have to deal with long sequences of letters and numbers.
I'm willing to take those in the field at their word that omicron subvariants aren't different enough to rate a new Greek letter, and I'm not a huge fan of the informal mythical monster nomenclature I've seen. (Calling the latest variant "the Kraken" is conclusory and not IMHO helpful.) But I think that given that there's going to be popular coverage of subvariants, some neutral hurricane name-style option would be helpful to make it easier to write about them.
"Helpful" is relative.
If you're interested in clickbaiting and panicmongering, "Kraken" is a not-bad choice.
Evidence suggests not really, given how little public attention the name or the subvariant has really evoked. It's gotten about as much or maybe less reporting than the last few dominant subvariants, and has provoked no particular public response beyond the standard exhortations to vaccinate, boost and maybe mask if you feel like it. (Ventilation? What's that?) And vaccine requirements have been scaled back if anything.)
The main increased public response to Covid in recent months in the US at least has been requiring testing for Chinese travelers, which is orthogonal to XBB.1.5 (and kind of pointless for anything else given existing prevalence).
And I guess the feds are sending out four more free tests per household (whoo!), but that seems more to be about the general increase in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths during the early winter's variant soup, rather than being sparked by "the Kraken".
Maybe it's getting clicks somewhere. But those clicks don't seem to be translating to much visible effect that I can see. It's possible I'm not reading the right sources.
I thought they were saving xi for the new strain that will come from China "letting it rip".
Sigh. :^)
That's right, I meant to start pronouncing his name "zai" or "ksee". Thanks for the reminder!
I think they're thinking something along the lines of "if we piss off the CCP, it'll stop letting us into the country *at all* and that would cause issues in our other projects, and/or it'll retaliate against innocent WHO personnel currently in China because they have a history of doing that".
Whether this actually holds up in terms of the maths is questionable, but they wouldn't be the first people to get suckered by China and then succumb to sunk-cost.
I'm guessing the WHO would probably try to avoid offending world leaders less prickly and powerful than China's.
Though I imagine Delta Airlines wishes they'd been so solicitous of corporations in 2021.
Avoiding offending world leaders less prickly than the present CCP is plausibly a better deal, since their demands are less costly to meet.
Do frogs also have hearts on their left side?
I am genuinely curious. Maybe even more generally, where on the evolutionary tree the "asymmetric heart position" appears? As soon as the heart itself? Why?
By the time of jawless fish the heart was already starting with the "blood comes in one side and goes out the other". Not sure it was asymmetrically oriented along the body axis though, but I suspect that started soon after?
Thought experiment based on the general Georgist discussion that sometimes occur here: I'm the mayor of a small village where land is plentiful. I convince a million people to move here, and they each get to buy a plot of land for cheap. We pool our resources and build a city. Our city becomes a nice city and more people want to move in. Land prices go up a lot. Everyone originally involved becomes a millionaire. It's all like a pyramid scheme except the pyramid is real.
Has something like this ever been tried? I assume that the hard part is "convince a million people to move here", but shouldn't we have people or institutions with that kind of pull? Or is the hard part "become a nice city that attracts people"? That doesn't look very hard, most cities seem to be hardly trying.
(Yes, I know my thought experiment is totally unrealistic, I just want to discuss the principle.)
It's been tried already: Oklahoma. There's a good 99%PI-Podcast episode about it, aptly called "The Worst Way to Start a City"
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-worst-way-to-start-a-city/
The problem with your thought experiment is the implicit assumption that a city is a collection of buildings and physical infrastructure. In reality, the value of a city is mostly in its people and its social and institutional capital. This is why a city losing its people will be in inexorable decline despite little physical change (e.g. Detroit in the late 20th century was not suffering from earthquakes destroying its buildings).
The problem is not finding a million people to put up capital to construct a bunch of high rise. The problem is turning a million people into an attractive community.
Those million people are the attractive community. They are incentivized to be very attractive since they are invested in the city.
If that's all that it took then cities would never die back once having reached a certain size threshold, which is demonstrably not the case.
Ownership of land is concentrated in most cities.
I think the key would be some coherent reason for so many people to choose there, instead of somewhere else. Other commenters mentioned Chicago (railway hub) and Dubai (oil).
But really, every city that has succeeded can be looked at as doing exactly what you are talking about, with different levels of intentionality and different levels of success (including how long it took to grow). If you look at NYC or SF right now, there are people buying and holding land, or developing it, for future purposes. That's really what you're talking about, minus the very short timeframe from your hypothetical (which still works for a number of major cities, including rebuilt ones like Tokyo).
But people in NYC or SF is not coordinating to buy land. The coherent reason to chose this city instead on an already existing place is that the already existing place is expensive.
"Expensive" is always relative. A city may be considered "very expensive" at a particular place in time, then go through a massive upswing and prices increase by some large factor. Does that mean it was or wasn't "expensive" prior to the upswing? All a matter of perspective. I am arguing that a sufficiently large incentive to move to a place overrides the "it's too expensive" reasoning and could be reason for coordination. If significant amounts of oil (or some other valuable natural resource) were found in or around an existing major city, that city may see significant growth in the way you are describing. Similarly, SF became a major tech hub and already high prices were able to skyrocket in a way that could be called coordinated.
An oil find or SF being a tech hub seems rather different from what I'm talking about IMO.
I agree that there's a difference. I don't think the difference is a difference in kind as much as level. I think most cities did what you are describing to some extent, and a few (Dubai and Chicago again) doing almost exactly what you are describing.
My original point, looking at those examples, is that you just need a compelling reason to choose that particular city over alternative options, even knowing that second-tier adopters are going to be more than first-tier, and third-tier will pay more again, etc.
If you're talking about a literal one million people are all first-adopters, I think that's a logistical problem that's far too large for our planning and construction industries to handle.
Chicago in 1830 was a grubby frontier outpost of fewer than a thousand people; in 1837 its leaders optimistically declared it to be a city. They were clear (and loud, and insistent, in fact famously would not shut up about) the goal being to become the "next great metropolis", etc. "Come on over and get rich" was absolutely the collective civic concept for decades to come.
In the 1840 census Chicago had 4,500 residents, ten years later it had nearly 30,000 which put it 24th in a nation of 24 million people.
Then starting with the 1860 census the population growth went this way (I'm rounding the totals):
1860: 112,000 (9th in the US)
1870: 300,000 (5th)
(October 1871 the entire central district burns to the ground, is entirely rebuilt by spring 1873)
1880: 503,000 (4th)
1890: 1,100,000 (2nd, stayed there until 1990)
1900: 1,700,000
1910: 2,186,000
1920: 2,702,000
1930: 3,376,000
Lots of people did get rich from Chicago's frantic growth, some of them legally and plenty of them not. People began visiting the place basically to see what was to that point the biggest fastest building of a huge modern city that had ever been even imagined. By 1900 there was a whole published literature in the U.S. and Europe of books and articles (some of them from famous writers), basically marveling at how some log cabins along a middling river running through a swamp had turned into CHICAGO -- complete with mass transit and symphonies and museums and world-class banks and half the nation's resident multi-millionaires and a whole modern developed-nation infrastructure -- in less than a single human lifetime.
(This also had some far-reaching and novel economic impacts way beyond that place, I recommend "Nature's Metropolis" by William Cronon about that part.)
That might be the example to date closest to what you're describing, at least other than ones driven by a particular extractive resource such as nearby oil fields.
Good history.
See also Miami and Spangler.
Chicago was the success story, but I think that sort of ambition was pretty common. Metropolis, Illinois was founded close to the same time with pretty much the same aim (as the name suggests) and the same vision of being a transport hub, and, well, now its main claim to fame outside its county is trading off the fictional city Siegel and Shuster put Superman in a century later.
St. Louis ("Gateway to the West") also vied with Chicago for that role. There are various reasons given that it failed (e.g., eastern businesses being reluctant to put a railroad hub in a slave state, Illinois beating them to a bridge over the Mississippi), but my sense is that it's not a completely implausible alternate history.
I mean, Chicago didn't have oil fields, but they had a great location for building a railroad hub. From a brief look at the history it's not clear whether they envisioned from the beginning that they should become the great freight gateway to the West; the first railroad charter in 1837 was just for a line to the lead mines at Galena (although at over 150 miles that was still an ambitious scale, for the time). But with railworkers and access to shipping already in place they had all the ingredients to take advantage of the massive demand created by westward expansion.
So, anyway ... while I expect the founders' ambition and optimism helped, the explosion was still very contingent on other circumstances. The city didn't rise to great wealth as some self-contained economic engine.
Sure, that's why I said it is probably the _closest_ real-life example. I don't think the hypothetical exactly as stated is anything but a thought experiment. Cities do not grow to serious sizes in isolation, never have.
And as an aside, yes the 1830s Chicago founders absolutely did envision from the beginning that it become the great freight gateway to the West. So did groups of men who founded Milwaukee, and laid out literally a half-dozen different villages in Northwest Indiana most of which died out, and some other places in that part of the world in that general timeframe. All of those groups initially thought in terms of water transport, specifically in Chicago's case building a new thing called the Illinois & Michigan Canal.
That canal did get finished and its construction did jump-start the new city and it did operate for some decades....but in the big picture it was by the time of its 1848 opening already obsolete. That first railroad company chartered in 1836 didn't run its first train until 1848 and didn't reach beyond the borders of Cook County until the early 1850s...but the new way of things was clear to everybody by then. Chicago pivoted to the new transport technology and by the time of the Civil War was the greatest rail center in the country if not the world.
The story of the colonization of Texas by Moses and Stephen F. Austin may have some useful parallels: "In order to settle Texas in the 1820s, the Mexican government allowed speculators, called empresarios, to acquire large tracts of land if they promised to bring in settlers to populate the region and make it profitable." https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/stephen-austins-contract-bring-settlers-texas-1825
Having grown up in pre-air-conditioning Texas, I have long thought that a key part of their strategy had to be to get them to move in the six months of fall to spring, so that, by the time summer hit, it was too late to get back to Tennessee. Anyone trying to come here in July would have turned around. Or maybe they were all crazy, like William Barrett “we outrange the Mexicans so let’s get ourselves pinned down in the Alamo instead of using guerilla warfare” Travis.
As a fellow Texan who has only existed in the post-freon era, I can only say, bless your heart.
“Bless your heart?” Them’s fightin’ words!
lol clearly from context I meant it in the "genuine expression of pity" sense and not the "sardonic criticism" sense
I'm just old enough to have spent weeks every summer as a child visiting grandparents in Kansas and Oklahoma before AC was completely ubiquitous and effective. Middle-class homes had room AC units which struggled to keep up with the local August climate, car ACs the same and not every car had it, etc. In Oklahoma during the summer absolutely nobody went outside by choice during the day. And that was the 1970s climate not today's!
This is basically Dubai, right? But they have oil. Maybe the problem with this scheme is that random group of immigrants from all over the world lacks social cohesion necessary to build successful economy capable of producing goods which can be traded with outside world and thus pay for necessary imports. If there is an oil deposit nearby, problem solved.
I am sure other examples are possible.
If this were to be done, it would likely need to be done by a group that already has high social cohesion. Mormons maybe? But the Mormon church already have Salt Lake City and I guess they can just continue to grow it instead.
Have we done rat studies on what causes obesity?
From Slime Mold Time Mold: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
> The graduate student was inspired to try putting the rats on a diet of “palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake. Today, researchers call these “cafeteria diets”.
> When you give a rat a high-fat diet, it eats the right amount and then stops eating, and maintains a healthy weight. But when you give a rat the cafeteria diet, it just keeps eating, and quickly becomes overweight.
It seems like we could learn a lot from this. Seems like we should be able to binary search: try this with 50 foods and track which ones cause weight gain. Then look at the ingredient lists and see which ingredient is causing the weight gain. Then... we'd just know what causes obesity?
Even if the search doesn't uncover an exact culprit, I think a lot of people would get value from just having an index that maps from common foods to How Fat Rats Get if you give it to them.
Do we have this already? If not, why not?
Consider the origin of the word rubenesque. How about he Venus of Hohle Fels (40,000 BCE). I am not sure that she was pregnant - I think she was just fat.
From Shakespeare's ages of man, the 5th age:
“the justice,
In fair round belly, with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances”
Individual obesity is not a modern thing. Gluttony and sloth have been around for a very long time.
Average population obesity is the modern thing. Obesity comes from easy availability of food and lack of burning calories (physical work). Modernity has created that potential circumstance for more and more people.
We live in an age of plenty and increasing mechanization which has reduced the necessary toil. It is not really the "kinds: of foods it is the easy availability of calories and the lack of required strenuous activity. What you probably need is a sedentary rat.
Perhaps it is not the ingredients per se but the calories per volume. I'd think that a rat can only eat so much volume.
SMTM discusses many of the issues around this (look at their articles on scurvy, for example), but I think would agree that more research in this area is desperately needed. Part of the issue is that if the effect is from a contaminant, or several contaminants, that it would likely be present in different levels in, for example, different lettuces grown in different places at different times, and might get accidentally added during processing of some foods, so just looking at “lettuce”, “wheat flour”, “eggs”, etc, would likely miss this.
SMTM is strangely respected in this community, but I have found the articles I have read from them (admittedly relatively few) to be very unimpressive. They misinterpret or misrepresent the research they present, and offer no real support for their contamination hypothesis, while bizarrely ignoring that obesity correlates very well with increased calorie consumption, which in turn is due to the availability of cheaper and tastier food.
What is SMTM?
“Slime Mold Time Mold”
Is it strangely respected? I mostly see people responding by asserting, as if they are killer facts that SMTM was unaware of or omits, ideas and arguments that SMTM discusses at some length. I think you really do have to go on a deep dive of at least reading the many “A Chemical Hunger” posts (or read a good chunk of their posts in the last year, for example) to see the extent to which a) there looks like there’s something there to be considered and b) they are fully committed to approaching this stuff as actual science with all the uncertainty that involves.
In the articles I've read, they misinterpret or purposely distort (I have no way of distinguishing between the two, of course) the research they present, and not some of the details but some of the central points of the articles. I don't think they can be trusted to present scientific results.
My impression is they get way too much respect, yes. They've been funded with a moderately-large-by-EA-standards grant and were initially feted as important by Yudkowsky, to offer a couple of examples.
This despite many serious problems in their work, including many ways they misrepresent the research they discuss. Natalia Coelho wrote a long piece pointing this out, and they've point blank refused to engage: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium
Totally agreed. The criticisms in the piece from NC seems very valid to me.
They agree that increased calorie consumption will cause weight gain. They certainly don't ignore it, they have a whole post about it.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/15/a-chemical-hunger-interlude-a-cico-killer-quest-ce-que-cest/
They disagree that we have good data on whether people today consume more calories than people did before 1960. I personally take issue with your claim that increased calorie consumption "is due to the availability of cheaper and tastier food". That's certainly a decent hypothesis, but far from proven. Assuming people do eat more calories than they used to: how do you know it's due to food price and taste? How do you know that food is tastier today than it was in 1940? How would you even demonstrate the truth of such a claim?
> How do you know that food is tastier today than it was in 1940? How would you even demonstrate the truth of such a claim?
I mean, the 1940s weren't that long ago. We have photographs of what people ate, we have cafeteria menus and shopping lists, we have recipe books. We know that what people ate (in western countries) back then, and it tended to be a bit plainer.
Can you give me a source for that?
In my understanding people in 1940 ate cake, donuts, pies, cookies, white bread, pancakes, waffles, syrup, biscuits, jam, cheese, sausages, bacon, ham, beef, chicken, and mashed potatoes heaped with butter and gravy. Not to mention that a lot of it was fried in lard.
Now that's just my understanding: I don't have any data to back that up, just anecdotes and old cookbooks. Do you have a better source to point me at that will indicate differently?
Maybe some upper-to-middle class people in the US (one of richest countries in the world at time) ate all that. There were chubby people in the 40s and before (a mental picture including Taft and Churchill emerges).
Here in Europe, my grandmother certainly did not eat donuts and cookies and jam every day in 40s or some other decade, even if we ignore WW2 when large parts of population coincidentally were malnourished. If I think about her eating habits in 90s-00s, assuming they were unchanged from her childhood in 1930s (probably not, because availability had improved and prices plummeted). Mashed potatoes with butter and gravy ... certainly, for dinner. Meat could be included, but not every day. Glass of milk (they had a cow), but I am less certain if they would get cheese. For breakfast, oatmeal and bread and-or eggs. For lunch, some kind of soup. For supper, oatmeal and bread. Such diet gets quite boring quite fast, you won't eat large portions of it for fun.
I like the question you are asking. I will note that in the 1930's people ate fruit for dessert and considered it a treat and couldn't always afford it. I don't think these people could, generally speaking, afford chocolate whip cream top hats every day. Also, the innovation in baked goods over the last 80 years has been quite extreme. There are an unbelievable amount of chemicals in baked goods today, again generally speaking.
Heck, I went ahead and Googled 1940s diner menus and found this one from 1949. It features a ham and relish sandwich on white bread, chicken salad sandwich on white bread, beef bologna and swiss on rye with russian dressing, hamburger steak on a bun, all with a side of french fried potatoes. For dessert we have chocolate whip cream top hats, 5 kinds of pie, cheese cake, and chocolate layer cake (as well as "Assorted danish pastry"). Looks plenty tasty to me!
http://menus.nypl.org/menus/29921
I've also been unimpressed.
But surely if the effect appears reliably in the "cafeteria diet", we could do some research to isolate which part of that diet causes the effect?
I mean, that’s exactly what SMTM suggests? And is surprised that people seem so incurious about?
People are incurious because we already know the answer. As mentioned by Julian below, what is difficult is to find how we could eat reasonably when cheap abundant tasty food is widely available, not why eating all this food make us fat.
I suspect and/or vaguely-remember part of the issue (which may turn up as a confounder in the study as described if naively implemented) is that *variety* itself causes larger portion sizes, because becoming sated with one type of food doesn't necessarily translate to becoming sated with food in general.
Though I don't imagine a diet of "chips which taste good but *never* make you feel full" would help on that front either.
> *variety* itself causes larger portion sizes, because becoming sated with one type of food doesn't necessarily translate to becoming sated with food in general.
Right. I'm sure many of us are familiar with the idea of "there's always room for dessert" or a metaphorical "second stomach for dessert".
I've heard that fat and sugar in the same food are the problem.
It seems to be that high fat food like crisps or high sugar food like sweetened drink can be problematic, but the association of the two is certainly worst!
There is not obesity mystery: nature has selected us to crave the high calorie/sugar/fat/salt food that were both scarce and very valuable in our previous natural environements. Now that these food have become very abundant, we still like them very much and overeat.
But by that reasoning, the very low rate of obesity in countries such as Japan must be a mystery, no?
Yeah, but (in the industrialized world) "high calorie/sugar/fat/salt food" has been abundant for a century or so, yet the growth of obesity has been more nearly on a timescale of the last half century. or so. There has to be more to the story.
I'm not sure that's true for everybody. Maybe for the upper-middle to upper First World class, sure. But even in my own lower middle-class youth, a mere 50 years ago, we never got store-bought sweets except on very special occasions. When we had a dessert or snack at all, it's because my mother baked it herself. The only time we ever drank soda was on the very rare occasion that we went out to eat.
Ok, I should clarify: I'm not so much talking about store-bought sweets but rather about flour, sugar, butter, and salt. Yes, they have to be combined and baked to e.g. make shortbread cookies, but the ingredients themselves were (in industrialized nations) rather abundant by historical standards by 1922.
Sure, by historical standards. And that's why the people of 1922 were taller and stronger than the people of 1822. I'm just observing that within my lifetime the broad trend of a falling relative real price of food, particularly sweet and refined ingredients, and commercially-made sweets that don't require anyone to invest two hours of personal labor (in addition to the cost of the ingredients) to make them, seems to have continued, and, since we topped out in height to be gained via better nutrition circa 1970[1] maybe now we just gain weight, because of the still greater cornucopia of tasty sweet food ready to our hand almost instantly. Heck, these days we don't even have to get in the car, DoorDash or whatever will deliver it within minutes of our phoning it in.
I'm not ruling out other and multiple explanations, but I also think we can't easily dismiss the simple hypothesis of easier, faster, and cheaper access to tons of sweet foods, because I don't think that trend stopped 150 years ago, even in the First World.
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[1] e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-by-year-of-birth
There's a colossal difference between "have raw ingredients to make similar food" and "have a ready-to-eat product with high amounts of those ingredients, pre packaged in plastic and non-perishable, and probably cheaper than whatever lower-calorie options you were looking at"
A difference, yes. Colossal? Baking shortbread is simple and quick.
True, people in 1922 probably could have eaten cake every day if they'd really wanted to. It was social shaming which kept that temptation in check.
At some point the social shame against eating cake every day wore off. People started making small cakes and declaring them to be "muffins" and deciding they were now a breakfast food (muffins have been around for centuries but not in the modern American cake-like form).
Then the muffins got sweeter, and they got bigger. Meanwhile the one little shortbread biscuit that you might have had with tea slowly turned into a chocolate-with-chocolate chips cookie the size of your head. In 2023 you can barely buy ice cream which doesn't have solid chunks of something even sweeter distributed through it. Everything has got sweeter, and sweets have become more socially acceptable.
In Wilkie Collins' "The Woman In White" (1860) the villain is Count Fosco, an Italian nobleman with a taste for sweets. His sweet tooth is portrayed as disgusting, unmanly, creepy -- sweets are for women and children, not for men. But his actual consumption would be nothing remarkable these days.
Maybe. Or maybe there is some sort of contaminant that changed our propensity to overeat. Or maybe our microbiome changed. I'm merely noting that (relatively) cheap flour, butter, and sugar were available early enough that the I doubt that the evolved attractiveness of calorie-dense foods is the whole story.
"Yeah, but (in the industrialized world) "high calorie/sugar/fat/salt food" has been abundant for a century or so".
My impression (sorry, I'm too lazy to look up data!) is that abundant and cheap junk food is much more recent than that, and that until a few decades ago, eating at fast food restaurants was, for example, too expensive to be very common. The percentage of a family's budget spent on food has declined sharply over the 20th century.
Yep, the complicated part is the psychology to change peoples behavior, not the biology.
Indeed!
Yes this seems like it could be very helpful. Though my guess is it would just track pretty closely "how tasty is X" compared to "how full of calories is X".
People like to talk about "fillingness" or whatever, and that is I suspect a small part of the story.
I have always suspected the main story is simply that a cookie/brownie/cake whatever tastes fucking delicious and is also chock full of calories. Yes you can sort of train yourself into a mental space where you find broccoli delicious. But it is not a fucking cookie and to claim so is silly. And also one of the main ways people make things like broccoli (which I like) delicious is by smothering it in butter/salt/sugar so it is more like a cookie.
Yes this seems like it could be very helpful. Though my guess is it would just track pretty closely "how tasty is X" compared to "how full of calories is X".
Totally agree, with the caveat that "tasty" and "full of calories" are associated, not by coincidence.
Anecdata: When I ate sugar every day, I craved sugar every day. Once I decided to stop, there was a week or so of cravings, then I no longer felt like eating sugary things.
I think that sugar has characteristics that make it more like an addiction than it is like an actual desire. Once your palate stops being accustomed to overly sweet stuff it really doesn't taste that great.
Same thing for me but on a shorter time scale: I do not really like sugar but I crave it if I start eating it. For example I almost never eat candy but in the rare cases where I eat one I am very tempted to eat one after another until the box is empty.
There was a nice discussion of that in one of the Huberman lab podcast a few months ago (At 45 min):
https://hubermanlab.com/controlling-sugar-cravings-and-metabolism-with-science-based-tools/
Oh for sure.
Does any one know of a meta-analysis or a large study of the causal effect of privatization on firm productivity ? Preferably using a experimental/quasi experimental design or regression discontinuity.
Best I could find:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.47.3.699
Why do children get schizophrenia so rarely?
Is it the case that they "don't get schizophrenia", or just that it's not diagnosed?
I think there's good arguments to be made that it's irresponsible to diagnose children with things when there's so much noise - they could be considered to have symptoms that point towards all kinds of diagnoses....but sometimes kids are just weird, right?
It should be relatively easy to test this hypothesis by looking at young adults with clearly diagnosed schizophrenia and checking when their major symptoms started to appear (as opposed to the time of diagnosis) - I'm not an expert on this, but as far as I know, for the people with various significant symptoms they seem to start only after childhood, not earlier than their teen years.
A caveat that this is not a specific subject that I'm well-read in, but this is the approximate area I'm educated in. Of the ideas bandied about I'm familiar with, the most compelling one is that schizophrenia is often a disorder of abnormal neuronal connectivity that onsets typically during late adolescence because that is when salient brain development is happening that makes it the high risk window. That's just a high level explanation, though. There are more specific hypotheses that try to connect what those anatomical abnormalities might be and how they relate to known genetic predispositions.
Psychosis not caused by neurological disease/deterioration or brain injury also is extremely rare once a person hits early middle-age, so I'd reform your question to ask why psychosis has developmental risk window during the human lifespan.
My guess: Schizophrenia appeared, at least frequently, with the Modern Age. Children, not being fully socialized/indoctrinated are less affected. Similar to an explanation of childhood innocence that they lack knowledge and experience that adults have accumulated.
"Childhood schizophrenia" used to be a common diagnosis. It somewhat notoriously was an original diagnostic landing spot for people we now would label as just having an autism spectrum disorder. I work primarily with people who have cognitive disabilities and mental health challenges. A sizeable % of my older clients have a "childhood schizophrenia" line in their diagnostic history.
It's rare now and generally only comes up in unusual cases of children having a degenerative issue, but this is a relatively new thing in the larger scope of psychiatric labeling. So if diagnostic awareness was driving things, the culture has moved away from it, not toward it.
"used to be a common diagnosis"
That's interesting. It's curious how words change meaning over time and how, uh, 'atypical mental conditions' evolve over time - as do their definitions/labels (as we learn more and how new generations(new perspectives) diagnose them).
Still, my speculation that the Modern Age caused or exacerbated Schizophrenia (and by association Autism) still stands. This based on my incomplete reading of 'Madness and Modernism', Sass(1992) and my incomplete understanding of Iain McGilhrist's '08 and '22 publications. : )
Probably because some of the dopaminergic tracts aren’t fully developed until 18-25. Another theory is that there is a “second hit” that has to happen in one’s environment for symptom onset to occur (large amount of stress, shock etc) and so kids just don’t develop symptoms because they have more protective factors on average. Another possible theory is the gradual decrease in neuroplasticity tracking in an inverse proportion to “brain maturation” as the possible second hit. Just some theories I have.
Isn't that what an imaginary friend is?
A psychotic disorder is a more complex suite of symptoms. People rarely present exactly in the textbook ways people read about - except in those rare cases they do and you're shocked someone is so textbook - but if all an adult had was a particularly vivid imaginary friend that typically wouldn't cause them to meet criteria. Heck, it might just mean they're religious. Sensing disembodied personas isn't unto itself what schizophrenia (or psychotic disorders more generally) is.
Yeah one thought would be that schizo behaviors in younger people are both less problematic because they have less power and ability to commit violence, they have 1 and often 2 full time minders to help them, and younger people generally taken less seriously (for good reasons).
My six year old spent a whole year saying his best friend's various relatives did just about anything you could imagine.
You see a jockey, “Bobby Jone’s uncle is a jockey.” You see a hotel under construction “Bobby Jones grandpa once worked on a hotel construction site”. Now probably once in a while these were lies his friend told him. But most of the time it was just his way of relating to the world and novel stimulae when he didn’t have a better response. In a six year old who is going to care?
But if he is doing it at 22 it is probably a sign there is a problem.
Cultural appropriateness is part of making a diagnosis. If someone engages in ritualistic cannibalism of a man-God whose voice they occasionally hear, they're probably not psychotic. Chances are they're just Catholic. Part of this is that if your surrounding culture is Ok with a set of behavioral/cognitive traits, they're going to be less apt to harm your ability to function, which is a necessary part of what it means to have a mental disorder. But the bigger part is there's some underlying etiology to these disorders that can occasionally look like something that happens in a local culture, but is conceptually distinct from it. And that's probably what is going on with a child's imaginary friend as a typical part of childhood development expressed through their local cultural experience vs. the kind of hearing voices/has delusional beliefs scenario you are likening it to.
Dostoevsky and ego:
https://orbistertius.substack.com/p/this-caprice-of-ours
Also, last week I asked a question about consciousness and free will and it generated a lot of discussion but it also seemed like several people were confused. Superb Owl wrote an interesting post on the same topic
https://superbowl.substack.com/p/free-will-willpower-and-randomness?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
but it didn’t really line up with my individual thinking on the topic. Anyway this time I’d just like to ask, how many people here think the hard problem of consciousness is actually Hard? Has Scott ever written about it? I think that’s where a lot of the divergence came from.
I have a hard time trying to understand what’s supposed to be “hard” about it. The best explanation I’ve got so far is: it’s like life is everyone playing the same video game on their own device and you can interact with everyone else in the game, but you can never ever see anyone else’s screen. Still not sure why that makes it a hard problem.
Why lump free will and consciousness together? In my view the former is just one big hopeless confusion around not-even-wrong unexamined definitions while the latter is one of the most interesting questions of our time.
I like Eliezer's post Zombies Redacted, which is a reworking of Zombies? Zombies!, to which apparently Scott has written a related post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fy2b55mLtghd4fQpx/the-zombie-preacher-of-somerset) although it does not really seem to engage with the hard problem. If there are others I'd also like to know of them.
As for your question, I don't think the "hard problem" is hard in Chalmers' sense, for reasons similar to those expounded in Zombies Redacted (i.e. even people's assertions and theorizings about consciousness have a physical manifestation in the brain and should thus have a physical origin).
The hard problem is the problem of reductively explaining qualia ie. of explaining in a detailed way how and why particular qualia are produced by particular physical behaviour. Asserting that it must be physical, somehow, is not solving it in that sense.
It's useful to separate the two debates:
1) Is the problem of consciousness hard in the Chalmerian sense?
2) What is the solution to the problem of consciousness?
I was making an argument for answering 1) in the negative. Your retort that my argument does not answer 2) does not necessarily invalidate it as an answer to 1).
Of course a complete answer to 2) would thereby solve 1), but it's also fair to take a shortcut and try to answer 1) directly. This is what the zombie argument does as well, though I find it unconvincing for the reason I've given (and I'm not aware of any zombie-ists attacking this reply head-on).
If (2) isn't a supporting argument for answering (1) , what is? If nothing is, then your answer to 1 is just an opinion.
Like I said in my original post: "even people's assertions and theorizings about consciousness have a physical manifestation in the brain and should thus have a physical origin". I think this is a deep argument and people who claim the hard problem is capital-H Hard don't engage with it to an extent I find satisfying.
This is also basically the argument Eliezer makes in the two posts I mentioned. For an example of someone (David Chalmers in this case) not engaging with it to a point that convices me, see his comment here (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies?commentId=5qKe5gQ8HWgfRq9Dw#5qKe5gQ8HWgfRq9Dw) and Eliezer's reply immediately after.
Speaking of non-engagement, Yudkowsky doesn't seem to engage much with Chalmer's attempted correction, and no-one engages much with the anonymous user who attempts to clarify Chalmer's views and gets downvoted to -4.
"Like I said in my original post: "even people's assertions and theorizings about consciousness have a physical manifestation in the brain and should thus have a physical origin". I think this is a deep argument and people who claim the hard problem is capital-H Hard don't engage with it to an extent I find satisfying."
What is engaging with it supposed to tell them? It doesn't make the hard problem -- the problem of saying how consciousness is physical -- easy. (In fact, you previously stepped back from the idea that reports-of-consciousness-are-caused-by-consciousness solving the HP,..although now you seem to be embracing it again).
It also doesn't select a unique answer to the mind-body problem: it's compatible with identity theory, mysterianism, interactive dualism, etc. The only thing it rules out is epiphenomenalism.
EY's reply only discusses zombies and epiphenomenalism. That might be a impactive against two of Chalmers' various claims, since he seems to believe in both, ... but it still isn't a point against the hardness of the hard problem, the thing we are discussing. It's possible for Chalmers to be wrong about zombies and epiphenomenalism, and right about the HP, since it is ideas that are right and wrong, not people. Or so I think. Do you think the HP vanishes without zombies, or something?.
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>how many people here think the hard problem of consciousness is actually Hard?
I tend to think that the solution to it is what could be more or less called panpsychism, specifically the idea that consciousness is simply what it "feels like" for a given piece of matter to exist, and self-awareness (which by this theory would be a distinct subset of consciousness rather than synonymous with it) is what happens when conscious matter becomes interconnected in a complex enough way to become self-reflective. The reason I tend towards this answer is that consciousness obviously exists, in the sense of subjective, experienced qualia existing (this being really the only thing we can be absolutely sure of because it is the only thing that is subjectively and directly experienced by us), and yet our knowledge of the external world seems to show that there is very likely nothing beyond matter that is tied to it in such a way as to create consciousness in the way we experience it, so therefore the only solution left is consciousness being an innate quality of matter itself. This seems counterintuitive to most people since I think we all have an innate bias towards some sort of mind-body dualism, but when you consider that existing matter must have some way it objectively *is*, then it makes you wonder why there can't be some inherent way it subjectively *is* as well in terms of how it is existing at that moment in space and time, and so, as said, consciousness is really just the way that existence "feels" for everything that exists.
Clearly consciousness is produced by brains. Your idea isn’t new but lacks any explanatory mechanism. Why aren’t mountains conscious.
This theory implies that mountains are, in fact, conscious, if on a very primitive level (again, it differentiates between consciousness and self-awareness). Objecting to the claim that all matter is conscious by asking "why isn't x matter conscious" is begging the question, wouldn't you agree?
im asking why mountains aren’t the most consciousness, being so big. Why wouldn’t they be self aware. All that’s happened here is the hard problem of consciousness is moved to the hard problem of self awareness.
And anyway brains are clearly related to consciousness which is why blows or shots to the brain kill, but to the legs do not. And we can measure brainwaves etc.
That would still leave you with some kind of interaction problem, no? At some point in the causal chain leading to us writing these comments about consciousness, the "innate way existence feels like" has to be expressed in terms of neuron firings and such. But we know that neuron firings already have a complete explanation in physics. So where/how is the interaction between the "innate quality of matter itself" and the physical neuron firings happening, without violating the causal closure of the physical world?
Interesting. Not too different how I think about t, but I have always conceptualized it as materialism, not panpsychism.
Let us assume qualia is innate quality of matter. However, most of how humans experience the world is ... mediated by ... function of our nervous system, not bare qualia. The qualia of seeing a color or tasting or anything requires sensory organs -- a piece of matter a rock does not possess them, so only innate qualia all matter has must be quite different (I wanted to write, much simpler, but maybe that is in the eye of beholder).
I would agree, interestingly this implies that what we experience as "redness," for example, actually has very little to do with what the subjective self-experience of a "red" object or a red-wavelength photon is. Instead it corresponds with how it feels to be a specific electrical pattern in a neural interface, which has nothing in itself that might physically be described as "red" from the outside, but which has become habitually triggered by this otherwise unrelated outside stimulus because it happened to be the pattern of material being experienced as such that, as a cognitive pattern that benefits survival, was most convenient to be triggered by external redness. Essentially, the cognitive equivalent of "the map is not the territory," which is an uncontroversial idea in cognitive sciences, but acquires this additional interesting aspect when we consider the territory itself having the same capability of subjective experience (if not self-reflexivity) as the map.
The response is entirely about free will.
I think it is a pretty hard problem. After all we haven't solved it yet! That said I don't think it is insurmountable, and I am definitely not a dualist.
FWIW, I suspect the the "hard problem of consciousness" is the lack of a proper definition. Without a proper definition it can't be solved. With the definition that I prefer it's just the mind observing itself, and self=consciousness is the mind observing itself observing itself. But that only works with *some* definitions of consciousness.
There's no hope of finding a single definition that captures all the concerns and issues.
A lot of work has already been done on splitting the problem of consciousness into sub-problems relating to sub-definitions.sense-of--self, higher order thought, access and phenomenal consciousness, etc.
That doesn't dissolve the hard problem: rather the hard problem emerges out of it.The HP relates to qualia/phenomenality specifically.
Narrowing the definition to self-observation leaves unresolved issues...you just have to call them something else.
I write a simple newsletter where I post three interesting things, once a week.
https://interessant3.substack.com
Let me know your thoughts.
Love this and turned several of my friends onto it last month.
Oh wow, thanks!
Regarding therapists: my wife and I had really good luck using Alma. The basic gist is that you put in your insurance and the type of therapy you are interested in and then you interview the pre-sorted potential therapists until you find a fit. I interviewed three and found a great fit with a therapist that focuses on rationality based CBT and IFS (Internal Family Systems). The matching with someone who definitely takes your insurance is pretty remarkable. I’m not sure how widespread this is, but in NYC there were many many options to choose from.
Application of Kelly Criterion to forecasting markets, discuss.
f* = p - (1-p)/b
If you use your own judgement to assign p and take the market's implied b, it's pretty straightforward as long as your bet is too small to move the market; the math would be more complicated if you were pushing the odds around, and I don't feel like working it out explicitly right now.
I know how to calculate it.
But if forecasters aren't even considering it (or if some are and some aren't), does that reflect a problem with prediction markets.
What makes you think prediction market participants aren't considering risk management?
What make you think they are?
Probably only to the extent that exceeding the Kelly sizing will tend to drive even good forecasters' bankrolls down, reducing the liquidity in the market. If there's sufficient liquidity regardless, then it wouldn't affect the quality of the forecasts.
But doesn't the size of the bet serve as an ostensible surrogate for the forecasters confidence in the prediction?
I have never been truly enamored with the idea that money in fact is a surrogate for anything other than having more money. Rich people are not inherently better predictors. But the theory of prediction markets beyond the wisdom of the crowds is some how that monetizing the process makes it more predictive.
Yes and no. If a single whale (having done the math I demurred from) could move the market all the way to their estimate of the probability without exceeding the Kelly limit, but they stop short, then yes that suggests a lack of confidence in their estimate. But if the market is liquid enough that even the largest participant can only move the line by epsilon, then the confidence of individual bettors becomes irrelevant.
I think the expected utility of monetizing the process will make better predictors *into* rich people, such that over time rich people *would* *be" better predictors. A lot of the theory is based on a steady state, while it seems to me that objections tend to focus on the transient effects of initial implementation (which, if it takes long enough for any given market to approach steady state conditions, would in fact dominate).
Most betting markets you don't have the ability to make repeated bets, nor are the exact figures clear. But yes you want to size your bets if you don't want a high risk of losing it all.
I understand, but do people betting on prediction markets actually understand this?
Forecaster A understands Kelly.
Forecaster B doesn't understand Kelly.
What should we say about size of bet and conviction with respect to A and B?
Harry Sussex has just had his autobiography leaked. In it, he makes a number of rather astonishing claims. One of those claims is that he personally killed 25 enemy fighters when he was an Apache copilot / gunner in Afghanistan (he spent 30 weeks on deployment, so approximately one enemy fighter killed per week). He says he is fairly confident about this number because he reviewed footage of his flights on a laptop afterwards, so it explicitly isn't that he eg destroyed a transport van and guessed at how many people were inside
Is this number plausible? Would an average Apache copilot kill at this rate or is there something special about the way Harry was deployed? If 25 kills is not notable, what would the Apache equivalent of an 'ace' be (that is to say, a performance noteworthy enough to comment on)? What psychological support do pilots receive after killing people, given that they do so so frequently? Overall, is Harry likely to be telling the truth?
Without knowing too much about it, I'd say that if 25 kills in 30 weeks was an unusually high number for an Apache, then the Apache would be a pretty useless weapon given the expense, difficulty and vulnerability of it.
I don't think there'd be an equivalent to an "ace" though. An ace fighter pilot must shoot down other fighter pilots, in conditions approximating a fair fight. Apaches (especially in Afghanistan) will avoid anything like a fair fight, so the number of kills you get is mostly just a function of the number of targets you get sent in the direction of.
Considering the footage one sees of helicopter gunships picking people off at long range with night vision, using either missiles or guns, this doesn't seem unusual at all -- this is a team effort ofc, but presumably the gunner is the one pulling the trigger.
Another factor would be that I'm not sure how much aimless patrolling goes on with the gunships -- aren't they mostly flown either in response to intel (ie. reliable source says the guys at such-and-such compound are planting IEDs; go blow them up) or calls for close-air support. ("holy shit we are overwhelmed/these guys over the ridge are lobbing mortars at us, pls send help tuvm")
Knowing nothing about the details of his deployment - one transport van could be 10 people right there. I'm not an expert but having seen some footage from apaches in my day, 25 in 30 weeks strikes me as extremely plausible.
I am happy to say I have no idea who Harry Sussex is. As for people killing others in war zones with modern technology. Sure they might kill quite a few. Just depends on where/how they were deployed. Certainly the median solider isn't killing at that rate. The median soldier is probably sitting at a desk in some base.
I would imagine if you're considering all combatants in a conflict the median soldier usually has zero kills and the highest possible median is one kill.
If you imagine a conflict with 100 combatants, for each combatant to get 1 kill, all 100 people would have to die. For the median soldier to have one kill, at least 51% of combatants would have to die (i.e. if 51 soldiers each get one kill and the rest get zero). In reality, the distribution is probably less flat - the top soldiers may have 10 or more kills - and without a very flat distribution it would be very hard for the median soldier to have even 1 kill. For example, if the top 10% of soldiers averaged 6 kills each, it's impossible for the median to be 1 kill since 6 kills * 10% + 1 kill * 41% = 101% of people.
Yeah that was my point, just stated differently. But also I was mostly talking western soldiers who are generally as a group achieving quite high kill ratios due to their small numbers and materiel advantage. Even so I agree I would bet the median is zero.
"Harry Sussex" is Prince Harry of the UK, I'd be willing to bet it's much more likely you've heard of him under the latter name. "Sussex" is in reference to the fact that he is the Duke of Sussex, although he has stepped down from the duties normally associated with that title. Technically if you wanted to refer to him with a standard "civilian" given and surname, I believe the surname would be "Mountbatten-Windsor," which is what his children use, ̶a̶l̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶"̶S̶u̶s̶s̶e̶x̶"̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶i̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶l̶i̶t̶a̶r̶y̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶e̶n̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶.̶
Edited for correction, upon looking it up the surname used on his uniform in the military was "Wales," in reference to him being the son of the Prince of Wales.
It shows what a total idiot the guy is, to paint a great big target on his back and possibly even endanger his family with his probably exaggerated bragging, not to mention that MeAgain may feel a bit ambivalent about him mowing down non-white people by the bushel (if his exploits are to be believed).
I never gave it much credence before, but now I'm truly starting to believe the rumours that he is actually the son of someone called James Hewitt, who had an affair with Princess Diana. Knowing he is a cuckoo in the nest, and not in the royal bloodline, might explain Harry's apparently compulsive bitterness and vindictiveness (although piles of loot, estimated at $50M, for publishing his latest pot boiler and associated interviews is another fairly plausible motive!)
Still, US readers, take heart, you may not have to put up with him for much longer. He also boasted about taking cocaine, and could soon therefore be kicked out of the US as an undesirable alien! :-)
Oh I dunno his mother (Diana) was also a vindictive airhead. Far as I can tell people only like her because she was pretty and died young and glamorously.
She wasn't even especially pretty, and I'm not sure why people are so intent on pretending that she was. I mean, by Royal Family standards she was, but by "pretty celebrity" standards she wasn't.
The irony is Harry has been complaining for years that the media destroyed her life; but now he is voluntarily allowing them to do the same with his life, not that he has the self awareness to realise that (yet).
Prince Harry's tell all falls into my "none of my damn business" bucket but I can't seem to avoid hearing people talk about it. It seems that people who are actually interested in this stuff are feeling like he's crossing into TMI territory.
Certainly Harry is strikingly similar in looks to James Hewitt; especially when you look at photos of them taken at approximately the same ages.
He also looks strikingly similar to a young Prince Philip though. Unhappily for His Maj, the good looks in the Mountbatten line seem to have skipped a generation.
People on defense oriented subreddits seem to think that number is on the low end for an Apache pilot in Afghanistan. Air aces are usually in terms of shooting down enemy fighter jets or at least bombers where the enemy is supposed to have defenses. Maybe it would make sense for an Apache crew who destroy 5 armored vehicles to be aces?
Awesome question - I too want to know the answer to this. I look forward to seeing what other commenters with more relevant info have to say.
About 9 years ago, I read this old, silly Atlantic piece about how apple cores are a social construct: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/apple-cores-are-a-myth/281531/
...but I ended up taking the advice to heart, and have been happily eating everything-but-the-stem ever since. It really does add up to significantly more apple, especially on the larger varieties like honeycrisp. Made me wonder why I'd spent the first two decades of my life not consuming apples this way. Peer pressure, I guess? Never bothering to fact-check just-so stories? Not understanding "the dose makes the poison"? I don't know. It's at least understandable why people peel fruits and vegetables - they've a notable difference in flavour, texture, etc., if edible in the first place at all. There's some real there, there. (But I still evangelize eating kiwi skins when possible. Have made a few converts!)
Wonder how many other parts of life are like this. Untruths that go unnoticed and thus uncontested, until one actually bothers to verify their structural integrity. Make beliefs pay rent, indeed...
I've been under the impression that skins of kiwis and peaches and other fuzzy foods are nasty because the skins pick up and hang onto potentially pathogenic bacteria, and/or chemicals such as fertilizer and pesticides. Love to be convinced I'm wrong.
I mean, I'll concede that that's what makes cantaloupes higher-risk: the intricate skin pattern creates very high surface area, so it's an excellent breeding ground for bacteria, and dirt isn't easily removed. That's for a ground crop though, the worst possible combination. Berries also have high surface area, and I think that's maybe why they're suggested to wash extra-well? But not sure. Never bothered to research. Cursory Google shows most "should I wash X" sites are pure woo fluff masquerading as wannabe lifestyle brands, so I'm skeptical.
(But I'll fully agree that reversed chemophobia is not ideal weighting of tail risks, and it is after all a trivial inconvenience at best to wash. Still think aesthetics is the stronger argument for going skinless though. Lots of popular tastes and textures that I react abnormally poorly to, so I'm definitely wired weird!)
Do you enjoy the core of the apple as much as the rest of it? Aren't the seeds and tougher membranes in there unpleasant to eat? I'm well aware that there's nothing poisonous or inedible in an apple core. I don't eat them because I don't like them.
If I had to plot out my Apple Enjoyment Gradient X versus Longitudinal Apple Strata Y (latitude? always get those confused), I'd say it looks like a mostly continuous function, yes. Sharp drop-off for the stem ends, as that's the part that "takes work" to avoid, and the bottoms tend to be a primary spot for early spoilage. I'd estimate that my decreased utility from eating a "mushy" spot of the apple is at least three times any small signal related to the membrances and pips.
The technique also matters - there's a reason that video has him eating the apple vertially rather than horizontally. This is intuitive with, say, steak - of course you're gonna notice the fibre a lot more if you cut with the grain, versus against it! To the extent an apple has noticeable "grain", it's parallel to the core. So eating it from the bottom rather than the side means only getting small chunks of such fibre per bite, rather than a whole mouthful at once. It's also easier on the mouth, obviously. Like the way one normally eats celery, rather than nibbling it sideways, which is an endless chewy stringfest.
I think certainly there's different thresholds, and for some people that minor unpleasantless is enough to write off the cores. Some people really hate potato or grape skins too! I guess I'm wondering about an unknowable counterfactual - what percentage of that dislike is organic, versus inculcated via well-intentioned expectations-setting? One way or another, there's a good amount of implicit and explicit pressure against apple cores, an ambient Everybody Knows; would people eat them more often without such messaging? Or a revised message of "it's actually just the seeds that need avoiding", perhaps. No one throws away the "core" of a watermelon for containing seeds, for example, that'd just be silly. ({Plus it's usually the sweetest part.)
Just remember to think of latitude as ladderitude, it is the height that you climb towards the poles.
Ah, so this is why the "Global South" remains poorer - those nearer the poles keep pulling up the ladderitude after them. Makes sense!
(I wonder if it's partly cultural confusion - the compass has different emphases in Chinese tradition...East, North, West, South. So I always think about left <-> right before up ^|V down.)
>Untruths that go unnoticed and thus uncontested, until one actually bothers to verify their structural integrity
Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's whole thing? I wonder if he would eat the apple core?
One a semi related note: I get a headache/near migraine if a eat an apple without cutting it. No idea why. This seemed to start just a few years ago. I've assumed its some interplay with the way my teeth are pulled when biting the apple and the usually cold temp of the apple pressing on the top of my mouth. It doesn't seem to happen with other similar fruits like pears, peaches, plums. Could just be psychosomatic.
Will freely cop to never having read Nietzche, nor being able to suss out What's The Deal from years of ambient exposure.
That's interesting. I tend to leave apples out, rather than refrigerate them...dulls the flavour, doesn't seem to extend shelf life that much. The firmness of the flesh is also significantly higher than those other fruits. Do you have issues with other similarly-textured whole-bite things?
In "Beyond Good and Evil" Nietzsche lays out his morality. He starts by lamenting that everyone before him just took the presence of morality for granted without examining if it exists at all. I was trying (unsuccessfully) to make a joke. I liked the idea that Nietzsche would have strong opinions on how to eat apples or that eating an apple in whole would be what an Ubermench would do.
I should try eating an apple at room temp to see if i still get the headache. This all started after I took wellbutrin which cause serious jaw/teeth clenching and then pain/headaches. Thats part of why i think its psychosomatic or a learned response.
Anyway, sorry for derailing your question!
I eat apple cores so that nothing is left but the stem. It isn't the best part of the apple, but I think of a core as sufficiently messy and nasty that I'd rather not have it around.
It's possible to eat shrimp shells. I found this out from reading a woman who was doing caloric restriction, which can make a person pretty hungry.
Why do people leave the tails on shrimp? Is there any dignified way to get the tail off? Do most people eat the tails?
> Is there any dignified way to get the tail off?
Pinch the base of the tail firmly along its axis of symmetry while you're eating the shrimp. The meat pops right out, especially if you pull on the shrimp a little with your teeth.
Thank you. That's better than holding the tail in one hand and pulling the shrimp out with the other, which is what I've been doing.
Neither approach is great if the shrimp has soup or sauce on it.
Oh yeah, the tail is my favourite part of the shrimp! I usually get some of those off other peoples' plates when out with family. And it's usually the only shell remaining, what with how they're typically industrially shelled. Which is unfortunate, lotsa classic Chinese <s>shrimp</s> prawn preparation relies on having that crunchy outer layer. I believe they're left on so that people have something solid to grip while preparing them, and also for cocktail-type purposes or eating while fried; the totally-denuded ones seem to only come as Already Fully Cooked, which are used for different things. It's like a natural handle. For more formal occasions, usually one picks up or spears a shrimp near the tail, bites off the rest, then discreetly pushes the discard to a corner or disposal dish.
I think the majority of people don't eat them, since it's unintuitive - most recipes call for shelling, and lotsa older folks still have memories of "de-veining" shrimp, back before better industrial processes largely obsoleted that. They really are crunchy and a bit sharp. I like them anyways cause they tend to pick up a lot of sauce/seasoning, and are quite high in calcium. Forget bone broth or eggshell coffee, give me shrimp shells please. (Great base for seafood broth too, though getting enough is a bit expensive.)
I'll admit I've never heard of someone eating shrimp tails before, although I'd imagine it would be a good source of calcium. As for your other questions, I think the tails are left on when the shrimp is served out of some combination of aesthetics and to give a convenient place to hold it, and I don't really know of any good way to remove the tails that isn't either fiddling around with them in an undignified-looking way, or just biting almost up to the tail and leaving a bit of flesh behind.
I started doing this when a teacher in high school told me the cyanide in the seeds isn't enough to be poisonous, but is enough to slightly lower your blood pressure in a way that might be healthy (I still believe the former, not so sure about the latter). In any case, I've been eating the whole apple ever since.
Wait til you have kids and then you can extract that much more value from their unfinished cores!!
I mean orange peels and lemon peels are also edible. Apple cores really do have a different and more unpleasant texture. Some people skin grapes.
Coincidentally I also enjoy eating those citrus whole - but those seeds I spit out, they're quite noticeable and often painfully sharp. Dentists were Very Concerned when I was a kid and used to eat whole lemons. Luckily nothing ever came of it. They're very tasty dried with the peel on too! I always use extra zest when a recipe calls for it, hard to go wrong.
The one exception is typical McNavel Oranges...the raw whole peel on those is rather unpleasantly bitter and stringy unless sugared. But they also taste like ass just generally. Give me mandarins (totally edible in whole) or satsuma oranges (less so but exemplars of fruity goodness) instead any day.
I eat everything but the stem too. I can recall at a very early age - probably when I first knew the words - asking my mother if I was at ‘the core’ yet.
The pips or seeds of many fruits contain amygdalin, which the body converts to cyanide!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/11/cyanide-in-fruit-seeds-how-dangerous-is-an-apple
Yes, am aware. Hence reference to "the dose makes the poison". The liver can deal with small amounts of cyanide, and does on a regular basis anyway if one eats such exotic foods as rice. From what I've read, the amount is so small as to be negligible; one would have to intentionally eat quite large quantities of pips to get any noticeable problems; the case studies we do have of cyanide poisoning via food involved improper handling, directly sucking on stone fruit pits, or other such improbabilities. Much more likely to get bored of eating apples before that, it's not a once-daily habit even. It's also largely from chewing or grinding up the seeds - if merely swallowed, they mostly pass through inert. It's not like improperly-prepared cassava, which will Definitely Cause Harm in fairly short order.
Stephen Skolnick who used to comment on here a bit says this kind of low-dosage toxicity is only really gonna be an issue for someone with a messed-up microbiome, or who otherwise loses the ability to eliminate such poisons*...but I'm neither in the habit of taking antibiotics, nor eating all that much processed food. So not particularly worried at the moment. I'd abstain for awhile if I were planning a surgery or something though.
*https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/the-thousand-secret-ways-the-food and follow-up https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/thousand-secret-ways-ii
Same thing happens with Kiwis, I'd imagine, seeing as most people still don't eat the perfectly edible skin.
I'll admit that the typical kinda-furry brown ones seem intimidating at first..."won't it be all weird and scratchy?" But then I ask if they peel peaches, and of course not, who does that. It's very similar though...peach fuzz, kiwi fuzz. The bark is worse than the bite, literally. And even totally smooth foods can make one choke if they "go down wrong".
These days one can even find <s>naked</s> "golden kiwi", which are sorta extra-oblong and ruddy-yellow rather than green inside, and are totally denuded of hair. And the instructions on the container still say to scoop out the innards and throw away the skin! It's very strange.
(I first heard about kiwi skin being edible as a passing throwaway comment on, idk, some Discovery Channel show or whatever. They claimed it's the part with the highest concentration of nutrients, and this is similarly true for many other foods, like potatoes and grapes. Big If True, never did look into it though. Which, yes, ironic. I just can't be bothered to peel stuff though.)
I was at a workshop where they provided fresh fruit in the pauses, but no cutlery at all. So I was like, how do they expect us to eat these kiwis?? --- And learned that you can eat them with the skin.
Always a fun stunt at parties, makes me remember Police Academy 2, that supermarket pillaging scene where one of the thugs eats a banana with the peel. (But I think banana peels aren't edible)
Yes, I admit I partly do it for surprising people too. Contrarianism for its own sake is a thing.
Banana peels are, in fact, edible - just rather unpalatable without cooking. Very similar to plantains. You can sometimes find dried "baby" bananas with the skin on, as an easier segue into the stuff. Most forms of preparation are like dealing with raw bulk kale - you really have to beat it into submission and cook rather thoroughly to render out that slimy bitterness. Baking works well, and it makes a good confection base too (candied peels).
Although, of note, the composition of a banana (moreso than most fruits) changes *very* quickly as it ripens. The greener a banana is, the higher proportion of starch : sugar in its carbs, and vice versa for yellow. This also affects the micronutrient composition...some are more easily available when greener, some when yellower. And has attendant effects on taste and texture - there's a reason banana bread almost always uses extremely-ripe ones! (I like greener bananas, personally.)
but there are the tough glassy bits near the pips, and the pips themselves, do you really eat the whole thing?
I do, and similarly for pears. It really isn't particularly noticeable unless I go out of my way to notice it. Sorta like how string beans* and celery ribs do have a "string", it's definitely A Physical Thing, but the level of botheringness seems to correspond strongly with how much one has been conditioned to expect it as a bother. Accidentally chewing a pip itself is slightly unpleasant (bitter notes, like with watermelon), but usually they just get swallowed. Nothing in particular stopping me from spitting them out, other than lack of convenient proximity to compost bin, I guess. A later article claimed that the density of bacteria is particularly high around fruit seeds, such as apple cores, so I guess there's some potential benefit too.
*I also enjoy edamame and pea pods, peanut shells, and popcorn kernels...but that's a whole other level of very tough fibre that I don't at all classify as Not Really Noticeable. Used to literally eat toothpicks as a kid, so it's still an improvement.
I did eat toothpick as a kid too, and still eat popcorn kernels! Most of the time when I eat them it's to "have something to do with my mouth", I don't like not having anything to chew while eating. I'll try to eat apple cores, it may help me slow down when eating.
I'll admit that I'm very skeptic about kiwi skins, the ones I get have a furry skin that seems like it would be like chewing hair, plus it may be hard to get clean.
Yeah, it was either that or paper towel. I liked the brown ones made of recycled unbleached paper better. Luckily never developed a true oral fixation like smoking, but it is nice to chew gun or otherwise be occupied in some such way. Much as I like soup, it's not a Proper Meal without some mastication. The solution is clearly to put chewable things in the soup. Diced-up corn on the cob is nice, that gives an excuse to eat with my hands too. Who needs utensils, really?
Kiwi skin has a lot less texture than you'd expect. Not at all like, say, artichoke fuzz (which is legitimately gross and tastes worse, even when boiled to death) or corn silk. The cleanliness I'm not sure, have always been pretty cavalier about eating plants without washing. Supposedly just a rinse takes care of most _____cide residues. Unless they're visibly dirty, like many root crops, in which case one might wanna actually scrub some. (Or melons. Melons really ought to be wiped down before slicing. Amazingly dirty, and to think of passing a sullied knife through the whole flesh...bleurgh.)
I think the fact that you eat peanut shells is pretty important context for your assertion that apple cores are basically the same as the rest of the apple...
I'll agree that they're on a spectrum with string beans, though -- I don't want those, either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They're boring compared to basically any slightly-more-exotic pole bean variety, yeah. Give me purple beans or Chinese long beans any day instead. If it doesn't have that characteristic crunch, if one's teeth don't "squeak"...that's no pole bean, I say.
I guess no one ever taught me they're "supposed to" be shelled before eaten/thrown away? Always just...bit right in. We used to roast pumpkin seeds at home, it seemed a similar type of food to eat whole. Same with sunflower seeds. A prolific snack during ill-fated Little League days. David brand, was it...? Pretty confident one major reason people don't eat the shells is that they're typically extremely salted. I like salt in my diet, but the salted versions of nutshells are...ouch. Harder and harder to find roasted-unsalted these days, and washing them off makes it all gross-soggy. Defeats the purpose of crunchy goodness.
Oh my, I missed the antistocks... let me tell you another reason why they shouldn't work.
They're a proxy for an arbitrary metric that nobody optimizes for - Tesla does not pay dividends, it never has and I doubt that it ever will. Some companies pay dividends regularly, others do not, and the decision about the dividends can be quite divorced from the rest of the value.
Measuring profit? Let me point you to Amazon that doesn't believe in having profits, as much money as they get they reinvest or do some accounting magic with it (I'm exaggerating).
Whatever measure chosen it will at-best be fitted for last year's management with last year's strategy. You aren't running just counter-party risk, you're betting that the measure chosen does indeed reflect changes in value and won't change for completely unrelated reasons.
So if there's one thing this isn't it is - As simple as buying long.
The only argument I can see for them is that a regular share's value is so ephemeral that it's impossible to make the connection between a company's value and the price of a financial instrument any weaker so who cares.
Value of a stock is also (in the simplest model) the present value of expected future dividends.
If we add to the model the payout to public shareholders on company going private, we see that the anti-shareholders would owe the same amount.
This is straying from where I'm confident of my knowledge, but I assume that if every other metric I know about has fiddly constraints this one would have those too.
Devil's advocate:
Basing a financial instrument's value on rare occurrences is healthy for the economy, at that point I might as well be trading in NFTs that represent different attitudes about tesla's future. And that way the SEC is less likely to throw me in jail.
As a defense of the simplest model, Tesla talks a lot about not paying dividends, but imagine if there were some kind of legally binding contract they could sign that would render them forever unable to pay anything like a dividend. If Tesla signed this contract, do you think their stock price would go down? If so, that suggests the current price reflects some chance they start paying dividends.
Schiller says something very similar in his 2007 Financial Markets course.
Where is breaks down is that if you own enough stock, you can reverse such a decision and let the dividends flow to you: it's called going private.
You're still investing in the payment-of-tesla-dividends proposition instead of tesla's value, so the antistock is only worth that sliver of value.
I think the stock price change would be more reflective of what people think of a management that signs such contracts than the change in expectation depending on the level of such expectation now and how much uneducated money is moving tesla's price - a thing that I don't know how to measure and how tight that contract is - i.e. would it block other forms of capital return which would cripple the company's financial strategy or leave them open thus making the point a technical triviality.
If tesla would do so as a move to commit to stock buybacks as a capital return mechanism because of the taxation rationale (As Berkshire Hathaway does) the price might go up rather than down.
Even acadmeic mathetmatics isn't safe any more
https://twitter.com/joelwatsonfish/status/1610778319426916357
"Scenes from the Joint Mathematics Meeting (the largest annual meeting of mathematicians in the world):
A talk entitled "Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice""
What do you think the average opinion of this researcher and her work was among the mathematicians in attendance? Because I have a guess.
They wouldn't be there if there any reasonable level of hostility towards them. And the fact that these presentations are even being accepted by the conference organizers is the problem.
Most people reject woke nonsense, but it doesn't matter! The problem isn't most people agreeing with it, it's that these ideologies capture institutions and everyone has to go along with it at the risk of having their livelihoods jeopardized.
How many mathematicians in attendence would be comfortable putting their name on an open letter decrying this presentation's thesis in explicit and direct terms (e.g. not saying something like "This presentation is well intended but unhelpful in fighting against patriarchal systematic racism")? I have a really, really good guess.
Perhaps they should install a light to let people know when it is safe to stop clapping.
Here's something sensible: https://www.amazon.com/Twice-Less-Performance-Students-Mathematics/dp/0393317412
A book with the point that AAVE (African American Vernacular English) includes some phrasing which makes mainstream english phrasing about arithmetic hard to understand. This could leave a teacher thinking that the kid just can't understand, while the problem is a need for translation.
Immigrants don't have special problems with learning math that I know of. First and second generation Asian immigrants famously do well in math. That tends to contradict the hypothesis that English gramma is the problem. I Personally learned math in foreign language (French) and was not aware of the language being an impediment.
Quite a fair point, one that absolutely doesn't depend on whether the child is "Queer" or not.
(And only apply to blacks in the US)
There's plausibly something about racism in the situation-- not just that children aren't being taught in their home dialect, but that people who default to believing that black people are stupid aren't going to notice there's a language difference causing the difficulty with arithmetic.
This language difference is directly impacted by intelligence. Second gen asian immigrations whose parents don't speak English as a first languge do well above average in literacy. And the thing is, we know blacks are less smart than whites through intelligence testing. And guess what, the IQ subtests most dependant on language (e.g. vocabulary) have smaller racial gaps than those not dependant on language, meaning these IQ gaps cannot be a product of language differences.
And it's bizarre calling this racism, because the "anti-racists" are the ones pushing for AAVE to be accepted as a real language and to not teach black kids proper english. It's the "anti-racists" that have created this situation through their dumb, agrocentrist ideology.
A possible reason (that you ignore) that "Second gen asian immigrations [sic] whose parents don't speak English as a first languge do well above average in literacy" in Standard American English because the English spoken by the communities they're in is by-and-large Standard American English, so there isn't a competing dialect of English involved. And before you protest, just having an "Asian accent" in SAE is not the same thing as a wholly separate dialect with different tenses, different inflection rules, and other grammatical rules, like AAVE is.
If this model is correct, it seems like we should see black kids do better learning math from black teachers than from white teachers. Is there good evidence for this? (I don't know the literature, though I have a broad impression that education research is often not all that great, and I worry about replicability and garden-of-forking-paths issues in it.)
I suspect in an educational setting black teachers will be speaking Standard American English.
Sure, but if the kid is stuck because of a mixup between AAVE and English, a teacher fluent in both can help.
No, it seems like we should be stamping out AAVE as the main dialect black kids speak and get them speaking the same English as the rest of the country/world.
Perhaps by starting with AAVE and transitioning to mainstream English?
You're oversimplifying the situation. Not all black teachers know AAVE, and some white students are native speakers.
Sure, but it would be an easy study to do, and P[speaks AAVE|black] >> P[speaks AAVE|white].
If the model you're describing is correct, then we have a pretty clear prediction of something we should see--black kids learning math from black math teachers should do better. If we see that, it's some evidence for the theory; if not, it's some evidence against it. But also, it sure seems likely that there's already data on this somewhere.
My point is : the kind of people who mix "Cisheteropatriarchial" and "whites" and "queers of color" in a single sentence without punctuation are probably not interested in your very sensible and level-headed reform. They want solutions like "Stand all the white boys in a line every week and tell them how aweful they are, white girls are one-time-per-month", or "Leave K12 education to suck exactly as much or harder, but accept [politically favorable] blacks more often at universities\jobs, using whatever dumb nonsense you can come up with to justify".
They have to do this, they are addicted to heroics and "Rebel Alliance" narratives, and "kids should have better education" isn't exactly an oppressed take, although people differ on who's responsible and who should pay the bill, but no monster is going to argue with a straight face that "Yes, black kids are having difficulty due to language\worse income\less fathers, and that's a Good Thing". There is no "alpha" in pushing a narrative like that, to borrow Scott's parody terminology.
Wokism actively reward nonsense, because it's a system of morality that rewards novelty. Whenever "morality" and "novelty" come together in a single sentence, disaster is as expected as Death and Taxes. There *is* a place for novelty in morality, at a rate of about 1 idea per century (if ordinary human brains are the ones doing the thinking).
But in a system like wokism, you have to be cutting edge, and how can you be when all the gays have gotten all their rights? the only solution is to invent new gays (made up pronouns and identities) and mix-match the vanilla gays with other identities (queers of color and intersectionality in general). The number of combinations you can get this way is exponential, so they can never run out. They are trapped in a self-accelerating feedback loop of inventing new injustices wholly out of thin air and pretending to be mad about it, then achieving a meaningless\non-existent victory and going to bed before repeating the entire cycle the next day. The world is choke-full of actual injustices to be extremly mad about and spend a lifetime fighting, but they aren't new and sexy, and they are very exhausting and nobody talks about your (tiny and incremental, mostly pyrrhic) victories on twitter and TED.
Some people do leave wokism. A lot of them are Marxists.
I keep hoping that talking reasonably will pry some people loose.
It's pointless because the problem is institutions, not individuals.
One might almost pity them. Almost.
I can't imagine that it has anything to do with gender. There might be other dialect differences that affect smaller groups, and the problem isn't necessarily only American.
I can imagine that a few children with very good mathematical intuition guess what the teacher must mean, and the majority conclude that it's incomprehensible and they can't learn it.
That word "disruption" suggests that the speaker's preferred strategy is to level down rather than level up.
The Joint Mathematics Meeting is the joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society (the main professional organization of professional mathematicians) and the Mathematics Association of America (the main professional organization of mathematics educators at the undergraduate and high school level). Educators are a core part of this conference. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that educators think about race, gender, and sexuality in the context of education. It's only if you think that education about *math* is somehow not the same sort of human practice where people think about these issues that this should be surprising.
Look, this presentation is woke nonsense. I know it, you know it.
Typically mathematics has been more resistant this nonsense because it is a strictly technical discipline that is less dependant on language than almost any other. This is obviously true, which is why the humanties were ideologically captured many decades ago, whereas serious inroads have only started being made on academic math is recent years.
But the fact that conference organizers for math are accepting this nonsense for presentation shows a significantly negative cultural change that likely signals future ideological capture that will poison yet another field.
> It's only if you think that education about *math* is somehow not the same sort of human practice where people think about these issues that this should be surprising.
Presentations about education are fine. Presentations about education based on demented far-left race and gender ideology are not fine. None of this is based on scientific evidence, it's pure ideology, and it will poison mathematics the way it does everything else it touches.
Kenny, out of pure interest I tried looking up the talk to see what was the actual content. I didn't manage that, but I did find the photo identifying the man giving the talk; Luis Leyva.
Here he is:
https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/bio/luis-leyva
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education, Department of Teaching and Learning
Faculty Affiliate, Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies
"At the juncture of gender studies, higher education, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), Leyva’s interdisciplinary research explores narratives of oppression and agency across historically marginalized groups’ educational experiences to uncover interlocking functions of racism and cisheteropatriarchy in undergraduate STEM. He draws on critical race theory, women of color feminisms, and queer of color critique to conceptually and methodologically ground his scholarship, which centers historically marginalized voices in STEM higher education across intersections of race, gender, and sexuality."
I have certainly been educated, in that I never before heard of the term "queer of colour" (I was aware of debate around whether "queer" was or was not a slur). I had thought the term was "queer person" but now it seems that "queer" is a pronoun in itself.
Let us continue:
"Leyva is the Director of the PRISM (Power, Resistance & Identity in STEM Education) Research Lab at Vanderbilt-Peabody College. The lab’s research serves to hold an “intersectional prism” up to underrepresented students’ narratives of experience to illuminate and disrupt multidimensional forms of oppression in undergraduate STEM education.
...His second project, titled COURAGE (Challenging, Operationalizing & Understanding Racialized and Gendered Events) in Undergraduate Mathematics, examines features of instruction in undergraduate calculus classrooms that students from historically marginalized groups experience as discouraging or supportive as mathematics learners. This project, supported by the National Science Foundation (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program), addresses the pervasive role of calculus as a gatekeeper that reinforces racialized and gendered access to STEM. "
So - calculus is bad? Has anyone got an opinion on this? Do away with gatekeeping calculus or not?
If the man is managing to teach black kids maths, then good for him. But I can't navigate all the jargon, and what on earth does the below have to do with learning engineering?
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/prismlab/
"As a space of collective healing and re-humanizing the research experience in the academy, PRISM members support one another in constantly interrogating their positions of privilege and oppression to engage in research alongside historically marginalized communities in STEM education."
Is that a therapy session or a maths class?
I looked up one of the linked research papers and hold on to your hats, you'll never believe this!
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221546.2021.1879586?forwardService=showFullText&tokenAccess=RIF3PNXJZI3E3FQ9GXQT&tokenDomain=eprints&doi=10.1080%2F00221546.2021.1879586&doi=10.1080%2F00221546.2021.1879586&doi=10.1080%2F00221546.2021.1879586&target=10.1080%2F00221546.2021.1879586&journalCode=uhej20
"Introductory mathematics courses, including precalculus and calculus, largely influence Black and Latin* students’ persistence and sense of belonging in STEM. However, prior research on instruction in these courses for advancing more equitable outcomes is limited. This paper presents findings from a study of 18 Black and Latina/o students’ perceptions of introductory mathematics instruction as a racialized and gendered experience at a large, public, and historically white research university. Sociological perspectives of logics and mechanisms of inequality guided an analysis of Black and Latina/o students’ group interview responses on how instruction perpetuates racial and gendered oppression. Two logics were identified: (i) Instructors hold more mathematical authority than students in classrooms; and (ii) Calculus coursework is used to weed out students ‘not cut out’ for STEM. These logics, coupled with the influence of broader sociohistorical forces (e.g., cultural scripts of behavior, stereotypes), gave rise to mechanisms of inequality through seemingly neutral instructional practices that reinforce racial-gendered distribution of classroom participation and STEM persistence. Our findings inform implications for STEM higher education researchers and mathematics faculty to foster socially affirming STEM instruction, especially in introductory courses."
Yes, imagine this shocking revelation: teachers have more authority than the students in classrooms! Were any of you aware of this shocking and distressing "logic" before?
It gets better; paper number two:
https://jume-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/jume/index.php/JUME/article/view/295
"BSTRACT In this article, the author discusses the intersectionality of mathematics experiences for two Latin@ college women pursuing mathematics-intensive STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors at a large, predominantly White university. The author employs intersectionality and poststructural theories to explore and make meaning of their experiences in relation to discourses of mathematics ability and pursuits of STEM higher education. A cross-case analysis of two Latin@ college women's counter-stories details the development of success-oriented beliefs and strategies in navigating the discourses that they encountered institutionally and interpersonally in their mathematics experiences. Implications are raised for P--16 mathematics and STEM education to broaden equitable learning opportunities for Latin@ women and other marginalized groups' construction of positive mathematics identities at intersections of gender and other social identities."
A whacking *two* Latina students are used to "raise implications for STEM education". I'm loath to call this - no, scrap that, I'm not loath at all. I *am* calling this a grift; do a round of conferences, write a few papers, head up a 'lab' talking about white cis hetero patriarchy bad but extra bad in maths, let's stop teaching particular branch of maths and just let all the queer trans females and other persons of colour enter the engineering course and give 'em the degree at the end, much more equitable!
(I say this as someone ignorant of maths and unable to understand or indeed grapple with it. But if I got a sympathy pass and award due to being a female person who can't be expected to understand hard sums, I'd be insulted and I would never be able to rely on "well at least the person who built that bridge learned how to calculate the stresses correctly so it won't collapse under me")
On calculus being bad - you'll find some very widespread shared beliefs among mathematicians (probably not majority, but maybe close) that it would be better if university calculus requirements were replaced with statistics or logic or critical thinking or something else of that sort.
That's absolutely irrelevant to the point being made. Black kids would likely struggle just as much with a rigorous college statistics course.
As for "logic" or "critical thinking", well this is absurd considering you need to understand calculus to understand vast swathes of scientific theory and these things will not help you with it. And obviously "critical thinking" is one of those bullshit terms that is so vague so as to allow almost anything to be taught underneath it, including ideological nonsense with no empirical evidence of providing any benefit to a student's congitive ability or understanding of other subjects.
Derivatives are easy and useful in many situations. The rest of the calculus, yeah, can get arbitrarily complex, and the technical details are mostly useless even for most people in STEM.
I wonder what exactly passes for "critical thinking". I mean, I understand what the idea is, in theory, but beyond the obvious mistakes, how exactly do you *teach* it, or *measure* it? (For example, teaching people lists of fallacies can easily backfire. The more you know, the easier it is to assign one of them to inconvenient information, so you become more immune against arguments you disagree with.)
So while I agree about the usefulness of critical thinking, I worry that adding it to university requirements would result in something different, such as conformity with some narrative.
Yes, it’s a hard question to know how to structure a quantitative reasoning requirement for a university. But it’s not really controversial that structuring it as a calculus requirement in particular is bad, if you don’t expect people to become engineers. And even engineers should get an actual quantitative reasoning class that covers some probability, which they often don’t get under current structures.
There are many universities where the math requirement can be filled by statistics or formal logic. I don’t know if there are many that don’t have such a requirement at all. I don’t know that any universities have changed this general education requirement one way or another in the past five or ten years.
I Wonder how damaging any of this is though? I looked at the website promoting his talk and others.
https://www.jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2023/2270_invspeakers#leyva
And all around him are pretty normal mathematical speakers, often POCs (more often in fact) giving proper lectures. It’s probably like there was an occasional Marxism and Mathematics lecture in Soviet technical universities, just because you have to.
More damaging to the U.K, is the general disregard for mathematics exemplified by the dull mediocrity of people like Simon Jenkins.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/05/maths-schools-rishi-sunak-arts-sport
You mean like how the Soviets basically rejected genetics wholesale on ideological grounds that greatly diminished their scientific and tenchical progress accordingly?
And look, we're already seeing it in other fields today in the west. You can't do certain research, you can't come to certain conclusions. Intelligence researchers are having their access to genetics databases blocked. This is all real and is stunting science.
I would like to know more about this. Like, what were the exact mechanism that caused this. Because, Soviet Union started as a backward feudal country... then at some moment it sent the first man to space... and then it fell behind again. The simple explanations like "of course, soviet communism sucks" are not sufficient, because they cannot explain Gagarin. What was the mechanism that worked at first, and then it didn't; and why?
Russia is still great today at the mathematical olympiad ( https://www.imo-official.org/country_team_r.aspx?code=RUS ), which is not a completely fair comparison, because greater countries have a natural advantage; it obviously makes a difference when you pick 6 best math students among 1 million, or 10 millions, or 100 millions. Then again, Germany has almost as much population as Russia, and it stays visibly behind.
Among multiple factors, relatively how important were crazy people in positions of scientific power, such as Lysenko, versus how important was lack of money when the research becomes expensive. (In other words, could an unexpected source of huge income hypothetically have saved soviet science, or was is doomed regardless?)
One explanation I have heard is that in capitalist countries, new inventions can become products overnight. So the Soviets had space research, but the Americans *also* had dozens of household items based on technology somehow originating from the space research. Could be something useful such as microwave oven, or something stupid such as laser pointer, but either way it provided additional funding for the research, and made the population familiar with the new technology; and then you had millions of people thinking how to make this even better. Meanwhile, the Soviet scientists had to convince some important member of the communist party to approve further research.
Towards the end, Soviets were just shamelessly stealing technology from the West, and still stayed behind. Which is a shame, because they also had some cool idea, such as a computer based on balanced ternary digits (-1, 0, 1) rather than the usual binary (0, 1), and who knows where that research could have led in a parallel history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun Was the missing part the ability of some rich entrepreneur to unilaterally decide to mass produce millions of cheaper smaller ternary computers, spend a lot on advertising, and sell them as expensive toys?
I suppose that different people will come up with different theories. I am curious what was the real reason. Probably a combination of things, but what was their relative importance, and why it first worked and then it didn't?
It’s more an Asian, Cisheteropatriarchal Space though.
You father is disappointed in this comment. ;)
How specifically is the queer-of-color math different from the cisheteropatriarchal math?
I can see how education relates to color (although I consider the terminology very unfortunate, because it is not the "color" per se, but rather its correlations with being a *cultural* minority and/or not speaking English as a first *language*), or how sexual orientation could be relevant to some biology or history lessons... but the impact of sexual orientation on mathematics is a mystery to me.
All I can imagine is mentioning something like "and by the way, the guy who invented the square root of seven was a black gay who identified as a fox". Is that all?
>How specifically is the queer-of-color math different from the cisheteropatriarchal math?
Um it is easier with lower expectations and more excuses.
I assume it’s more about classroom dynamics than about humans mentioned in the curriculum.
The author literally thinks calculus exists to gatekeep people who aren't straight white "cis" men from technical fields. It's ideological nonsense, not science.
And don't you think its bizarre that foreign students from Asia who don't speak english as their first language have no issue whatsoever with these "classroom dynamics", but people born and raised in this very country can't learn in it's classrooms? It's all just rationalization for the evil straight white men being more intelligent and capable than other non-asian groups.
Nobody who uses the term "heteropatriarchy" is operating scientifically, it's all ideology.
I still don't see how this is about math specifically, rather than school in general.
(Or could you just replace the word "math" with any other subject, and give the same talk at any other conference? That certainly is a way to increase one's publication count...)
I haven’t seen the presentation so I don’t know what the authors are saying. But there are all sorts of reasons why different subject matters cause different sorts of classroom dynamics. There are specific things about learning how to do proofs in front of other students that are an important part of math classes and no others.
But even if there is nothing distinctive about math here, someone whose work is entirely in math education is likely to limit their claims to math education, even if some of the issues they discuss might generalize to other subjects. If you don’t have semesters or years of observation of physics classrooms, you’re not going to make claims about physics teaching.
You don't think it might be an issue for teaching math if certain groups are innacurately perceived as more talented than others? Or get additional support?
If your role as a teacher and institution is to give the best possible education to your students, and identify the best potential mathematicians, you need to be aware or structural issues so you can mitigate them.
>You don't think it might be an issue for teaching math if certain groups are innacurately perceived as more talented than others?
There's no evidence for this. Whites and Asians are ACCURATELY perceived as better. And trying to pretend otherwise can lead only to the kind of racial discrimination as we see in American colleges' affirmative action policies.
>If your role as a teacher and institution is to give the best possible education to your students, and identify the best potential mathematicians, you need to be aware or structural issues so you can mitigate them.
Then do actual science. This isn't science. It's pure ideology. They're not trying to determine what's true, they're advancing an ideological goal (help their ingroup and hurt their outgroup) and will find any justification for doing so. These people will never, EVER accept that different groups have different innate abilities.
Are queers perceived as less talented at math? Never heard about anything like that.
The left will hold up Alan Turing as a brilliant gay genius one moment, and the next they will pretend he doesn't exist to "prove" gays are considered less capable.
The primary determiner of whether you get support or not is how well you do on the test, and whether you are actually trying or seem to be goofing off. Can't see how either of these hard bits of real-world data have dick to do with your color, class, creed, sexual orientation, or any other of the modern points of obsession.
>if certain groups are innacurately perceived as more talented than others?
What if they are accurately perceived as being more talented than others? Is that an even bigger issue?
This speaks more to a lack of imagination, than to a dearth of culturally relevant pedagogy.
I suppose if you had a specific example (of the impact of sexual orientation on mathematics) you'd probably at least hint at it. So you don't know either.
> It's only if you think that education about *math* is somehow not the same sort of human practice where people think about these issues
And do you think a lot of thinking goes into writing a paper like this?
Yes. It might be thinking that you disagree with, or that you think you can find obvious flaws with, but there is in fact a lot of thinking here.
This isn't science. It's pure ideology. They're not trying to determine what's true, they're advancing an ideological goal (help their ingroup and hurt their outgroup) and will find any justification for doing so.
This are the kind of people who would never, ever accept that intelligence differences exist between races regardless of how much evidence you provide them. They will shout you down, they will call everyone involved racist, they will call for you to be fired. They will never accept something so harmful to their narratives. This is what ideologues do, not scientists.
I agree that there's thinking there, but there's no truth-seeking: no one's trying to find ways that objectively increase a useful endgoal like "we solve navier stokes" or "students understand math better". There's thinking, but it's all about social positioning and jargon-based politics.
I’m pretty sure they are trying for the goal of “students understand math better”.
No, that's nonsense. The goal is to advance their in-group.
Considering the (backwards) progress they've made over the past 50 years, maybe it's time to for them to consider whether their focus is really where it should be.
I think we'd all be willing to listen respectfully if there were clear objective results from this kind of stuff. Show me a state or big district that went all-in on diversity and inclusion initiatives and obtained a decade of steadly rising math SAT scores across the board for everybody.
But in the absence of any objective progress after so many years of discussion and money being poured in, I think the people who are footing the bill -- parents and taxpayers -- are quite justified in their increasing levels of skepticism. I suggest it has dick to do with culture wars per se, it's because as parents we know damn well whether the school is teaching our kids reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic more or less successfully in 2022 than it did in 1972. And the answer is "less."
It's worth asking whether the tools they're bringing to the job are capable of helping them achieving this goal. I am deeply skeptical, but evidence >> models--are there high quality experiments that demonstrate a lasting positive effect from changing the style of teaching math? Say, something with large n, random assignment, and preregistered comparisons (aka, not "we did this intervention to raise adult IQ and discovered that it raised math test scores in the 6th grade among hispanic girls only.")
>I’m pretty sure they are trying for the goal of “students understand math better”.
I am actually pretty sure this isn't a goal of a huge portion of these people. It is very clear they MAIN goal is reducing the disparities between what they perceive as homogenous ethic groups based on color of skin. Not educating people.
And BY FAR the easiest way to reduce disparities is to cut down the tall poppies. And if you don't think this is the case I would encourage you to actually listen to any group of educators/school district that is all fired up about this and look at their actions.
Which often involves 1) gifted and talent gets eliminated 2) Even general curriculum gets easier with lower expectations.
But I wonder if it need be. A friend who is head of maths at a large school in London got fed up that low proportion of girls was studying maths beyond age 16 (in England, that's the point where if you are on the standard academic track you drop down to three or four subjects) and over a few years saw a pretty sustained rise. It certainly feels to me that that's a genuine problem being addressed - and so yes, it's a pity of impractical jargon based nonsense gets in the way here.
There's a very big difference between gender difference in interest in mathematics and racial difference in mathematical ability.
Men and women do not differ in mean intelligence, but races significantly do.
The survey has a question asking whether insufficient 'extra content' is a reason for not becoming a paid subscriber. This confused me because I wasn't really sure there *was* extra content beyond open threads. I see now that there definitely is, but I had to look at the archives to figure this out. Possibly this just means I was inattentive, but I think there just isn't much indication, if you're a free subscriber, that there are any nonfree posts at all.
(I'd guess one typical history goes like: 1. Subscribe at free level, intending to evaluate later whether a paid subscription is valuable or indeed any different than a free one. You are helped in this by the assurance that Scott's doing just fine in his deal with Substack and doesn't need the money. 2. Nothing at all reminds you to reconsider #1. 3. ....)
To prove there are people who would happily subscribe but haven't yet, I've subscribed for a year.
Scott didn't want to annoy people by making paid-only posts take up the page for non-paid people - this goes back to SSC's Problems With Paywalls.
He says there's only 95% free content every Open Thread.
... yep, he sure does. Which I must have read multiple times but completely forgotten in milliseconds, apparently. Sorry.
I love the idea of being able to put in my best writing samples to an AI for learning, and then only have to give it a list of key points and phrases before it can turn those into an essay or paper in my style of arbitrary length. I've already done the important part of the paper before submitting it, and if I want to tweak its style I can just give it more writing samples to play with.
How should I refer to Scott Alexander in comments here? Should it be "Scott Alexander", or "Alexander", or "Scott"?
What's the best way to refer to the author of a website when discussing them? My instinct has always been that formality and distance are obstacles to conversation, and that you should refer to people as they'd prefer to be addressed unless you're in a formal context, and that most people think of themselves by their first names rather than their surnames. But I recently heard that this is not standard in the US, and using someone's first name before they've invited you to, or without some kind of reciprocal relationship with them, is presumptuous. Is there a standard on this?
Complicating this, I understand that Scott Alexander isn't his full name.
I'm a little surprised by the question in this informal day and age. We're all on an immediate first-name basis in America anyway. Scott's writing style is very conversational, so for me anyway calling him anything but Scott would seem stilted.
For what it's worth, I read something referring to Scott as "Siskind" and it seemed kind of hostile to me-- something like childishly referring to someone by the part of their name they prefer not to be known as in this context.
Sneer Club? I read it so I know what criticisms of the rationalist community are, and they are fond of that.
No, I don't read Sneer Club, but something from there might have been quoted here.
My impression is that their criticism is compulsive and low quality, but I haven't read a lot of it. Have you found some good criticisms there?
1. There is a lot of genuinely low-quality sneering, most of it centering around the idea that our esteemed host and Eliezer Yudkowsky are bad people and everything they do should be discounted as a result (I agree with neither A nor B, of course).
2. They have some genuinely good Marxist or SJW points about rationalists being blind to class and privilege impinging on what they think. I am neither a Marxist nor SJW, but even your enemies are right sometimes. And sometimes it's just a matter of 'there are tradeoffs between the welfare of group A or B, I see your point but I am in group A and you are in group B'.
I've pondered this. Elsewhere when referring to a blog author's post or writing to another poster I've use initials (e.g. SA). Same if we're discussing a famous person cited in a previous post. It seems to me a neutral, clear and efficient notation.
Initials are never really clear. I see SA I think Something Awful. Google gives me Samarium, the Salvation Army, and the Societe Anonyme.
Even if we limit it to "writers named Scott who are particularly famous among nerds", there's Alexander, Aaronson, and Adams.
There's always "Our esteemed host", or "The Rightful Caliph".
Yea, well I'd say it depends on context to make it work and if several regulars start to do it then it becomes 'common knowledge'. Also, it's similar to how less common acronyms are used (which is essentially what initials are) in a paper. The six word name once, early in the writing and then the acronym following.
However you want! Though probably you should shoot for what best coveys information to the people you are trying to communicate with.
Thanks everyone, I’ll probably stick with Scott in future.
I’m still unsure about generalising to other websites. On the one hand, this isn’t a typically formal situation, but I’m not sure it’s unambiguously an informal one, either. I’m essentially pestering Scott at work here, this is his job and I’ve ever met him. Another Scott, the radio presenter Scott Stephens, has said that you can’t know someone unless you can smell them - that is, unless you can have a private one-on-one or small group conversation with them. Neither Scott has ever smelled me.
I'd go with whatever name is used in friendly comments.
Since nobody else has mentioned it and Scott's officially okay with it: his full name is Scott Alexander Siskind.
So now he'd going to get confused with statistical software?
I don't understand.
I recall in about 1986 getting a handwritten note from the senior tutor at my Oxford college addressed to "Dear Smith", where Smith stands for my surname. This usage was, I discovered, almost dying out, but it had been a common English trope for friendly informal correspondence, used by academics, senior civil servants, I dare say Bishops. "Dear Mr Smith" was too formal; "Dear Peter" unthinkably forward.
It's almost always just Scott. Occasionally there's a good contextual reason to (mostly satirically) use "Dr. Alexander". Infrequently one uses the full Scott Alexander to differentiate from that other prolific Jewish rational writer, Scott Aaronson.
Other blogs tend to follow the same conventions...Matt Yglesias is just Matt on Slow Boring, Zvi Mowshowitz is just Zvi on Don't Worry About The Vase, Freddie de Boer is just Freddie on his blog (which for some reason lacks a punchy name, I've always found that odd), Bari Weiss is just Bari on Common Sense, Bryan Caplan is just Bryan on <s>Econlib</s> Bet On It. And so on. Oftentimes you can pick it up from the content too - authors will refer to themselves a certain way, and that tends to reflect the comments. It's less about formality and more about reference classes...there are a million Scotts in real life, and (probably) thousands of Scott Alexanders, but within the blogosphere, a much narrower subset of blogging Scotts.
When commenting on someone's blog, I think it's standard to address them by first name only, and to refer to them in the third person by first name only, unless there are other people being discussed with the same first name.
When cold e-mailing someone, it's more standard to start with their title and last name (e.g., "Dear Dr. Alexander," or "Dear Prof. Easwaran,") and then in future replies, to address them however they signed their previous e-mail to you (i.e., with first and last name, or title and last name, if they signed with first and last name, or to switch to first name only if they signaled that this was appropriate by signing with first name only).
Talking in person, you would start with title and last name, unless they explicitly tell you it's ok to move to a first name basis (which is usually something that the higher status person has to initiate).
This depends a lot on conventions within a field/subcommunity. I hang around two different prominent universities in my field--in one, the high-status people are referred to by first name and if you say "Dr X" or "Professor X," people will tell you "we don't do that here." In the other, the high status people are "Dr X" or "Professor X," and as an outsider, how I address someone is part of establishing (or trying to establish) my own place in the pecking order.
I addressed him by Alexander in some articles I’ve written but I think that’s very weird cause I can’t recall anyone calling him that. It’s always Scott in the comments.
How about 'our esteemed host'?
As an American--in my experience, using someone's last name instead of their first name is primarily done in formal writing, e.g. in a newspaper article or longform nonfiction. People in customer service roles might refer to clients/customers as Ms/Mr XYZ to convey politeness, but even that is a bit old-fashioned.
There might be some professions where this isn't the case. Maybe law? Law is weird.
As for Scott--I think it's just convention in the comments section here to call him Scott. Using just a first name seems pretty typical for comments sections specific to particular writers or creators. E.g., to pull the first example that comes to mind, Bernadette Banner's YouTube comments typically refer to her as Bernadette. Now I'm wonderng how speakers of other languages do this, and if it's indicative of some parasocial relationship.
I don't comment here much, but I do participate in places where Scott's work is discussed and I (slightly reluctantly) say 'Scott'. I prefer to use a more detached tone when speaking about people's ideas and use last names for intellectuals more than most people do, but I find when I say "Alexander" it sounds like I'm just confused about who I'm talking about.
> I recently heard that this is not standard in the US, and using someone's first name before they've invited you to, or without some kind of reciprocal relationship with them, is presumptuous.
This is very old-fashioned etiquette. People use first names in almost all interactive contexts these days.
When I'm discussing another person _in not-too-formal writing_ I will sometimes deal with the "first name is too informal/familiar/friendly, surname feels weird" problem by using the full name once and then their _initials_.
The thing I am most concerned about there is mostly not the informality of using their first name, it's the possible perception that you're viewing this person as a friend/ally and therefore shouldn't be trusted to be impartial. In many contexts this doesn't matter, but if e.g. there's some discussion about some probably-hostile thing El Sandifer wrote about Scott Alexander, I _am_ going to be trying to be impartial and I will call them ES and SA in order to reduce the risk that someone thinks/feels "he's writing about X as if X is a personal friend of his, so I should assume he's biased".
(If I were writing about someone who _is_ a personal friend of mine, I would say so and would use their first name throughout in order not to mislead, unless the relevant stylistic norms forbid that as e.g. in academic publishing.)
"Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules" 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DUiMASYGQs
I wonder if people don't use "Mr." anymore mainly because once women became a major part of the professional workforce it was too much trouble to figure out whether to address them "Mrs." "Miss" or "Ms." (Particularly when the correct title is "Dr.')
Also wonder if pronouns will suffer a similar fate for the same reason.
My otherwise-socially-conservative feminist mother, at least, regaled me with stories about how getting folks to agree to drop "Miss" in favour of "Ms" was a victory for equality, back in her day.
Though I'm told that in the rare instance Gen Z is called upon to say "Ms." (e.g., the Ms. Marvel tv show), they're surprisingly likely to pronounce it "Miss".
And back in the 90s I was involved in a wedding where the invitation list for the bachelorette party addressed the single women as Ms. and the married women as Mrs., which struck me as kind of missing the point.
As an elementary schooler in the early 2000s, I was taught to refer to adult women this way. I didn't learn that "Ms." and "Miss" were separate things, rather than different spellings of the same word/idea, until college.
It sure did. Oh well, sorry Gloria Steinem.
Everybody here seems to use Scott. Elsewhere he's referred to as 'Scott Alexander', for reasons of disambiguation.
For reasons involving the NYT article and doxxing, his *last* name (not mentioned here) is used only by his enemies. So never use that.
"For reasons involving the NYT article and doxxing, his *last* name (not mentioned here) is used only by his enemies."
I was not aware of this. Some questions - I'm being sincere. Not assuming you (or anyone else) will answer all of them.
Does the fact that I've used his full name (since reading Still Alive) mean I'm one of Scott's enemies? If not, who are Scott's enemies and what makes a person Scott's enemy? Where has this distinction been formulated? Do Scott's enemies agree with it, and do they identify as his enemies? Does Scott agree with it, and more importantly, does he agree with your suggestion?
What purpose is there to classify people as Scott's allies or enemies, other than the obvious tribe-forming, tribe-strenghtening behavior?
What sense is there in tabooing his full name, as he has publicized it himself, deleting and recreating his entire blog during the process? Isn't letting (assumedly) malicious people appropriate the use of his full name counterproductive?
There is the Rightful Caliph, and there is the Reign of Terror. That is all you know, and all you need to know.
Oh, that I can live with.
If you use a name on internet, I am not going to investigate whether it is your real name or a pseudonym. Not even because I respect your privacy (although I do), but simply because I do not care. If someone signs their work "Scott Alexander", then for all practical purposes, that person *is* Scott Alexander. Name is just a reference anyway.
Some people become famous under pseudonyms, like "B. Traven", or "Student" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distribution
Why do I call him "Scott Alexander" when his full name was already made public? First, because this is how I have referred to him for *years*, so I am already used to it. Second, because this is how he still signs his articles. Third, because many other people call him that (for the first two reasons), so if I say "Scott Alexander", people I communicate with immediately know who I am referring to. Three reasons to use the pseudonym, and zero reasons to use the real name.
(Fourth, because not using someone's name has a kabbalistic significance. This is an inside joke. Read https://unsongbook.com/ to find out more.)
In the past, it was possible to figure out Scott's real name, but Scott asked people not to use it publicly, because doing so could have hurt him. Predictably, some assholes did it anyway, and NYT decided to go nuclear.
Since then, Scott has significantly changed his life, so the old reasons not to use his real name *now* no longer apply. (Also, anyone can find it on Wikipedia now.) So there is no harm if you use Scott's real name today. Now we avoid it mostly out of force of habit.
"Since then, Scott has significantly changed his life, so the old reasons not to use his real name *now* no longer apply. (Also, anyone can find it on Wikipedia now.) So there is no harm if you use Scott's real name today. Now we avoid it mostly out of force of habit."
This seems to be a reply to my comment, but I'm not sure whether it is directed at me particularly. However, I agree with the gist of this comment, especially the quoted paragraph - it also did not add to the view I already had. That is, I wonder whether the fact that I questioned [that Scott's last name should Never Be Used] gets interpreted as me saying there never was an issue with people doxing him (which, of course, I haven't so much as hinted at).
You're overthinking this pretty heavily.
>Does the fact that I've used his full name mean I'm one of Scott's enemies ?
Of course not, that's ridiculous.
The commenter you're replying to's heuristic was "using Scott's last name exclusively", which using the full name isn't. And I would say even that heuristic is pretty flawed, I can see where it's coming from but I don't think it performs any better than random chance.
>If not, who are Scott's enemies and what makes a person Scott's enemy?
The commenter you're replying to is using "enemies" lightly in the sense of internet assholes.
- Who are those internet assholes ? who knows, the internet is anonymous, that's why it's so heckin awesome. I once searched for Scott's name ("Scott Alexander") on tumblr and saw a deluge of posts raging about how he "platforms" (God I fucking hate this word) racists and mysogynists and blah blah blah, no idea if you can still find those if you searched now, that was a couple of years ago.
For a pretty reliable dumpster of Scott's (and rationalism's in general) enemies, see reddit's "Sneer Club" subreddit. Another one is MeFe, or Meta Filter, a link aggregator site sorta like reddit or hackernews (and it's pretty good actually assuming you don't go near any woke link). It has a huge woke bias so every Scott link is probably them raging about he "PLaTFOrM"s nazis. Another one is hackernews itself, though thankfully it's far more contrarian and heterogenous on most issues than either reddit or MeFe, but that's exactly why you will occassionaly see the incessant whining.
- What makes a Scott's enemy ? No idea, Scott is really the rare "mild man" type, I'm lucky to have someone like him in my personal life (though unfortunately not for long), it's extremly hard to not at least listen to what he says and then disagree very respectfully if you can muster the guts to disagree at all. He commands by sheer politeness.
Scott's enemies are varied, they are anything from woke left wing to extreme king-cock-sucking right wing. It's hard to say anything generalized about them. I assume the first woke ones were Feminists, all the way back in 2015 or so, for reasons that you better not read about for your own mental health. Oh good old feminists, always blazing the way in being assholes in all sorts of new and exciting mannners. No idea where the first right wing ones came from, I see plenty of them being sour because Scott steelmanned some of their arguments and then counter-argued them to the ground again, but I'm not sure this is the sour spot.
>Where has this distinction been formulated?
In the brain of anybody who see a dedicated group of people consistently moaning about 1 person for a decade or so.
>Do Scott's enemies agree with it, and do they identify as his enemies?
Nobody wants to be seen as the loser who keeps raging about someone who lives rent free in their head, they will probably say something to the effect of "Scott Alexander is a representative of the Crypto-Fascists tech-industry silicon-valley tech bros who want to roll back abortion rights and the rights of the Blax communities of color", and in their own system of knowledge and ethics, this counts. But to most other people who are attracted to rationalism, it doesn't.
>Does Scott agree with it, and more importantly, does he agree with your suggestion?
No idea, and no idea. _I_ would say Scott *definitely* agrees there are people who hate his guts, however (un)charitably he internally justifies or models their behaviour. He also seems pretty sour about the NYT thing. But whether he thinks calling him by his last name is a marker of belonging to this group is much more open to debate.
>What purpose is there to classify people as Scott's allies or enemies, other than the obvious tribe-forming, tribe-strenghtening behavior?
Classification is life's eternal hobbies, and intelligence's first baby steps. Every AI course begins with a baby-mode "Cat or Not" classifier. Even Bacteria classifies their pond water into "Rich in Sulfur" and "Not Rich in Sulfur". If you're *Any* sort of a goal-having goal-seeking agent, you have to classify things. Friend-(X)Or-Foe is a pretty vital distinction. How can you even prevent yourself from noticing that there are consistent markers for a group of people who doesn't give a flying tick about any of your ideas, and dedicates an unhealthy portion of its existence to hating you ?
> Isn't letting (assumedly) malicious people appropriate the use of his full name counterproductive?
Absolutely (and I will still correct you that the guy or gal you're replying to only said "last name exclusively, not the full name). But also, it's good and wholesome to know what upsets the people you respect and then not do it in front of them. If a bunch of assholes keep calling your glass-eyed red-haired friend a ginger 4 eyed nerd, then - unless you're so intimate with the guy that you can single-handedly redeem the words - you better stay away from using those words in front of him. There is nothing inherently taboo or insulting about "ginger" or "nerd", it's just associated with people who make it clear they hate the guy they're describing with.
That's all assuming the original commenter's reasoning, which I find a bit leapy. Calling Scott's by his last name is a bit weird for sure, I have never seen anyone or himself call him that, but it wouldn't even count for a 0.001 in my calculation of whether someone is a Scott's enemy.
Thank you for replying and putting in effort -
I can understand your POV. A couple of points besides that:
"(and I will still correct you that the guy or gal you're replying to only said "last name exclusively, not the full name)"
They said this:
"For reasons involving the NYT article and doxxing, his *last* name (not mentioned here) is used only by his enemies. So never use that."
I did not gather from this the 'last name exclusively' part, particularly not "not the full name" part, and I apologize if this is a very relevant part of the question. However, I can also ask the same questions on using only his surname, which I have also done, not knowing that some people who are not Scott use this as a marker to classify me as one of his enemies, that is, apparently as a random asshole on the Internet.
"But also, it's good and wholesome to know what upsets the people you respect and then not do it in front of them."
I wholeheartedly agree. I seriously question this point's relevance to using Scott's full name. Has he asked to be referred to primarily with his pseudonym? The situation has markedly changed from the days of SSC, precisely due to the fact that he is no longer (relatively) anonymous.
"Calling Scott's by his last name is a bit weird for sure"
I routinely refer to celebrities by their last name. That is, I talk about Yudkowsky, Hanson, *******, Tao, Pele, Einstein and Trump, not Eliezer, Robin, Scott, Terry, Edison, Albert and Donald. I think this is normal.
It's just a signal, like "Barack Hussein Obama" or "Donald Drumpf" -- sure you could use those even if you supported the person in question, but due to the peculiarities of history people may assume that you don't like them.
Barack Obama's middle name is not Hussein, and Donald Trump's last name is not Drumpf. Scott's last name is what it is, and he personally celebrated it in ACX:s opening post. I do not think this analogy works.
I think we disagree about our understanding of "last name", the one I have in my mind is "Siskiend" (I butchered the spelling I know), the one you have in mind seems to be "Alexander" ?
I mean, I'm okay with both. I have made it clear that the point is mostly unconvincing to me, I'm just playing the role of the original commenter's advocate, that's all.
>I did not gather from this the 'last name exclusively' part,
Yes, I realized this just now, I agree it can be understood both ways, perhaps even favoring your way.
> classify me as one of his enemies, that is, apparently as a random asshole on the Internet.
I doubt you should care about the opinions of someones who uses a single word to deduce something like this about you, eh ?
>*******
Seriously, it's okay. Say it : his name is Scott Alexander Siskind, there is no taboo about it, you don't have to star anything. The commenter that started the thread just shared a (quite frankly) flawed heuristic, but people are not dumb algorithms. If you're on Scott Alexander Siskind's blog writing comments that are not 51%+ insulting Scott Alexander Siskind, you probably don't hate Scott Alexander Siskind, or Scott, or S. Alexander, or SSC, or Siskind, or S.A., or S.A. Siskind, or Unsong's author, or the Jewish Author That Loves Writing And Is Enviously Good At It, etc.. I can't speak for Scott, but those all strike me as pretty reasonable aliases for him.
"I think we disagree about our understanding of "last name""
I'm referring to ACX:s writer's (Scott's) family name, the one NYT threatened to and eventually did publish.
"I doubt you should care about the opinions of someones who uses a single word to deduce something like this about you, eh ?"
Absolutely. Let me emphasize that I do not feel that OP:s comment had anything to do with me personally, but I did use myself as an example, mostly to avoid the possible if unlikely lines along "Even if you don't see how using his last name is offensive - well, let me point out that you don't use his last name, but guess who does? Evil enemies!" (yes, I'm also kidding a bit).
Earlier you said that I'm overthinking this, and that the commenter I replied to used the word 'enemy' lightly. That is exactly the relevant part and what I'm opposed to: the cheap usage of the word word 'enemy'. I agree that my comment represents overthinking, and I wholeheartedly believe that whenever the word 'enemy' is used, one absolutely should overthink the case. This - to be extremely wary of groupthink, halo effects (negative or positive), ingroup-outgroup biases etc - was one of the first things I learned when reading the Sequences, and I think it is a very valuable idea.
That is, I consciously decided against a charitable interpretation of their words due to the (psychological, social, cultural) risks associated with using allies and enemies as a framework for thinking. I do not think this is the place for that sort of language (I do NOT mean that words like 'enemy' should be banned or something equally stupid).
I agree with several things you said, and I agree with the last paragraph.
Petty and mostly unimportant point, but "doxing" has only one x. I'll cite RMS himself on this one.
https://stallman.org/doxing.html
(Also, while I can understand why using his real last name might still be "outgroup-coded," Scott openly uses it in "Still Alive," this blog's second-most popular post, and in his Lorien Psychology project, so I don't think it really has to be kept secret anymore)
I don't really care much about this spelling variant, but if you're arguing "doxxing" is incorrect, I'll argue back.
A quick search reveals no references to this supposed letter exx other than by Stallman, so if it does exist, it's at least pretty obscure. The mispronounciation of "doxing" as /doʊksɪŋ/ seems much more obvious than the mispronounciation of "doxxing" as /dɑxɪŋ/. Avoiding forming digraphs with other meanings does not seem like a rule English actually tends to follow (e.g. "cooperate", "lighthouse"), but doubling final consonants in cases like this when adding a suffix is. I read that the letters "x" and "v" have often historically been exempted from this rule because people thought it looked bad or something, with this exception becoming less common lately, although writing this now I'm doubting my memory/source for this. Anyway, my main point is that consistency is a better reason than most to prefer one spelling (or other linguistic feature) over another, and that points to preferring "doxxing". (Also apparently it's sometimes spelt "doxx" even without a suffix, but I don't see any particular reason that would be preferred).
It's spelt with a double-X because it's Internet slang, and playing with English spelling "rules" is a common Internet game. Wikipedia (which prefers "doxing", FWIW) claims that the original spelling was "d0xing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
I think RMS is joking there: nobody would write "yech" as "yexx", and the standard way to render the Greek letter chi in English is "ch", as in technology, chirality, archaeology, etc. Besides, language is defined by usage, and "doxxing" is at the very least a widespread usage.
Edit: Also, "Exxon" is not pronounced "Ecchon", and doesn't derive from a Greek word! It was a computer-generated variant of their previous name "Esso", which is derived from "S. O." for "Standard Oil", and is still used in much of the world. The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey switched from "Esso" to "Exxon" after other Standard Oil descendants sued to stop them using the "Esso" brand in their territories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ExxonMobil#Exxon_Corporation_(1973-1999)
Further, it's my understanding that they deliberately chose the 'xx' spelling of Exxon *because* this pretty well guaranteed that no one was using that name or word in any prior sense anywhere.
That sounds very plausible!
Norms vary by subculture. In Silicon Valley it's normal to address and refer to people by first name in almost all situations. In some other professional cultures it's normal to use last names by default. This sometimes leads to odd juxtapositions-- e.g. my intuition is that both Scott Alexander and academic James C. Scott should be referred to as "Scott".
I have never heard of it being presumptuous to use someone's first name outside of a business setting. That's always been the standard in my part of the US; if it's a formal meeting like a teacher or a doctor you use title and surname, for everything else (like blog posts) you use first names. Especially online where you only know people by the name they want to be known by.
Of course for Scott specifically you'll want to go with "S-Bro", or maybe "The Mysterious Mr. S."
Over on Scott Aaronson's blog, it's customary to refer to him as "the other Scott A".
Boring math-nerd thing alert:
I was always annoyed by the Calculus presumption that (dx)^2 could be disregarded.
A very small bit of something squared (that is, a very small bit of a very small bit) is very very small, but it's not nothing. Or maybe it is ...
1/9 = 0.1111111 ...
9 × 1/9 = 9 x 0.1111111 ... = 0.9999999 ...
But, 9 x 1/9 = 9/9 = 1
And therefore, 0.9999999 ... = 1.
The discussion that followed this comment, and the links posted, are fascinating. Thanks for posting this - please do not hesitate to share similar concepts in the future!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed. Most of the subsequent discussion was above my head. I plan to dig in and learn more of this stuff.
There is an unsatisfying solution to your annoyance : (dx)^2 is 0 because we said so.
This is the approach taken by dual numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number), numbers of the form a+b*ε, where ε is a special number defined by ε^2 = 0 (a root of zero that is itself not zero, nor any real number of course). Compare to imaginery numbers, where we make an equally non-sensical assumption at the start and then derive a whole new beautiful universe. Dual numbers are also extremly awesome, for one thing they allow you to calculate both a function and its derivative in a single forward pass, and - if the programming language you happened to write the code in is dynamic - without changing anything in the code that calculates the function itself. That is, given a piece of code that calculates f(x), giving the dual argument "a+1*ε" to that function (along with defining the necessary fundamental operations) makes the code auto-magically calculate both f(x) and f'(x), represented in the output dual number as c+d*ε.
Differentials are known to be non-sensical, there is a sort of doublethink that occurs where you simuatenously imagine that dx is a "very small number" for some purposes but also 0 for other purposes. I hear they have a modern equivalent in non-standard analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonstandard_analysis), but it seems to be a fairly heavy weight mathematical machinery.
This (the "because we said so" part) reminds me of being back in Grade 9, and Mr Holme teaching us that any number raised to the zero power equals one. He got upset that we repeatedly asked why; "because it's defined as such" wasn't satisfactory.
He should have showed us a series with 2 or 10 raised to different powers, both positive and negative. (Maybe he did - it was a long time ago, and memory becomes selective.)
The relationship between definitions and facts in mathematics is a subtle one. There are many cases in mathematics where a definition and a theorem can switch roles (but the lemmas connecting them stay the same). All definitions in mathematics are in principle arbitrary, but they should be chosen to make interesting facts convenient to express and prove. It's a question of user interface design, really. Mr Holme was right that "because it's defined as such" was the answer to the question you'd asked, but he should have gone on to answer the follow-up question, "why is it defined that way?" And then he could have talked about the definition of 0^0, where there are good arguments for either 0 or 1, but ultimately you have to pick one.
> Compare to imaginery numbers, where we make an equally non-sensical assumption at the start and then derive a whole new beautiful universe.
This has always bugged me. It's the standard way of teaching the subject, but there's another way that isn't nonsensical at all: start by defining complex numbers as 2D real vectors with a new operation you call "multiplication", defined as (a, b) * (c, d) = (ac - bd, ad + bc). We can embed the real numbers into the complex numbers via the map x -> (x, 0), an it's a theorem that (0, 1) * (0, 1) = (-1, 0). I've explained this at greater length here: https://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/158861.html
> defined as (a, b) * (c, d) = (ac - bd, ad + bc)
That looks entirely artificial. Instead, reformulate real addition and multiplication in terms of the number line: to add a, you move the line until 0 is at a; to multiply by a, you pin 0 in place and stretch the line until 1 becomes a. Then you do exactly the same with the number plane and voilà, you have complex arithmetic.
> That looks entirely artificial.
Artificial, yes, but it's clearly well-defined! But I'm happy to admit that your formulation is equivalent *and* makes it easier to see the design rationale.
0.999 ... does not itself directly denote a number starting with "0.9". It is a shorthand notation for "The limit of the sequence { 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, .. }". By the definition of limits, that limit is 1.
The limit of a sequence does not have to be a member of the sequence. For example the limit of the sequence { 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, .. } is zero, even though zero is not in the sequence.
(The above two paragraphs summarise the contents of countless thousands of posts on the Usenet group sci.math, and doubtless many other math forums over the years, where the problem of whether 0.9999... equals 1 is discussed over and over ad nauseam! :-)
Calculus these days, and for over two centuries past (since Bolzano in 1816), has defined derivatives via limits. So there is no need to worry about that (dx)^2 stuff. It was always known to be contrived and suspect, and that was the incentive to replace it by rigorously defined limits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_of_a_sequence
The best way to understand the modern definition of a limit is to think of it like a challenge, sort of like "anything you can do I can do better":
A sequence {a_1, a_2, a_3, ...} tends to a limit L if no matter how small a positive value, ε, you choose, I can find some N such that every difference abs(a_N - L), abs(a_{N+1} - L), .. from then on in the sequence is smaller than ε.
Generally, the smaller the value of ε, the larger the "starting" value of N from which all the differences are smaller than ε. But no matter how small you choose ε, I can always find some sufficiently large N with that property. So I will always win! :-)
You could think of the smallest N with that property as a function of ε, and that is how the definition is usually expressed. But it does make the definition look a bit intimidating and "busy".
As Dominic mentioned in his reply (currently) just below mine, this is called the epsilon-delta definition. I don't entirely agree with him that it is "very easy to understand", or to really grasp and apply anyway, because most students find it a bit of a "pons asinorum". But once one does grok it then most of classical analysis is practically an open book! Formally it reads:
A sequence {a_1, a_2, .. } tends to a unique limit L if for every ε (the "epsilon") > 0 there exists an integer N(ε) such that abs(a_n - L) < ε (the left hand side being the "delta") for all n >= N(ε).
In topology, there is an identical definition of a limit point in a space, where the "delta" (a interval on the real number line) above is replaced by a neighborhood which is a spherical region centered on that point.
Out of curiosity: would you find [or have found] it easier to understand epsilon/delta if it were expressed in the following way?:
"A sequence {a_1, a_2, .. } tends to a limit L if there exists a function from any positive real (call it ε) to both an integer (call it n) and a proof that abs(a_n - L) < ε."
Alas, now that I try to write this out in English, this is rather unwieldy. It seems dependent types really must be written down symbolically to be coherent.
[Off-topic mumblings: But anyways my idea is that "there exists" is a nearly-incoherent concept used in classical mathematics. To wit: I have found that when pressed, *actual mathematicians* (... okay, okay, actual redditors in /r/math who have demonstrated otherwise excellent fluency in the concepts) will argue that the kind of object that "there exists" because of the Axiom of Choice is not the same kind of object that "there exists" because it has been constructed, even when the same mathematicians [redditors] insist that they are assuming classical mathematics, not constructivism. But this claim has no basis in fact in classical mathematics; the whole point of the AoC is that you get out of it just as valid an object as any other way of obtaining the object. My interpretation is that these mathematicians are really constructivists at heart, but ones who have managed to have hidden the cognitive dissonance under the convenient rug of "there exists", which is a phrase lacking in intension and multiplicitous in extension.]
As it stands, that definition doesn't define a unique limit, because it isn't enough for just some n-th difference to be less than ε. All the subsequent differences n+1, n+2, .. must also be.
For example, the sequence { c n - floor(c n} } for n = 1, 2, .. and some fixed real c > 0 satisfies your definition. But the limit is unique (trivially zero) only when c is an integer. Otherwise, if c is rational then it cycles periodically between a finite set of "limits", and if c is irrational it's even worse because I think every value between 0 and 1 is a "limit"!
However it does highlight that the word "unique" should be included in the definition before "limit"! But a point of discontinuity in an otherwise continuous function is a slight complication because, depending on the side from which that point is approached by a sequence of function values, there may be a left-limit and a right-limit which are not the same (although each is unique in itself) (I say "may" because that is not true if the point is a so-called essential singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_singularity .)
As for the Axiom of Choice and so on, I've never troubled myself over logical foundations. I'm content to leave that to the smart people! :-) But if a non-contradictory axiom gives rise to interesting and useful results, as Choice undoubtedly does, then I think it should generally be allowed, as long as one is clear on which results rely on it.
See first paragraph of my comment! (although you expressed it more formally)
There are good explanations for this on Physics StackExchange and on MathOverflow. I can't find the one that really spoke to me (I think it was in terms of epsilon-delta limits, and so very easy to understand at even a high-school level) but here are a few that I found while trying to rediscover that one:
- https://math.stackexchange.com/q/3536272
- https://math.stackexchange.com/q/3086464
- https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/70376
- https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/498016
https://math.blogoverflow.com/2014/11/03/more-than-infinitesimal-what-is-dx/ is also relevant.
It’s not that dx is somehow small but not negligible while dx² is negligible. It’s that 1+dx is indistinguishable from 1, dx+dx² from dx etc.
So when you, for example, differentiate y = x² you get dy = (x+dx)²−x² = 2xdx+dx² and you throw away dx² because it’s dwarfed by dx. If you were to calculate the second derivative you’d likewise keep the least small thing which would happen to be dx².
You're right to say it's not nothing. Since you say it's a 'presumption' I think you're talking about a high-school/non-math-majors' version of calculus. That version takes shortcuts without fully laying the theoretical foundation for these shortcuts, which does exist and is extremely cool. When you understand that foundation it won't be just a 'presumption'. An intro real-analysis course, or even a more theory-oriented undergrad calculus 1 course, will put these conceptual difficulties front-and-center and deal with them in a rigorous way. Bishop Berkeley's "ghosts of departed quantities" may be mentioned, as will the effort in the 1800s to put calculus on a foundation that more rigorously deals with the ideas that made you uneasy. You will start to understand why "let ε<0" is an Extremely Funny Math Joke. There are a few book recommendations you might get; I like Apostol's Calculus (Volume I) for this, because it's what my undergrad course used. I think Spivak's Calculus is also well regarded (not the same as his *Calculus on Manifolds*, that's for later on).
At some point in discussions like this someone will inevitably bring up 'nonstandard analysis', which is a way of bringing formal mathematical meaning to 'dx' as a sort-of-numbery-thing, the way it's used in that intuitive loosey-goosey way in calc 1, but it's possible to actually do calculus without ever admitting that "dx" has a meaning.
My Grade 12 math teacher, the great Mr Desbrisay, took a few of us aside for the last few weeks of school and introduced us to differential calculus. He used an algebraic approach - let's take y = 3x^2 as an example.
y + dy = 3(x + dx)2
y + dy = 3(x^2 + 2xdx + dx^2)
y + dy = 3x^2 + 6xdx + 3dx^2
3x^2 + dy = 3x^2 + 6xdx + 3dx^2
dy = 6xdx (dx^2 was considered to be so insignificant that it could be dropped.)
dy/dx = 6x
We went though a bunch of these, and added in constants (and discovered that the constant drops out - the answer is the same with or without a constant).
And then Mr D asked "Does anyone see the easy way?"
Someone (likely not me) saw that you could put the exponent in front as a multiplier, and reduce the exponent by one. What an epiphany!
***************
The next year, in 1st-year college, our physics teacher had us read Silvanus P. Thompson's Calculus Made Easy. It remains a delightful little book.
As I recall, Professor Thompson used a sum of 1,000 Pounds (i.e. British currency) as x, and dx was something tiny like a farthing (a quarter of a penny). I think there were 240 pence in a pound (in pre-decimal currency), so a farthing was one part in 4 x 240 x 1,000 (or just over 1 part in 10^6), and could, for all practical purposes, be ignored.
******************
Anyway, that was my introduction to calculus, so perhaps it's not surprising I got hung up on the idea of ignoring very small parts that were still there.
A few years later I studied electronics, and took calculus once again. At that point it began to make sense. Unfortunately, I never used it in the workplace, so it's mostly forgotten.
I will look for Apostol - thank you for the recommendation!
Here to second Apostol. I even revisited it a few years ago, just for old times’ sake. But it wasn’t quite the same without Roger Pinkham teaching it. Damn, I miss that man.
As far as I know, there are no STIs that increase libido. This is a little odd, since infectious diseases frequently cause physiological changes that enhance their transmission - influenza causes you to cough and sneeze, smallpox creates blisters, and so on. Any guesses as to why this might be the case? Perhaps it's too difficult to cross the blood-brain barrier, or hormonal changes are too unreliable.
There certainly are cases in the animal world, e.g. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/141031-zombies-parasites-animals-science-halloween. it's pretty well known that rabies causes dogs to lose their fear and become more aggressive, hence spreading the disease via bites. Also, I'm under the impression over the long term pathogens tend to become less infectious, i.e., the payoff to spreading too quickly become negative at the margin.
Do we know of any diseases that affect behavior in some way more complicated than "you feel very ill and lethargic so you lie there and let mosquitoes bite you?"
As another commentor mentioned, neurosyphilis if well know to cause significant mental changes.
Rabies causes you to develop hydrophobia and bite people.
In non-human animals, cordyceps, toxoplasmosis, and various other parasites cause extensive and complex behavioral changes.
Are we sure there aren't any? Scientists get to be way more thorough when studying rats than with humans. If, say, hepatitis B came with a 20% increase to libido, is that something we're equipped to notice?
It doesn't seem insurmountably hard – alcohol and testosterone both affect libido, and plenty of other naturally occurring substances reduce inhibitions, which would probably increase promiscuity on the margin.
We also know of infections in other mammals, such as toxoplasmosis in rats, that affect behaviour in complex ways. I'm not aware of many bacteria or viruses that are known to do this, but there are parasitic STIs in humans (e.g. trichomoniasis) so I think your question stands.
Do we know that this doesn't happen? It seems hard to control for given that people who get STIs were likely more promiscuous anyway, but my uninformed guess would be that the effect could well exist (60% credence maybe?) and we just haven't looked sufficiently hard.
Anyone know of any studies in this area?
My guess would be that by their nature, STI already select for people that have more sex, with more different people, less safely ; as in getting a STI is a good enough marker for the STI that you're going to transmit it.
Changing a complex behavior via brain chemistry is far more difficult than triggering those other examples. And there likely isn't a an easy progressive route of evolution for a virus to get there.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for hypersexuality, there don't appear to be any straightforward physiological causes of hypersexuality, so this is likely the right answer. And even if it were possible, it's likely the case that conditions in which individual humans have access to a very large number of unique sex partners are probably rare enough that such a complex trait didn't have the opportunity to evolve.
Controversial possibility: male homosexuality is caused by an as-yet-unidentified STI.
This explains why homosexuality was unknown for almost all of history but has suddenly come out of nowhere in recent decades. It also explains why so many boys who get sexually abused by men wind up as homosexuals.
>why homosexuality was unknown for almost all of history
3 out of the 3 major abrahamic religions has explicitly mentioned it by name, how much older can you get than 2000+ years and still have writing ?
(we don't know who drew the cave paintings of sexual organs by the way, those boobs might be drawn by lesbians, those cocks might be drawn by gays)
This is a very strong claim, presented here with weak or zero evidence and is likely wrong. Off the top of my hat:
- The claim reads that all male homosexuality is caused by a STI. That would mean that every man that identifies as primarily homosexual would have had same-sex sexual contact before identifying as gay (Edit: see response to prenatal exposure below). As far as I know, this is not true. Open to evidence.
- The claim does not account for the variability in individual sexuality between homo- and heterosexuality. What percentage "gay" should a person be (as for their preferred sexual orientation) in order for their orientation to have been caused by this assumed STI?
- Related, what causes the rest of the variability in individual sexuality? If a heterosexual male has a romantic crush on his friend (but that's all), what causes this? Are they infected, but have a milder disease?
- Related: what explains the rest of variability in sexual orientation in heterosexual males?
- Related: What explains the variability in sexual orientation in heterosexual females?
- Are most or all (birth-giving) women carriers of this pathogen? If women are carriers of the pathogen (which seems to me like the strongest option, assuming there isn't a worldwide conspiracy of "homosexual recruitment tactics" going on, widely covered up), why does it only cause symptoms in males?
- Why does the infection not cause any local symptoms but only a very complex, irreversible behavioral symptom? What (evolutionary) mechanisms are there to enhance this kind of pathogen's virulence?
- Why does female homosexuality exist? Why does it produce very similar behavior to a pathogen which only causes symptoms in males? Why do the mechanisms producing female homosexuality not apply to male homosexuality?
To sum it up: what reason is there to believe in an infection we have little to no evidence of causing psychosocial/psychosexual phenomena which can be adequately explained by other factors, while (I take it) claiming that those factors do in fact explain female homosexuality but do not or cannot apply to males. Are your assumptions ("homosexuality was unknown for most of history", "many sexually abused boys later identify as gay") correct, and do they reflect the available evidence accordingly?
I wouldn't look into this any further. Seems way out of proportion.
The primary advocate for this theory (which does seem dubious to me) is Greg Cochran. He may even have originated it, not sure.
I think the idea is that an infection at some particular stage of prenatal development could result in changes that then lead to being gay.
So far as I know, he has no specific evidence for this idea, just some general evolutionary arguments, which seem unconvincing given the amount of homosexual behavior we see in the animal kingdom.
Having said all that, some of your objections are easily addressed.
To point 1), no, it doesn't imply that - the virus could be something that also spreads by other means, indeed in this case I think the notion is that mom gets infected during some particular window of time.
As for point 2)-5), of course some effect could manifest incompletely or in polymorphic ways. Nor are we trying to explain all human variation in sexual preference here.
6), something that affected development of sex drive seems like it might plausibly only cause obvious effects in males, there is a whole separate XY ontogeny going on there.
7) does seem like a strong objection. We have actually done a fair job of looking for viruses out there, and while there are low impact ones that are *usually* asymptomatic, almost all of them cause some symptoms in some people. Here there's no candidate, no etiology of anything, no statistics that say 'pregnant women who had fevers in months 3-4 of gestation are 30% more likely to report having a gay son'... nada.
And yeah then there's the whole 'doesn't explain lesbians' aspect.
I also think that one of the things they invoke, namely, 'unknown for all of history', is mostly explainable by taboos. If you read US primary sources for say 1650-1850 (which is a lot of material!), how much evidence of homosexuality would you find? Maybe a sermon or two against sodomy, a couple of court cases without specific details?
That we don't find evidence in the much sparser material from some ancient civilizations doesn't seem like it needs much explanation. Greek mentions of it (besides being explained by the fact that we have an unreasonable amount of material from them, relatively speaking) come down to the fact that they weren't against it.
Greg's argument for this idea is mainly based on the fitness cost. Intuitively, it seems like male homosexuality should be selected against pretty strongly, since it decreases your expected number of offspring, potentially by quite a lot if there were opportunities for infidelity/extramarital sex/rape that could have left offspring if you preferred women, but not if you preferred men.
A common idea for how male homosexuality could be selected for involves the "gay uncle" idea--maybe gay men pour lots of resources into their cousins and nephews and siblings. This could work, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that it actually happens all that much--gay uncles don't in general seem to be better (or worse) at taking care of nephews/siblings/cousins than straight uncles. Further, for this to be a good strategy for the genes in the gay uncle, he needs to be about twice as effective at helping his siblings's kids as a gay uncle as he would have been helping his own kids as a straight uncle--that could happen, but it sure seems hard to get it to work out.
Another common argument is that sexual interest or preference for men in an ancestral environment might not have mattered much--if you're paired off, your wife is rate-limited in terms of the number of babies she can have, so what you do in your off hours is not a big deal. (And indeed, I think masturbation is pretty common everywhere, and it similarly is guaranteed to leave zero offspring.) On the other hand, it's hard to believe that there wouldn't be some fitness advantage in almost any environment to preferring a fling with a girl to a fling with a boy--there's some chance you'll leave your rival raising your baby, or leave the woman whose village your tribe sacked with a baby to raise.
Greg's argument is that when there's something with a persistent fitness cost that isn't being selected away, that's often a good marker for some kind of infectious cause. Thousands of generations of humans have been selected for behaviors that led to more children (which presumably mostly focuses on sex with people who can produce children), but some virus that circulates in childhood and clobbers some important function regarding sexual interest isn't under selection to max out its hosts' fertility.
OTOH, I don't think anyone has ever found any strong evidence for an infectious cause. It seems like if this exists, we should see its tracks in the many cases where Western explorers contacted isolated human settlements/tribes, and they went from approximately zero homosexuality to a normal (by our standards) rate of homosexuality. You'd kind-of expect that to have happened in the Americas as the Eurasian disease package showed up and everyone was exposed to it. I don't know enough to be sure, but my impression is that we don't generally see this pattern.
The other plausible explanation I've seen for homosexuality is that human sexuality is complicated, so there are dozens of things that can get a little misaligned and lead to non-reproductive sexual behavior--something you see a lot in many places in current culture.
>I also think that one of the things they invoke, namely, 'unknown for all of history', is mostly explainable by taboos. If you read US primary sources for say 1650-1850 (which is a lot of material!), how much evidence of homosexuality would you find?
There would be some suspiciously strongly confirmed bachelors, or dudes "who enjoyed the company of men" and such. It is there if you look for it, though numbers are hard to estimate and likely not what activists would like to claim.
Thanks - I can't access my earlier comment, but here goes.
1) accepted, although I did write my comment in response to the OP, specifically.
If the claim says that homosexuality is caused by a sexually transmitted infection, I'm going to treat it as such. Prenatal exposure would qualify, but that would undermine the whole "recruitment" point, which was presented as a (very dubious) fact needing explanation. I'm assuming the original comment did not take this into account, then.
Prenatal infection would also raise the question on why it would need to be a STI in particular, as other infections such as listeria or toxoplasmosis can also cause changes in prenatal development. It is also worth inquiring why it would need to be an infection in particular, if prenatal development is our key idea: pretty much anything and everything influences it.
2) Partly accepted - the claim does in fact claim to explain all male homosexuality, which is precisely what it says ("male homosexuality is caused by..." - not "most male homosexuality" or "male homosexuality is partly caused by..." or some other weaker claim). The claim is very strong, anti-orthodox and therefore in my eyes very dubious.
I think accepting that most variance in sexual orientation is caused by factors other than the supposed infection raises an a priori question on why it is required, then, that an infection causes a yet-to-be-specified-threshold-crossing amount of homosexual orientation. That is, why the other factors are not enough to cause e.g. homosexuality in case of males, but are so in females.
6) Accepted.
As for the rest of your comment, I agree.
"homosexuality was unknown for almost all of history"
Source, please.
"so many boys who get sexually abused by men wind up as homosexuals"
How many? Source, please.
It has to be a joke, doesn't it?
While I find the idea interesting, "homosexuality was unknown for almost all of history but has suddenly come out of nowhere in recent decades" seems wrong. If that's a thing that's been happening, part of the explanation is probably in the fact that more people talk about it. I remember what I think was a study about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" on this but for trans people in schools. Also, Scott has written a review of Crazy Like Us, a book that talks about people developing "western mental issues" after being exposed to their existence. I also remember Scott writing about how multiple identity disorder (I think) was at one time very popular and looking for it increased its presence.
This ties in to the idea of induced false memories. One of my issues with "homosexuality is caused by child abuse" is that it can be vety hard to prove in some cases, and if that becomes the main way to see things, it will feed on itself.
Since we're on the topic of fun theories: gay men are gay from birth, and emit pheromones that attracts other gay men. That would reverse the causality between being gay and child abuse.
Usual disclaimer that this is of course totally independant from the humanity of people, cis people, trans people, western people, non-western people, doctors, people with multiple identities, homosexuals, heterosexuals, people that were abused as children.
That's dumb. Homosexuality was a mainstream cultural phenomenon in ancient Greece and actually well accepted in Rome.
What's the oldest mention of male homosexuality in writing? It's clearly been widespread for a very long time, but I don't know how long it's been documented.
I can't find strong confirmation with a quick googling, but I suspect that neurosyphilis could case some combination of reduced inhibitions and increased libido in some cases.
Pretty sure I've read that syphilis causes higher libido (at least in men?). I don't have a cite for that either though.
Well, you got it from your partner to begin with, so In order to help spread they would have to decrease attraction to your current partner, who already has it, while increasing attraction to other partners, which is going to be a lot more complicated than increasing libido.
It only has to jiggle some knobs and levers in a way that increases its spread--it's not like the virus' DNA or RNA knows anything about blisters or sneezing or diarrhea helping it to spread--it's just jiggling knobs and levers and hill-climbing its way to higher fitness.
If there's not a workable way to get to "make the human hornier so he will spread me more" that it can get to by small random changes to the virus' DNA or RNA + hill-climbing, it won't manage it.
Are you saying current diseases need to suppress our urge to cough/sneeze when we're alone and increase your urge to cough/sneeze when near healthy people in order to be effective?
Are you saying sex is an AOE?
What do we save against? Breath weapon? Magical staff?
YKINMKBYKIOK
Presumably at least 50% of people who newly acquire a sexually transmitted disease do so from a partner who is either new, or not their only current partner. In either case, there's no need to decrease attraction to one's current existing partners to spread the disease.
Note that that isn't _necessary_ mathematically, though indeed presumably in the real world. (I am not sure whether Kenny was suggesting mathematical necessity or not, but I know I initially read his comment that way.)
Imagine that there are two kinds of people, whom we'll call Hubs and Spokes. They are all in permanent sexual partnerships where each Spoke has one partner, who is a Hub, but each Hub has many partners, who are all Spokes. (Perhaps for some reason the Hubs are much more desirable than the Spokes and much more interested in sex.) So the formal-relationship graph is made of lots of many-pointed stars, each with a Hub at the centre and lots of Spokes attached.
"Extramarital" interactions are almost all Hub-Hub. (Again, perhaps the Hubs are more desirable and more interested in sex.)
Now if an STD spreads, most of its spread will be from Hubs to the Spokes who are their partners. So most new infections are from someone who is _not new_ and _is the newly infected person's current partner_.
Again, I don't think this toy model much resembles the actual world, and I agree with Kenny's presumption as far as the actual world goes. But if anyone else shared my reaction of initially nodding wisely and saying "yes, that seems like the kind of thing that would be necessarily true", they should note that in fact it isn't; Kenny's presumption embodies some nontrivial beliefs about the world's actual patterns of sexual relationships and sexual interactions.
> they would have to decrease attraction to your current partner, who already has it, while increasing attraction to other partners
This doesn't follow. It is possible, plausible, and I suspect correct that increased sex drive leads to more partners. I don't see why it would have to be the case that you'd need to lower attraction to your current partner.
Path of least resistance for higher libido is to have more sex with your current partner. Especially if their libido is also increased by the STI. There's an upper limit to how much sex a person can physically have, and finding new partners takes time that could be spent having sex with the old one.
Path of least resistance either way is to have sex with an existing partner, if possible.
On average, it's your belief that infidelity with new partners is more common among less-horny people than most-horny people?
I'd say a one-sided analysis will probably not show much, infidelity is more likely a mismatch of libidos; one partner wants sex much more often than the other. A disease that increases both people's libidos won't change the balance, so won't result in more infidelity, so has no evolutionary advantage.
Alternately, infidelity is a loss of attraction to one's current partner.
If it is found to be constitutional and statutorily authorized, I am eligible for Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Should I apply? More specifically, I am uneasy with applying for student loan forgiveness because I believe it is a short-sighted, harmful, and unfair policy. This leaves me with three questions which I could use help with:
(1) Do you agree with my assessment of the student loan forgiveness program?
(a) It is a short-term fix to the problem of high university tuition that does nothing to curb the two major problems with the current system: young students with non-profitable career paths are allowed to take difficult to repay loans with little cost-benefit analysis and student debt is not-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Instead of fixing these problems, loan forgiveness is a band-aid that creates moral hazard as students will take on more debt with the expectation that it will be forgiven;
(b) It is an abuse of executive power. The Biden administration argues that the HEREOS Act authorizes the Secretary of Education to provide relief to student loan recipients during a national emergency and that COVID is a national emergency justifying relief. However, I do not believe that COVID is currently a national emergency, and, even if it were, I don’t believe that forgiving debts is an effective manner of combatting COVID. Just like Trump’s dubious border emergency, this is an attempt by the executive branch to sidestep Congress by using emergency powers. To me, this is a disturbing authoritarian development in American politics which I do not want to be a beneficiary of;
(c) It is expensive. Are we sure that subsidizing higher education is the best use for such a large amount of money;
(d) It is unfair. The only people who are eligible for student loan forgiveness are people who went to college. Since people who go to college tend to be richer than those who did not, student debt forgiveness is a regressive form of relief. It is also unfair to people who repaid their loans quickly and thus are not eligible for relief. And, it seems unfair that I, making 200k+ a year, will receive “relief,” paid for by less fortunate people, from an investment I made in my career.
(2) Assuming that my arguments against the policy are sound, if I want to be a moral person, does believing that the program is harmful mean that I should not apply for it or is it some type of minor generalized harm that I am blameless for imposing? For example, biking or driving to a friend’s house takes about the same amount of time. Driving imposes a small negative externality on the world through pollution. But I still drive whenever I want to because the harm seems so abstract and remote.
(3) If I do accept the money, what should I do with it? I could take the money for myself. I could also donate it. Are there any other options?
I broadly agree that the policy is a bad one.
However, I'd probably take the money, if I were eligible for it.
I've never voluntarily paid the government extra money in taxes, and I've never written charity checks to the government just because I want to support it.
Refusing to take government money is roughly equivalent to these things.
If I ever came to regret my decision, I could just write the government a check.
Well, speaking as one of those who'll be forking out the taxes to cover this "free" gift from government, there's no freakign way to know whether you should take the money or not. Maybe you're a gifted but impoverished individual, and your education gave wings to your talent that will let you produce amazing things in the future. Future textbooks on immunology will cite your name with reverence, say, or you will write the greatest novel of the 21st century, or even just be an awesome parent to a brood of happy children. And then I'd be just fine with contributing some shekels of my income to subsidize your education.
Or on the other hand maybe you're a God-damned navel-gazing social parasite, who studied frivolity and shallow faddish intellectual wankery, and you will be a burden on your family and the public purse until you pass out in a ditch from to many drugs and snuff it. In which case, paying for your education by taking my grandchildrens' inheritance is obscene.
There's just no way to know! And this is why a shotgun approach like this is moronic. It lovingly spreads high-quality expensive fertilizer on squares miles of land, without us knowing, or being able to know, how much of the land is fertile soil and how much asphalt or salt pan. Stupid to an amazing degree for a species that prides itself on being one up on the chimps.
All I can suggest to you is that you ask yourself whether it's a gift you feel you can and will return value on. If you take the money, will you consider it a weird form of investment, as if the rest of us bought stock in your career? Will you do your best to return, via the education it bought, something of value? Be successful, inventive, artistic, inspiring, or at least sober, hard-working, reliable, sanguine? If so, then I say go for it and godspeed. Let it then just be a reminder that you, like all the rest of us, stand on the shoulders of those who came before.
In lieu of a "like", wanted to say I really liked this comment. (And your comments just generally.) It's been a strange 3-ish years now of random checks, sometimes to the needy, sometimes not...sometimes spent wisely, sometimes not. Peoples' revealed preferences once they had stimulus in hand were interesting to compare. Some of my lefty friends who rail against empty kleptocratic materialism...used their checks to buy new gaming PCs. Some used it to pay down debts, some used it to further educations, some blew it on ephemeral hedonism. (I opened accounts with Vanguard and TreasuryDirect after getting investment advice here. Score one for instrumental rationality?)
It's different with student debt jubilee...not just OOM-wise, although that's a big part. But because it's easy to argue no wrong was even incurred, and the targeting is...not the most progressive. I've felt bad also for students who started educations just after the cutoff. Whether it clears the court or not, that sure seems pretty unfair - knowing the class right before you maybe got $thousands, and you get nothing. But now the possibility of future debt clearing will forever hang in the air...and, if it happens again, current beneficiaries like me will be paying for someone else's new debt. So then what was the point, after all? Robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Pontius...
Don't care about 1b at all, all the Executives at least back to Jackson regularly abuse their authority. And congress mostly likes it since it gives them political cover.
1a, 1c, and 1d are true.
As for 2, that is your call. I don't take all the tax breaks I can. I also volunteer more than my fair share at group orgs and do other things that strictly speaking are "unfair" to me at a cost to myself. But sometimes the reverse happens and I rely on the efforts of others. it is all down to your personal compass, there is no "objective" fact of the matter.
3 One thing to do would be to donate the money to some group/structure that is trying to break the current university system and its broken incentives/culture. I am sure there are some out there.
Agree with a, b, c, and d.
Take the money and donate 100% of it to a skilled blue collar scholarship program like MikeRoweWorks or, better yet, find deserving individuals going into or currently in skilled labor training and pay their tuition.
I will concede that you would probably do "more good" donating 100% of the funds to Against Malaria, however that wouldn't help any of the blue collar American workers who will be harmed in the course of paying your student loans, nor would abstaining from loan forgiveness.
But this money could be life-changing help for several of the individuals of the group who will be most negatively impacted should the loan forgiveness go through, so there is a poetry in transferring the wealth into *their* future.
And there's another angle: Our civilization is running short on welders, electricians, mechanics, nurses, etc, all people who arguably have far more utility to civilization than the average college graduate with a pajama job. We need more of them.
D) unfair. -> you’d be surprised to learn how unfair the US is. Only the middle classes worry about it. If this loan forgiveness were to banks they would gobble it up.
Yeah, this is parallel to the old discussion on Megan McArdle's blog, where her middle-class moral framework clashed with her MBA-taught notion of proper corporate behavior. Her basic take was that using bankruptcy strategically was an immoral and bad thing for an individual to do, which seems totally right to me--this is a program intended to help get people out of a deep hole, not to let you shift the costs of your fun spending onto others. But then she would turn around and see businesses using bankruptcy strategically in a totally different light--this is just how the game is played, they'd be screwing over their shareholders if they didn't reach for every advantage. I don't know how she'd resolve the question now, but I remember it as an interesting example of having two different worlds of moral intuition that collided in some places.
I live in a country, where higher education is (mostly) free of charge, and where you can apply for additional government funds to finance your living costs while you're studying if your parents don't have enough income. I won't deny that this impacts my views on the matter.
Having said this,
(1)
a) The basic underlying idea for the just mentioned policy is that higher education creates benefits to society at large - even if those benefits won't get enumarated through high-paid jobs. Hence, it's worth spending government money, because you create positive externatilities in the future. Given this assumption the description of the problem you're offering seems off.
c) see a)
d) You want to do what is feasable to make sure that lack of parents' wealth will not deter people to go to college. I believe the need to take huge loans can easily provide additional deterence for children from poorer families.
This is mostly to provide some additional ideas. I'm not arguing for Biden's programme specifically, because I don't know enough about the context and the details. Also, I think some of your arguments are valid. I'm not sure they are important enough to counter potential benefits, but that would be a different question.
> You want to do what is feasable to make sure that lack of parents' wealth will not deter people to go to college.
I don't see how a one-time debt forgiveness helps this at all. It's an unexpected windfall to people with student debt, but they didn't know this would happen when they took the loan and anyone taking a new loan today won't get any debt forgiveness.
> a) The basic underlying idea for the just mentioned policy is that higher education creates benefits to society at large
This doesn't address the parent comment's complaint. Even if sending people to university created a utopia with zero crime and great voters and no pollution, then that's great, but the complaint is that we're saddling students with debt. We're not doing anything to reduce the amount of debt future students will have.
That aside, for reasons that are too long to get into, I'm not sure more tertiary education benefits society. The US has one of the highest rates of completing university in the world. You can see a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment. The US's ~44% isn't the highest in the world, but it beats most of Europe and is significantly higher than Germany's 27%. If this extra education is making the US a better place to live than most of Europe, I'm not seeing it.
> I don't see how a one-time debt forgiveness helps this at all.
Sure. I didn't write this to say, Biden's plan is the best policy remedy for this. I wrote this, because I found the outline of the topic as presented in d) to be somewhat limited. Not a very concise argument from my part, rather some additional thoughts to keep in mind.
As a side note, I think there is a 'precedent' and 'we want to change the dept-burden issue' related to this, as John Schilling writes.
> This doesn't address the parent comment's complaint.
it doesn't. I wrote this, because the parent comment's description of the "two major problems with the current system" seemed very limited. If you re-read the two major problems as in the original post, you might know what I mean.
I didn't look up the wiki source yet. This doesn't mean 44% finished at least with a bachelor degree, does it? That would be quite high indeed.
> I didn't look up the wiki source yet. This doesn't mean 44% finished at least with a bachelor degree, does it?
The link explains it better than I can. It's the stats for people aged 25-64 who have completed "tertiary education". The majority of those are bachelor degrees, but it includes other programs as well (medical degrees, nursing schools, community colleges, etc.).
I honestly think they compare apples and oranges here.
Yeah, that's true. But it's true in the sense that no stats between the US and German education systems could ever be an apples to apples comparison. The education systems are different, plus the job market and the population are different.
One of the differences is that vocational programs are more prestigious and common in Germany.
And that seems relevant to the topic at hand. Would American students (and society) be better off if more went into trades instead of getting bachelor degrees? They'd have less debt, and often higher paying careers.
You're assuming it's a one-time windfall, when in fact it's a precedent-setting hint that every decade or so when the Democrats come back into power they'll offer up another Jubilee to win a bunch of extra votes.
Maybe in 10 years the hot issue will be medical debt. Or jobs displaced by AI.
I wouldn't take on student debt now just on the hopes that it'll be forgiven later. It's too unpredictable, and I don't think it'll be the deciding factor for many people choosing whether to go to college today.
It's very relevant that Biden's policies are specifically structured badly in an unfair way that causes terrible incentives. Countries with (semi-)free public education typically have better management, cost controls and testing requirements (none of which the Biden plan has).
I think (1) is correct, (2) you should take the money anyway, and (3) you should in general act morally regarding money (e.g. using some of it for charity/supporting production you value/avoiding spending too much of it on things with negative externalities). You arguably should apply these limits more strictly to money obtained through this program, but I'd say "apply more" should be somewhere between 0 and 100% (say, donate 20-30% of it or something)
(2) I never thought about the programme the way you describe it under (1). But if you believe this, you shouldn't take the money.
Also, if a lot of people would avoid the 'small' externalities caused by driving instead of biking, the overall result would be big enough. So yes, I suggest you bike. Or you drive, if this is what you want to do, but then don't excuse yourself with 'the effect is so small'.
1a) yes
1b) possibly, that's up to the courts now; Imperial Presidency keeps going strong
1c) uncontestably yes, with future changes to loan terms costing far more probably
1d) mostly agree, there are some decent steelmen* for its fairness though: that the student debt bubble is mostly an aftershock of the Great Recession, and the macroeconomic policies we chose to pursue. There really was a whole cohort of graduates from that era that left subsidized college life for a terribly shitty job market, and no, most of them were not underwater basket weavers. To the extent that we partially financed the recovery on crippling their income trajectories, some recompense is due. Obviously the means testing could have been chosen more progressively, and it'd be even better if it somehow didn't use tax dollars from the non-graduates. But the politics are a difficult lift no matter what, and making the perfect the enemy of the good usually means nothing gets done at all.
I find this more persuasive than I usually would, because we're seeing a bit of a repeat in economic circumstances now...bumper crops of people electing to start/go back to college, rather than join the workforce. For better or worse, college ends up as an economic refuge during rough markets. It'd be better to not have that always pan out as a terrible bet at the end of what are, after all, several prime earning years being spent on academia.
2) depends on your financial situation. I've been quite torn about it too, but in my case, it literally determines the sign of my entire net worth...other than parents dying and (maybe) getting a share of inheritance, this is one of the few Big Shots I get in my life to make some lasting socioeconomic progress. So I hate it, but I'll take the money if it's available. (As a three-time dropout currently bagging groceries for a living, I feel like I've got a bit more justifiable claim than some others, at least.)
3) Use it in some way that eventually redounds and pays for itself via generating taxable income, as recompense for the second financial helping you've been given. The vast majority of my theoretical share is going right into savings and investments. It's nowhere near enough to sustainably improve living standards in SF, but it's a nice addition to building a real nest egg...I don't want to be a burden on others when I stop working, and that includes the state.
Donation-wise I think the closest 1:1 would be just giving it back to the Treasury on one's tax return. Although at that point, easier to just opt out in the first place...tax implications are up in the air still. You could also opt to pay it forward - use that money to give someone else a shot at "an investment in their career" who really needs it. (Not necessarily college!) That'd be a satisfying resolution karma-wise.
*https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-student-debt-crisis-as-a-macroeconomic (paywalled, sorry, there's probably a very similar Noah Smith article out there)
ETA: you may also find this post useful, for calibrating your intuitions: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/grand-theft-education
My own take is that in general, I'd prefer libertarian policies, but I have to live in the society I actually have, with a lot of non-libertarian policies I don't think are great. But since I have to live with the non-libertarian policies that harm me, I don't feel overly obliged to refrain from taking advantage of the ones that help me.
Also, this is a {hamfisted, politically targeted} attempt to respond to the higher-education bubble--something that's a genuinely destructive thing going on in the world, driven by a mix of public policy and social/economic realities. I think this kind of "fix the problem caused by our last three new clever policy hacks with a new clever policy hack" approach is usually a bad one, but they are actually trying to fix a real broken thing with real victims. Since you're plausibly one of those victims, it's not crazy to think it's okay to take it.
Yes, it's a terrible policy.
Yes, you should take the money. You shouldn't even consider not taking the money. If it bothers you that much that it comes from a bad program, find some better use for it. Your protest isn't nearly as valuable as the cash.
(1 a) I agree.
(1 b) I agree.
(1 c) I agree.
(1 d) I agree.
(2) The default should be to take the money anyway. The problems you listed only seem relevant if you can determine that an individual abstaining from taking advantage of the program will cause less money to be spent on the program, rather than causing the same amount to somehow be distributed among more people / the program extending longer, etc. [if that were the case, then it would indeed be like driving vs. biking, where your behavior has a minor negative effect.]
Even if an individual abstaining from the program *would* cause less to be collected from others, from a strict utilitarian perspective, you should probably take it anyway, as long as you would donate some percentage that you calculate to an effective charity [probably not a very high percentage. E.g. let's say you get 10k from the program and donate 1k to GiveWell, it seems pretty obvious that the net utility would increase. GiveWell donations tend to be 10 times as effective as direct cash transfers to the neediest people in sub-Saharan Africa. So 1k to GiveWell = 10k directly to sub-Saharan Africans, which is surely of much greater utility than 10k to Americans.]
Of course, this would be the case with any theft from Americans - not just theft mediated by the government.
If theft from the rich with enough given to the very poor to increase net utility, while pocketing the rest bothers you for non-utilitarian reasons, the question is just whether the government stealing from others to give to you similarly bothers you.
If it does, *and if you can determine that the money would not otherwise be taken,* then abstain.
Otherwise, indulge.
(3) What you do with *this* money as opposed to any other money, is mostly only relevant to the utilitarian argument that justifies taking the money based on donating [some of] it.
However, even independent of that, there is a question of what to do with [spare] money.
That depends on how altruistic you want to be.
If you want to be very altruistic, donate much of it. If you want to be less altruistic, donate less of it.
If you legitimately earned money, and wish to selfishly hoard it, that is perfectly fine too. You are hurting nobody, and almost certainly helped the world greatly through whatever you did to earn the money.
In this case, where the money was not earned, the same basic calculus applies, except that getting the money did not generate utility.
Regardless of how much of any money one wishes to donate, it would make sense to donate it as effectively as possible [effective altruism.]
Viable candidates for most effective include GiveWell and Strongminds.
The only treatment of the question “is it ethical to accept money from government programs I believe are immoral” I can think of is by Ayn Rand, who as you may imagine faced that problem a lot more than any non libertarian would. She concludes that you can, so long as you still continue to oppose all immoral government monetary transfers. So no “well actually now that I have my money maybe student loan forgiveness is actually a good idea…”
You can read it here, go down to “Many students of…” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government_grants_and_scholarships.html
You can give it back to the United States as a gift by way of the Bureau of Fiscal Services.
https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
[Insert your own joke here]
On the emergencies point, the US currently has 42 ongoing official national emergencies, the oldest (Iran existing) having been going on since 1979. There have only been 14 months of non-emergency since FDR took office and declared the US' longest ever emergency, namely that the fact World War I happened meant he needed to close the banks for a few days.
A perma-emergency justifying massive and arbitrary executive power checked by partisan judicial oversight is now just how the US functions. This is probably because your constitution was written by farmers in the 18th Century who didn't anticipate a massive post-industrial economy necessitating [libertarians - discuss!] a proportionately huge administrative state. Caring about it in this case is basically an isolated demand for rigour.
It's pretty clear that our constitution does not anticipate anything like the nature of our current federal government, and so there's a huge amount of backfilling interpretations to allow us to be what we are. I go back and forth about whether this is more like:
a. A televangelist who started as a biblical literalist but now is stretching his biblical readings and theological reasoning to justify his three mansions, five mistresses, and fleet of expensive cars paid for from donations from hungry widows.
b. A military officer at a remote arctic outpost with a set of orders based on the idea that he's in a tropical rainforest, where following his orders directly would just end up with his command being wiped out, and so he's coming up with very strained interpretations of his orders that will allow him to not do the stuff he's been told to do that would be crazy in the current environment.
I think I'd lean more towards it being (a); America could probably survive with a literal reading of its constitution, given there are very few restrictions on the powers of the states in it and they could all become little countries themselves (the US federal government has different powers than the EU in its constitution, but generally fewer). The difficulty would be the vague boundaries of "interstate commerce" and its interconnectedness with other aspects of life.
There's no good solution to any of this, as you'd need to substantially rewrite the constitution to clearly define the regulatory competencies of the states and the federal government and when they apply. That kind of rewrite would require a constitutional convention though, which would either get deadlocked between the two sides in US politics or produce some awful partisan mess if one side seized control of the process.
Using the word “necessitating” assumes the conclusion.
In my opinion the moral question comes down to, if you take advantage of the program, does that mean someone else won't be able to do something. I think the program is gross politics, but you're not going to kill it by refusing to take money. You're only hurting yourself. Or, with finite systems, you're avoiding hurting someone else by taking their spot. Help yourself, help someone else, help no one. That's the choice.
(3)'s other option is "buy ad space denouncing the debt forgiveness program".
Glasses greatly improve vision with minimal maintenance. Hearing aids moderately improve hearing with a bit more maintenance. What other senses can be enhanced externally, and what are the problems with doing it?
How complicated would it be to build a device that improves a person's sense of nuance?
Not sure this qualifies, but things like Salt or MSG can improve the taste of foods. This isn't really improving our ability to taste but doest allow us to take more advantage of our ability. There is some so-so research on using things like texture, color, sound to improve/change the taste experience of foods.
The other two increase the abilities of perception to a level comparable to the typical person. Salt changes the perception one has and makes one's perceptions less like the typical person's (in the absense of salt).
It does seem weird that we haven't developed artificial smell sensors. (noses). This is most likely the result have having the wrong model for how smell works. See "Emperor of Scent". (Which I've recommended before.)
We have. They're called gas chromatographs. They just don't present their output as smells, because vision has much higher information bandwidth, and because we like things written down for later, and because we don't want our workplaces full of weird transient smells.
I know nothing of gas chromatographs... they look complicated. Let me again recommend "Emperor of Scent" as a good science read. The idea the author resurrects is that smell measures the molecular vibration spectrum, and not molecular shape. He finds a lot of good evidence for the former. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction
Also, I think at least most of the portable sensors are less sensitive than our noses for a lot of stuff.
We also train dogs to give us assistance in smelling stuff that we can't manage ourselves.
The usual model of how smell works, to the extent I understand it, seems to explain this just fine. Chemical sensors exist. Is that not an artificial sense of smell? I'd assume they correspond less closely with a human sense than, e.g. cameras or microphones, just because smell depends on the molecular shape which doesn't come in a simple spectrum unlike light and sound, and human noses detect a kind of arbitrary selection of things that it would take an awful lot of research and fine-tuning to exactly replicate. There are machines that can be used to identify specific small molecules, but from the point of view of replicating exactly the human sense of smell, they'd be excessively precise, making distinctions a human nose couldn't.
Yeah, "Emperor of Scent" posits that smell comes from the molecular vibration frequency of the molecules, and not their shape. He has some good evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction
Already exists, in small-bore anyway. Just pick an appropriate job uniform: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112000200
(I'm not really sure what exactly you mean by "nuance" though)
Given that people can be born as, and also train themselves into, "supertasters" - there's probably some mechanically exploitable ways to get +smell, +taste. But I can't really think of a good use for such things? Besides general transhumanist interest, anyway. Maybe something will shake out of research into mitigating long covid anosmia.
Now, proprioception on the other hand...lots of practical applications for a Spidey-sense!
I don't believe it's possible for glasses to improve vision by very much unless you have muscular difficulties with focusing the lenses of your eyes, or some sort of irregularity in the lens. For people with well-tuned lenses and musculature, there's very little that glasses can do to improve vision. (With microscopes or binoculars you can magnify things, but that comes at the expense of the width of field of view.)
I'm not exactly sure how hearing aids work - do they just amplify sound?
Consider night vision goggles or an IR camera--those are ways to actually get better vision in the sense of being able to see in conditions too dark for your original eyes, or to see stuff your eyes never could.
They amplify sound differently in different frequency ranges, to match the curve of the user's hearing loss. (Older analog hearing aids used to just amplify across the board, which didn't work nearly as well.)
They can also do other sorts of processing, like boosting speech frequencies relative to others, filtering background noise, focusing on sound coming from the front rather than the back, etc.
My wife's have different programs: for normal use which focuses on speech, and for music listening which doesn't, and there are also different settings for parties, quiet restaurants, etc. based on what it's going to filter out directionally.
I think once you have a good way of specifying nuance, either it’ll be doable to generate a huge corpus of context-statement-nuance triples and do machine learning to them, or you’ll be able to compute the nuances directly. Then another hard part would be detecting context (a lot of it could come from a long-term memory of voice-to-text conversation logs, or from people’s online presences).
Nuance? Not sure. THC improves my sense of humor though.
I'm specifically wondering about non-biological tools. Something that can be put on and taken off again. Can you increase sense of humor with, like, funhouse mirror glasses?
I forgot to use the “I’m just kidding font”
Judging by my wife's experience, hearing aids greatly improve hearing in at least some cases.
Most of my relatives hate wearing them for one reason or another. I guess "convenient" would have been a better word.
That I've seen. There's at least an adaptation curve. My wife was motivated to get past it, but there were definitely early growing pains from recurring ear infections (which eventually ceased, thankfully) to "did the refrigerator always sound like that?"
I suspect it's not helped by the fact that most people get them at a time in life that isn't the best for dealing with new fiddly gadgets (and now often new apps that probably don't have the money, coolness, or perceived market need to attract the top UI designers), that double as a sign of advancing age.
What do people think about the $29 billion valuation of OpenAI? Too high? Too low?
One argument I heard (on the most recent All-In podcast) for it being too high is related to copyright law. Basically it might be difficult for them to commercialize any of their models that have been trained on propriety stuff, like DALL-E allegedly being trained on digital artwork and images OpenAI doesn't legally own.
I don't know if this is true but I've seen a lot of artists online getting angry about it.
Are there any lawyers here who can comment on this possible copyright issue? Is this some new uncharted legal territory that will have to be debated in the courts?
One of those weird cases where it's too low and too high.
On one hand, it's likely that whoever purchases it (out of the half a dozen companies who actually could and might) will eventually get more than $29 billion worth of value from it.
On the other hand, that purchaser could also quite easily build their own OpenAI-equivalent for single-digit billions. It's mostly just a huge acqui-hire, and you could easily hire all the key people from OpenAI (plus a bunch from elsewhere), pay them 10x their already-huge salaries, fill in the gaps with a bunch of smart youngsters, and give them everything they could possibly need... and you could do it for (say) five billion.
But they won't -- for various organisational reasons it's easier for a senior executive to get the company to give them $29 billion for an acquisition than it is to get the company to give them $5 billion to build a new AI team from scratch or to expand one of their existing AI-related teams to something as good as OpenAI.
"Quite easily" radically undersells the difficulty of building an organization, much less a world-class, cutting edge research organization.
Too high. It's not apparent to me what, if any, fundamentals AI has at this point. It certainly isn't monetized significantly yet.
AI is going through a bubble right now. OpenAI might still be a good bet as the first wave of the bubble. But it's still going to pop at some point. At the same time, this bubble will be enormously generative and produce some real industries that stick around post-winter. The real test of staying power will be how much it sticks around and grows post-winter. For example, e-commerce went through an insane bubble in the 1990s but post-winter it had such solid fundamentals it kept growing.
Imo the issue isn't access to training data. AI is unambiguously allowed to access publicly available information (as are you). The issue is if what AI produces is transformative and independent enough to overcome the fact it is a direct economic competitor with the artists while being based on their works. Which I personally think is an unsettled area of law. In other words, if you instead created an AI that didn't use training data but simply magically predicted what the average of ten artist's output would be it would still have the same issue. But not a lawyer.
The 29B valuation is probably fair in the sense that OpenAI has gone 0 to 1 in the Peter Thiel definition. Just try to use “whisper” and you will realize this. on the point of lawsuits, its mostly a non-issue, the “artist community” or any other community capable of being a threat are not either motivated, coordinating or powerful enough to bring them down.
As far as I know OpenAI in no way provides a 10x performance, speed, or convenience benefit over the status quo in a monetizable niche market. Also, I would not personally bet on copyright owners not suing in any circumstance.
What would the basis of a lawsuit be? "Your algorithm read my copyrighted text that was made freely available on the internet" seems like it would apply as well to (for example) search engines.
Copyright law is explicitly there to protect economic interests. Search engines do not produce a copy of the work which deprives the original creator of revenue. AI generated responses do deprive the creators of revenue through creating a direct substitute for the original product. Which is what the law is designed around.
The fact it's somewhat novel matters less than the degree to which it's based on the original and a direct substitute for it that deprives the original creator of income. AI is fully based on the original, is explicitly creating a substitute, and deprives the original creator of income. The question of whether mixing together a bunch of other works is sufficient to make it fully novel is an open legal question afaict. But again, not a lawyer.
Is it actually valued at 29bil? This source just says there are talks about it being worth 29 bil:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chatgpt-creator-openai-is-in-talks-for-tender-offer-that-would-value-it-at-29-billion-11672949279
What would it mean for it be "actually" valued at 29 billion?
Yeah I'm just referring to the talks and rumors, I don't think it's been confirmed yet.
Great source for point 3. But, keep in mind that this result is because experiments != descriptive statistics. That's because the threats to external validity for (an internally valid) experiment versus survey are quite different:
1) experimental threats to validity involve causal heterogeneity (easily avoided if you aren't just surveying college students), versus...
2) claiming representative statistics of a population when your sample is drawn from a systematically divergent subsample (e.g. asking if someone has access to the internet when you are sampling people via MTurk)
"because experiments != descriptive statistics. "
Right!
And see Deming, 1975, on probability as a basis for action; regarding the difference between analytical study and enumerative study.
Thanks! This is a great general-reader friendly source that I'll share with students when they're confused in the future!
I think that's almost exactly what Scott Alexander was claiming in his article. You shouldn't say "99.5% of people are Mechanical Turk workers" (I figure they have a small lizardman constant because they're apparently a high-quality survey population), but you can say "60% of people give stronger anti-cancelling-student-debt answers if you show them an argument against it". Scott Alexander goes slightly further and says that correlations will normally have little causal heterogeneity, in your words - college-student Mechanical Turk workers would be less swayed by the anti-cancelling-debt argument, and so would general college students.
On the other hand, the paper says there is low treatment heterogeneity for the questions they ask. Arguing that there is high treatment heterogeneity on a particular question would also argue against this article being relevant. I think you'd need some kind of population of "people who [a given person] thinks are as smart as them", each nominating a survey they'd expect to have bias in it, and being shown to be wrong.
Yeah you are on point, and saw what I didn't say as well.
I deliberately did not talk about correlations because I have argued with this community, and Scott, extensively about specific examples of how correlation does not really mean causation.
I agree with Scott that "thinking really hard about the mechanism, formulating hypotheses about how you expect something to generalize to particular out-of-sample populations, sometimes trying to test those hypotheses" is good.
As an addendum to that, my view:
Drawing correlations from cross-sectional data, is extremely fraught when you then have the magical step of "If you’re right about the mechanism" to derive a causal claim. The correct (falsificationist / popperian regime) way to identify a causal claim is to falsify plausible alternative explanations. Under a Bayesian regime, it's to determine that your causal story is the most plausible among all plausible competing explanations. Either approach is damn hard in real life (outside of an experiment), and usually skipped over in lieu of claimants saying "trust me" or "here's another just-so-story". Mechanisms, particularly in the social world, are roughly theorized and often wrong across time, subpopulation, and space. And that need to be correct about the mechanism really matters!
But I think this data falsifies that. “There’s no obvious problems” is fine for generalising from cross-sectional data, as long as the problems are no more obvious than the ones here (e.g. “Mechanical Turk workers should resist priming effects” isn’t a strong enough argument). If you have a specific reason for concern, that’s one thing. But for questions like the ones here https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/pub/The%20Generalizability%20of%20Survey%20Experiments%20SupplementaryMaterials.pdf (one of the two question sets for this paper), do you agree that a vague sense that it’s hard to know whether something generalises isn’t enough, and it’s reasonable to expect this type of result to generalise?
That was an experiment. I am talking about surveys.
Scott replicated the 2018 SSC survey with Mechanical Turk workers, and came up with a bunch of hypotheses https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/25/preregistration-of-hypotheses-for-the-ssc-survey/. How many of the correlations do you think will be reversed between the two survey populations (obviously ignoring 7 and 11)?
wrote about dopamine for my substack, might be of interest to some of you.
https://timself.substack.com/p/dopamine-a-deep-dive
Was anyone else into PUA (pick up artistry) at any time in their lives? I dabbled with in the mid-late 2000s- I read all of the books, I joined a (snort) 'Lair' in a major city, and probably went out with other members 12-15 times or so. We'd actively chat up women in bars, which was a pretty radical concept for me at that time- just do straight-up cold approach. It never lead to anywhere (read: sex) for me, but I will say that for me as an introverted person, I really didn't find cold approach that difficult once I got warmed up. Whether I was rejected or not really didn't impact my emotions, it was easy to be unaffected by strangers I'd likely never see again.
I enjoyed the community aspect of it too, chatting with other men both in person and online about our attempts with women. I had a date (not from pickup) not go well at one point, I wrote about it on the forums and other guys chimed in with good, relevant advice. In general I felt like it was a positive experience and community. However PUA's become enormously controversial/kind of an underground thing now, both for obvious culture war reasons and legitimately evil behavior (rape, murder) by some prominent PUAs.
(Anyways, I was reminded of this because Mark Manson was on Tim Ferriss' podcast again. I was in Boston at the time and Mark was considered the most successful PUA in our community, he was a Big Deal. I never knew him personally, but it's a bit surreal to have had some contact with someone who is now quite famous. He's become extraordinarily successful. Anyways, good for him)
When I was 30 (about 15 years ago) I have read some PUA web forums, and a book or two.
As a sidenote, the PUA community has changed dramatically since then, at least this is how it seems from outside. With popularity comes money, and money changes incentives. At the beginning, it was a group of guys trying to figure out how to get laid, giving each other advice, making hypotheses, testing them, and posting "field reports". Then it became obvious that you can make a lot of money coaching people, and potentially even more by selling books and videos (because such business scales better).
But how can you sell the advice that other people provide for free? You need to differentiate yourself from the crowd -- and that is where many of the bad things come from. You can provide a different perspective. You can be more edgy, as a costly signal. (That is actually worse for your clients, but standing out of the crowd is better for your sales.) You can invent various crazy theories, with zero empirical testing, that people looking for "insight porn" will be happy to pay for. You can even spin the popular misleading advice (that the first PUAs were trying to overcome) as some kind of "meta-PUA", and sell it to people who are not ready to reject the popular advice. I am not reading this stuff anymore, but these days I would expect to find things that make the readers feel good for various reasons, rather than things that are actually verified to help them.
In my experience, as a undiagnosed aspie guy approaching 30 and still mostly clueless about women (and frankly, about humans in general), the greatest value of the PUA materials was challenging the standard bullshit narrative: "just be nice, and if you keep doing it long enough, you will eventually be rewarded... and if this does not seem to work, you were simply not nice enough, or not waiting long enough, just wait a bit more, you are almost there". Also, part of the narrative is that everyone who contradicts the narrative (or notices evidence against it) is bad, and you don't want to be bad, you want to be nice instead, otherwise you will not get the reward. (A simplistic secular version of the religious belief, if you think about it.) And yes, this is completely stupid in hindsight, and yet it can be difficult to break the spell, if you are an aspie and prone to interpret other people's bullshit literally.
I needed to be told that "being nice" and "getting what you want" are roughly *orthogonal* things. Yeah, you can still be nice for the sake of niceness. But if you have specific goals you want to achieve, you better also take specific action optimized for achieving those goals. Specifically, if your goal is getting laid, you might want to become *attractive*. (Again, obvious in hindsight.) Now you just need to figure out what exactly "attractive" means, which is not a trivial task (if you are heterosexual, you need to figure out what is attractive for the *opposite* sex; that might include things that seem either good, or neutral, or even actively harmful to you), and then actually do something about it, which might possibly be the easier part, dunno. Also, instead of waiting to find your "fated true love", go out, meet many people, and try things; you will learn by experience. (If you one day actually meet your fated true love, you better already be quite good at the game. Otherwise, you might be left crying while she shares her bed with someone more attractive.)
And with this general attitude, I went out there, started meeting girls, and my life changed a lot. I'd say I mostly took the good lessons. Yes, I know that some people took the bad lessons instead. I wish there was a better source for people who cannot figure this out on their own from scratch. (Well, there probably are such sources. But also lots of nonsense. How is a beginner today supposed to distinguish the good from the bad? If you can recognize the good advice, you probably don't need it already.)
I never became a player. Just needed to get from clueless to average; and for me, the early PUA literature served that purpose well. (Still a nice guy, by the way, no matter how much Twitter tries to make those words an insult.)
In my mid-twenties, I did a “bootcamp” with a coach who was very nice and wholesome, essentially building self-confidence and improv skills (which helped me). Nothing shady or manipulative. I stayed in touch with him for a couple years after that, and he ended up becoming a certified coach for personal development, while in a happy monogamous relationship with a PhD student in gender studies.
I think his sort of vibe could do wonder for the pre-incel crowd before they get radicalized.
In my early twenties and freshly broken up from my first serious relationship, I remember reading all of this stuff (or at least what existed ~20 years ago, and as far as I can figure out the state of the art hasn't really moved on since then). I was definitely never involved in the "scene" as such, but I was familiar with all the lingo.
While I think there were some good insights in there (e.g. that women value status the same way that men value looks, and vice versa) I think it was overall a net negative for me. The main issue is the way that it encourages men to consider "maximise the number of women who want to have sex with you" to be a goal. This is really only a useful goal if you're either (a) so unattractive that practically zero women want to have sex with you in the first place, or (b) a weirdly highly sexed individual who really gets a lot of life satisfaction from banging random floozies every weekend.
Since I wasn't in either of those categories, instead of focusing on maximising the number of women who want to have sex with me, I should have been focusing on how to meet _a_ woman that _I_ was actually interested in. But no, instead I spent a few years walking around with my head on backwards, optimising for things that I wasn't really interested in, and getting upset when I couldn't have things that I didn't actually want anyway.
If your goal is to find one special woman to have a special connection with, how else are you going to achieve it if not by banging a lot of potentially special women?
Need the desired "special connection" run through her vagina, so that one needs to test drive a bunch of them to be sure you get th best? Possibly there is some other organ involved, sometimes, for some people?
I hate to break it to you, but the vagina part is unavoidable, so you might as well get it over with quickly.
On a more serious note, the two boolean variables of sexual and intellectual compatibility give rise to four disjoint sets. If you’d like one or more women in your life compatible with you in both regards, you do need to test them in both regards and starting with one of the two works much better than with the other.
Well, I'm deeply impressed that you rank them as equally important. Work in the San Fernando Valley, by chance?
I daresay for most men, if there's a deep spiritual and emotional compatability -- which doesn't require confirming acceptable values for the SAE viscosity of vaginal lubrication -- one can usually assume, or in the worst case easily construct, sexual compatibility. I mean...unless you have some pretty specific kinks to which you are really committed.
In reality, lust in the basis of love. How well people rate the emotional/spiritual compatibility of a person is extremely dependant on physical attraction. Personally, I've never felt a romantic emotional connection to any woman I find physically unattractive. I don't feel one for all or even most physically attractive women, but it's certainly a necessary condition.
Some 10 000 km from there, give or take. Do vaginas and brains work differently there?
Snark aside, you forget that she also gets a say in whether she likes you sexually. The statement that sexual compatibility can be constructed in any case can be trivially falsified—can most men construct it with another man?
Barring very unusual cases, mutual sexual compatibility is a must, so whatever strategy you employ in building your relationship(s) has to account for that. I simply suggest that among all the compatibility tests you need to run this one should be chronologically first.
Uh, does not match my life experience. People are not abstract entities with some features like sexual compatibility or intellectual compatibility and finding a partner is a matter of picking up Lego bricks from a box and testing if they attach together. Unlike Lego bricks, people change for etter or worse with their experiences.
If a person has sex with dozen/dozens/several dozens of people until late 30s, they are going to have developed an attitude and values and ways to conceptualize their experiences and are going to have quite different time finding a "compatible partner" than if they were to marry as a virgin in their early 20s after approx year of courtship, and spent a decade building their mutual compatibility out of shared experiences.
If you’re saying compatibility is not predetermined and can be built you have a point, but surely you won’t go so far as to state anyone can be compatible with anyone. Thus we go back to the issue of finding the partner with the highest level of pre-existing compatibility which can be further improved by mutual effort, and neither virginity nor marriage are remotely helpful here.
Or are you in fact agreeing with me by implying that “quite different time” stands for “much easier time”?
For no good reasons it’s considered taboo to actively work on this aspect of interpersonal skills.
I read some books on this, bought decent outfits, got into online dating, went on a lot of dates of which a high enough number was successful.
I think it's the same phenomenon as with eugenics: there's nothing wrong with the thing per se, but such a high proportion of the practitioners, especially the high-profile ones, have done it in such flagrantly unethical ways that it has an only-partially-undeserved bad rap, and trying to do it ethically is a deeply non-central example.
There's then a second-order effect where the people who /are/ trying to do it ethically are much more likely to recognise that the criticisms of the others are valid than those who don't, and are more likely to try to avoid being associated with the term and describe what they're doing a different way, rather than providing good role models of doing it well, and only the witches are left.
Nowadays, if I see someone openly describe themselves as a pick-up artist, my expectation is that if you dig down into their views you'll find out that they're also a misogynist, and if I see someone describe openly describe themselves as pro-eugenics I expect that if you dig down into their views you'll find that they're also a racist.
As someone who does belief in some limited forms of eugenics I occasionally make half-hearted attempts to reclaim the word, but only cautiously and with limited expectation of success. And I wouldn't support trying to reclaim the phrase "pick-up artist", particularly because I think that while approaching women to see if they're interested in casual sex clearly isn't inherently misogynistic, the phrase "pick-up artist" arguably has connotations of an attitude to it (viewing the women as "marks" rather than as potential partners) that is.
"you'll find that they're also a racist."
Define racist.
In this case, I'm using it to mean "actively hostile to and contemptuous of black people, and will find bad-faith excuses to dismiss evidence of discrimination against them and to oppose any measure intended to reduce it".
Obviously, this isn't true of everyone who describes themselves as supporting eugenics, but it's depressingly common.
Back when this stuff was more mainstream and new, I heard from some women who were bothered by the idea that there was a kind of "cheat code" where a guy says the right things and then women sleep with them, but otherwise would not. The offense was a mixture of "women aren't so shallow as for this to work and I can't believe you think it would" and a contradictory "that's unfair to abuse women's psychology and trick them into doing things they wouldn't otherwise." This led to some interesting but minimally fleshed out discussions of whether PUA tips actually worked, whether they were ethical if they did, and whether they were novel at all (i.e. men had lied about or overstated their status for thousands of years to get women interested). On some level it clearly does work, but that may be a completely obvious and uninteresting version of "you dress nicer and actually talk to women" instead of the version where you "neg" a woman until she can't stand to not be with you or whatever.
All that to say, if we're only talking about your list of helpful tips for men to be more attractive to women, I don't think it would be controversial or taboo. That there's a whole side that also teaches that you can abuse the psychology of women and trick them into having sex with you is the taboo side.
The #1 taboo thing is openly stating that women want sex, too. And much of the trickery is tiptoeing the fine line where you make it apparent you’re interested in them sexually without ever saying it out loud.
If women want to have sex with men but will reject any man who is direct about having such a desire, they aren’t entitled to denounce anything as “trickery”. Similarly, I know enough of the behavior of men to understand why women prefer ghosting to polite rejection; nevertheless, as long as ghosting is the most likely outcome, the men are totally justified in not spending a lot of effort to get women on a date. Etc.
I have some tricks up my sleeve, mostly in the form of canned responses to common questions, and a knowledge of the underlying principles. Yes, the PUA tips do work. However, I haven’t adopted any that would involve lying. My approach is that anything that doesn’t involve deception and/or coercion is fair game if it gets me what I want, and if what I offer isn’t to her liking, she’s absolutely free to decline at any point.
Relationship management is very different from dating. PUAs are good at dating but very bad at relationships so their advice is not to be trusted. Unfortunately good materials on relationship management, especially if nonmonogamous, are hard to come by.
Well, the skillsets are similar. But substantially different nonetheless.
There was a book review regarding fusion which increased my confidence that nuclear fusion may actually happen in the next 10-15 years.
However, I wonder how that author would consider this counterevidence claiming that Tritium, which is needed for the lowest energy fusion reaction, is extremely expensive, and that the main producers (CANDU reactors in Canada) are going offline this decade. Yes, I do know there are some reactions that generate neutrons and you can attempt to breed it, but this article claims it's insufficient.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
I'm the author of that book review.
To make D-T fusion commercially viable, we're going to have to make tritium breeding work. This is not a solved problem, but it doesn't seem that difficult either. There are several proposed methods that should work, and ITER and other experiments are going to test which one works best in practice. Long-term, the main source or tritium for fusion reactors will be within the reactors themselves.
This article's main concern is that all the tritium will be used up at the experiment stage, before we get tritium breeding working. This is a reasonable concern, if we only look at institutions currently in the tritium market.
My biggest criticism of this article is that it doesn't seem to seriously consider how the market will change. The projection of tritium supply (Figure 1) assumes that ITER is the only consumer and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is the only producer. The article points out the ITER will use up almost all of the stockpile, leaving little for anyone who comes after.
I don't think that ITER will be the only consumer or that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories will be the only producer of tritium by 2050. Currently, there is very little demand for tritium (100g per year), so the stockpiles of tritium have been increasing. The market is going to change by orders of magnitude, so we should expect new suppliers to get interested.
What new suppliers? This article mentions some of them, but seems dismissive.
(1) Military stockpiles and production reactors exist. This might be never be commercially available in the US. This is a political decision: the US values its nuclear weapons much more than it values fusion. It might be different in other countries. In particular, "South Korea has four CANDU reactors and a plant for extracting tritium but does not sell it commercially." South Korea does not have a nuclear weapons program, so I'm not sure what they built them for unless it's going to be available for fusion. They might sell it commercially in the future, or they might be reserving it for K-DEMO, a fusion reactor in South Korea planned for 2037.
(2) Commercial nuclear plants could be retrofitted to produce tritium. The easiest way is to add some lithium-6 within the neutron shielding. This is unlikely to be particularly efficient if the plant wasn't designed for it, and there might be regulations preventing it. But there are hundreds of nuclear power plants in dozens of countries, so it seems plausible that this will happen somewhere. If you can produce a $30,000 per gram substance, and you know that there will be buyers, that seems like a decent incentive to produce it.
(3) The smaller new startups need less tritium than ITER, and will need it sooner, before the current stockpile decays. Some of these startups might even become producers of tritium. SPARC is not going to be tritium self-sufficient, but ARC might (these are the first and second generation of Commonwealth Fusion System's reactors).
(4) I'm skeptical that anything other than D-T will be used in first generation fusion reactors, because other reactions require higher temperature and higher density or confinement time. Other people working on fusion disagree, and are trying to use other fuels.
I agree that tritium availability is a potential problem, but I don't think that it's an unsolvable problem. The most likely future (in my mind) is that the startups will get fusion and become tritium self-sufficient before the current stockpiles run out. Even if that doesn't happen, potential new suppliers exist and will have incentive to produce it. There are regulatory / political barriers, but I think that they will be solvable in at least some countries.
Thank you for the response, this is most helpful!
Tritium breeding will be absolutely necessary for deuterium-tritium fusion to be economically viable; the trickle that comes from fission reactors is clearly insufficient. And, in theory, breakeven tritium breeding is doable if you use a lithium first wall and a bit of neutron multiplication. Your source accurately describes some of the practical difficulties in turning this theory into practice, but that mostly just adds to the very long list of practical difficulties in turning the mainstream fusion systems into practical energy sources. Going from "in theory, my plasma is running at greater than 100% of thermodynamic breakeven!" to being able to actually run a light bulb, is probably a bigger stretch than the tritium breeding.
Much better if you can do D-D, and better still with one of the aneutronic reactions, of course.
Thanks for this response, I wonder if we will get a Q > 5 fusion reaction in the next decade or two but fusion indeed never becomes commercially viable. This seems like a probable outcome.
I note that Tritium is one of the resources that exists in relatively large quantities in space (on the moon,, specifically, but possibly also elsewhere?), if off-Earth mining ever becomes a thing
You might be thinking of Helium-3. Tritium has a short half-life of only 12 years and is not found in sufficient quantities in nature to be extracted
When I was in Austin, I had a good experience with Grace Therapy (https://www.gracetherapyaustin.com/) specifically with Joy (https://www.gracetherapyaustin.com/joy). They have offices in Austin, but we did our work entirely remotely so you could do it from anywhere in Texas.
I had a good experience with Anne-Marie Hoyle in Austin. I went to her specifically because I wanted someone that was familiar with IFS. Went from depression to the best emotional health of my life and promptly met the girl of my dreams, which might not be related but the timing is very suspicious. Your results may vary, of course.
https://ifs-institute.com/practitioners/all/81925
I wrote an essay breaking down how AI will transform civilization in the context of machine learning:
https://www.aribrill.com/blog/2023/ai-civilization/
Here am I picking a fight in the very first sentence:
" If it’s a simple task, like taking inventory of office supplies, we can write a software program that codes explicit rules telling the computer what to do"
So the computer is going to physically go to the store room and count all the boxes of paper clips? Open the cupboards and check how many ink cartridges remain? Really? Wow, that would make my life so much easier, but I see just one teeny little problem here:
Computers can't walk. And the kind of robots which can physically replace humans aren't around yet, or at least not cheap enough and common enough for every office to have one.
Which means a real live flesh and blood human (such as, ooh, me?) will have to do stocktaking which is physically counting and recording every. damn. box. of. paperclips. Then when the human has done all the work, the results can be entered into the computer.
And then you can come along, write a short program, and go "There you are, problem solved, so easy! Computers can do it all!"
Yeah, right. The point here is, since I can't believe your very first sentence because from my physical experience working in all kinds of places doing stocktakes, I know it's not that simple, hence the rest of it has been chopped off at the knees by this flaw.
> Computers can't walk. And the kind of robots which can physically replace humans aren't around yet, or at least not cheap enough and common enough for every office to have one.
Something that I think is quite important is that economically and from a business point of view, the robot that can do anything a human do is already here: it's a human. His cost will depend on lots of things, including minimum wage, the market. Since we already have humans, other robots tend to be better at one task but way less versatile.
I think that the type of "walking around manipulating physical reality" jobs are the ones being left out of the whole 'sky is falling AI is here' debate.
I don't think manual labour/blue collar/pink collar jobs will be safe from AI and automation, but I think that ironically the middle-management guy in accounts could be replaced by AI sooner than the contract cleaner or janitor in the same office building: jobs that we now do on some device, rather than with pen and paper as in the past. If we're already using a software package to run accounts, the next step is to replace the human and let an AI do the entire task.
At the lower levels, there will still be a reliance on the guys in the depot and the delivery trucks and stacking the shelves to do the raw data entry of "we counted 12,000 boxes of widgets taken in to the warehouse" before the AI can manipulate all the numbers and decide to close down the plant in Tewkesbury making widgets because it's surplus to requirements.
Yeah, I agree with you on that. If your job is mainly "manipulating data through a computer", AI will disrupt your job more than if it's "walking around manipulating physical reality" as you say.
Thanks for the feedback, that's a great point! The example would make more sense if it said *a database of* office supplies. I'll edit that later.
Thank you for taking it in good spirits. I do think this is how the debate around AI is going, that the unexamined presumption is all about automation of what can be done in and by a computer.
I'm not saying manual work won't also be automated away (I think Amazon would love driverless vehicles and stock-picking robots to replace those whiny humans who object to pissing in bottles and no air conditioning in a heatwave and expecting to be able to eat and drink at mealtimes) but that is probably further down the line from the white collar office jobs that will be taken over by AI - see the fuming and seething over AI art, for example. A lot of this seems to be people who do online art commissions as part of how they make a living. I haven't yet seen commercial artists complaining, but they are the ones - rather than the hobbyists - who are most at threat here.
So will AI art do away with all human creativity - or will it be a tool like the camera, where photography became an art-form of its own, and art pivoted from being representational to being conceptual and abstract? I'd bet on the second, but the real use of AI art will be to do stock illustrations for articles like this one here (pulled totally at random):
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/01/latest-covid-omicron-subvariant-xbb15/672646/
There's no reason that couldn't already be AI art.
I could imagine a system where boxes are tagged with NFCs and get automatically registered when they're brought in or out of the stockroom.
I'm not saying that's economical now (though I imagine bigger warehouses are getting there).
In any case I'm not sure that this chops the argument off at the knees – there's plenty of data out there that is readily quantified and would be civilisation changing if it could be fully understood. It might still be humans typing the numbers in in some cases, but I don't think Ari's argument requires them not to.
Would individual pens, pads of paper, paper clips be tagged? That is what usually comes out of our office supply closet.
Boxes could be tagged with NFCs, but this doesn't mean the tagging was accurate.
Or that the contents remain the way they were when they were tagged.
That was my first thought as well. Theft would likely be a huge problem in a system only monitored by an AI counting what *should* be present. There's also breakage, spoilage, and other forms of unintentional loss.
To what extent do you think that the right-left divide in modern western politics resembles Nietzsche's idea of Master vs Slave morality?
I don't see any evidence of master morality on either side.
I See master morality on both sides.
Can you give some examples? As I note below, Trump did this with foreign policy, but a what others are there? In particular, I’m interested in examples where the rhetoric is explicitly imposing costs on the weak to one’s own benefit because they are weak.
A good example of a supposed slave morality that isn’t actually one, is Christianity. When Nietzsche was writing his philosophy, the believers in this “slave morality”dominated the world, the believers in supposedly tougher religions or cultures were subject to it, many had been so for centuries in fact. Many tougher religions had disappeared.
Wait - your claim is that it can’t be a slave morality *because* it’s believers dominated the world? You know that was still the case when Nietzsche was writing, right? And Christianity was Nietzsche’s main example of a slave morality? I you think Nietzsche was wrong about slave morality, or Christianity?
I don’t think you understand English that well.
I say “ When Nietzsche was writing his philosophy, the believers in this “slave morality”dominated the world” and you are asking me if I knew that “ was still the case when Nietzsche was writing, right?”.
Er, yes? That’s why I wrote exactly that
I don’t think we are going to get anywhere with this, so last comment.
It sounds like you're just defining "master morality" to be whatever morality is held by the dominant powers. Under that definition, it's trivially true that nobody in power believes in slave morality, but that's not really related to the Nietzschean concepts that the original question asked about.
well the original poster wasn’t specific about which Nietzschean concepts, so I chose Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity which was pretty naive.
IGDI. Is it or isn’t it? If it’s only a supposed slave morality, why do you say “the believers in this slave morality dominated the world”?
I think my first sentence is pretty clear. “That isn’t actually one”.
How so?
There’s no slave morality at the top of society ever. Maybe as rhetoric for the plebs. Nietzsche was a madman on a mountain.
It'd all be slave morality - master morality would just be doing what strengthens you, whereas in Nietzschean terms both parties' platforms boil down to whining about fairness.
I think a lot of things the left argues for come from a place of care for others, which as I understand it is what Nietzsche means bf slave morality. But I think most of what the right argues for is either neutral or also slave morality, rather than master morality. As I understand it, master morality means taking from the weak, like the heroes of the Ancient Greeks. Arguably, that describes Trump’s “screw-over-our-allies” foreign policy, but I don’t think anyone really applies it to domestic policy because explicitly making an enemy of someone means they almost certainly won’t vote for you.
The Republican policy of tax cuts for the rich (excuse me, “job creators”) might qualify as master morality, but as you suggest, it's not a great policy for winning elections so its not necessarily what Republicans run on.
Morality doesn’t describe what people do, it describes what people consider to be good. Tax cuts for your donors are universally agreed to be politically useful but evil, the same way that lying that you weren’t aware of a staffer’s illegal activity is useful but evil. But when Republicans try to justify those tax breaks, they don’t say “The rich are just better at influencing politics than you; if you want to change it, donate more”.
(Disclaimer: I haven't read Beyond Good and Evil in full, I'm going based on what I have picked up from excerpts and secondhand sources. Take this with a grain of salt.)
>As I understand it, master morality means taking from the weak, like the heroes of the Ancient Greeks.
From what I understand, this is wrong; Nietzsche explicitly states that those with master-morality are willing to give to the weak -- but that they do it as a show of their own power rather than as an act of pity or sympathy.
Nietzsche also says that those displaying master-morality despise flattery and lies above all else, and are proudly unconcerned with the opinions of others, both of which would seem to exclude Trump. I don't think there's any contemporary politician of any prominence who fits Nietzsche's description of a master.
I haven’t read the sources either, only a summary. (Let me give my summary: I think that master and slave morality describe different visions of what is good, rather than different ways of living. Possibly my summary was slanted, but it described Nietzsche as contrasting the heroes of the Greeks and some Romans, who were celebrated for their power, with the later Christians who celebrated meekness and turning the other cheek. The Greeks had a big tradition of generosity to visitors, you’ll often get whole sections of the Iliad and Odyssey describing someone’s gifts to a visitor, and the thank-you gifts in return. As you say, these are to demonstrate the giver’s power and wealth, not primarily for the benefit of the recipient.)
But modern governments don’t appeal to the same reasoning when they are charitable. Usually, they argue that the recipient needs it. Occasionally, they talk about how the country will look to others if they don’t give, but that’s usually in the context of geopolitics and maintaining influence. Maybe you can argue that having an army at all is driven by master morality.
If I never again see this damned Nietzschean quote - look, here. Have some Depeche Mode instead of me getting all fraught. The only "Master and Servant" discourse I can tolerate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsvfofcIE1Q
Damn good remix:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMW0GI-UYUo
Not knowing anything in particular about the UK, what struck me about this post is that I couldn't figure out what in the hell it was talking about. The first sentence asks why did the MHRA expect etc., which presupposes that the MHRA actually did expect etc. So far, so good. But the next sentence says that MHRA "must be held to account" ... but not what for. Was it some sort of evil that they "expected a high volume of ... ADRs"?
It was only after reading the replies that it became clear you're assuming not stating that MHRA not only expected but got a high volume of ADRs *and* that those ADRs indicated that there was something wrong with the vaccine *and* that MHRA knew that something wrong with the vaccine in advance. You really need to state all of that explicitly to make it clear what you're arguing.
You might also beware that the second of those unstated propositions is unlikely to be true and the third of them is *extremely* unlikely to be true.
Well, read it here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting
They have a Yellow Card system of reporting in place where anyone, including members of the public, can report adverse reactions and problems. Clearly they anticipated that with a mass rollout of vaccines on a scale like this, a lot of people would be reporting "I got sick, I had pains and aches, I was vomiting/had diarrhoea after getting the vaccine" and such like side-effects.
That would be a lot more than usual reports, and they didn't have the system in place to handle such a volume, so they requested tenders to provide a system to handle this.
If you immediately jump to "aha, they *knew* the vaccines would kill people!!!!!!" then may I enquire as to how you wear your underpants - on your head?
Your link describes an urgent tender for an AI system to process and triage ADR reports.
It looks like an ADR report is something you do when someone experiences unusual symptoms after taking medication. Since people get unusual symptoms all the time, lots of these are going to be false positives.
If you're rolling out a new treatment to a huge number of people and you are pretty sure it's safe but want to be careful, you definitely want to pay a lot of attention to any weird symptoms people report. But if you expect that lots of them will be unrelated to the treatment, you'll need a way to sift through them. An AI expert system to do anomaly detection and cluster analysis seems like a really sensible idea to help you find patterns of symptoms that look suspicious.
So this looks really praiseworthy, honestly. MHRA wanted to do due diligence to catch any unexpected vaccine side effects, and were preparing in advance to make sure they were ready to do so. Generally I was very impressed by the UK vaccine rollout; this reinforces that impression for me.
Interesting post from Emil Kirkegaard on the influence of a country's cognitive elite on the country's various economic and social outcome measures (compared with the influence of average intelligence).
https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/smart-fraction-theory-vindicated?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
As several commenters note, this could have interesting implications for genetic intelligence enhancement, in that even if only the children of the existing cognitive elite receive genetic cognitive enhancement (i.e. the smart get smarter), this should benefit society as a whole (increases in inequality notwithstanding).
It also makes think of a question that occurred to me before: Instead of the current intelligence distribution of the US, what if everyone had an IQ of say 115? No dumbbells and no nobels, just everyone moderately intelligent. How would this counterfactual society compare to actual US?
How very convenient for Mr. Kirkegaard that he is one of the cognitive elite, is my instinctual response.
Take a look at our current 'cognitive elite' whomever they may be. Are their children all following Papa's footsteps into being awarded Nobel prizes and inventing automatic door knob wipers?
There is an elite, and it may be more intelligent, but it's networking and positions of influence that count when it comes to having an effect on economic and social outcomes, rather than pure brainpower.
"The story of the theory is that it was originally proposed 100+ years ago by Terman, and then mentioned by Jensen and Weyl half a century later."
This is Terman of Terman's Termites, correct? And how did that turn out?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/beautiful-minds/200909/the-truth-about-the-termites
"Terman summarizes the accomplishments of his elite group as follows:
"Nearly 2000 scientific and technical papers and articles and some 60 books and monographs in the sciences, literature, arts, and humanities have been published. Patents granted amount to at least 230. Other writings include 33 novels, about 375 short stories, novelettes, and plays; 60 or more essays, critiques, and sketches; and 265 miscellaneous articles on a variety of subjects. The figures on publications do not include the hundreds of publications by journalists that classify as news stories, editorials, or newspaper columns, nor do they include the hundreds, if not thousands, of radio, television, or motion picture scripts."
Ooooh - radio scripts! Well I'm sure that changed the course of society! All right, that's snarky, but the fact remains: yes, they were successful in their lives. But which of them had a lasting and major impact on society that we can name today as the "Jones Effect" and which of them had good careers writing scripts for Hollywood that nobody can name a particular screenwriter as one of the Termites?
The article also runs into the attitudes of the past: some nations are just better, because.
"Nathaniel Weyl 1970:
Thus, very small changes in the average psychometric intelligence of a society can cause it either to become richly endowed with creative and gifted people or to suffer from a dearth of talent. This is the most probable explanation of the fact that, throughout most of history, genius and creativity have tended to be concentrated in the hands of a few nations and peoples."
Now, where have I recently read something similar about creativity? Oh, yes: a 1922 book about Chinese myths written by a Westerner who unburdens himself of his great experience living and working in China to tell us all about the national character in all its facets:
"Intellectually they were until recently, and to a large extent still are, non-progressive, in bondage to uniformity and mechanism in culture, imitative, unimaginative, torpid, indirect, suspicious, and superstitious.
The character is being modified by intercourse with other peoples of the earth and by the strong force of physical, intellectual, and moral education.
...Whatever form and direction education might have taken, it became stereotyped at an early age by the road to office being made to lead through a knowledge of the classical writings of the ancient sages. It became not only ‘the thing’ to be well versed in the sayings of Confucius, Mencius; etc., and to be able to compose good essays on them containing not a single wrongly written character, but useless for aspirants to office—who constituted practically the whole of the literary class—to acquire any other knowledge. So obsessed was the national mind by this literary mania that even infants’ spines were made to bend so as to produce when adult the ‘scholarly stoop.’ And from the fact that besides the scholar class the rest of the community consisted of agriculturists, artisans, and merchants, whose knowledge was that of their fathers and grandfathers, inculcated in the sons and grandsons as it had been in them, showing them how to carry on in the same groove the calling to which Fate had assigned them, a departure from which would have been considered ‘unfilial’—unless, of course (as it very rarely did), it went the length of attaining through study of the classics a place in the official class, and thus shedding eternal lustre on the family—it will readily be seen that there was nothing to cause education to be concerned with any but one or two of the subjects which are included by Western peoples under that designation. It became at an early age, and remained for many centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius and other classical writers. And so it remained until the abolition, in 1905, of the old competitive examination system, and the substitution of all that is included in the term ‘modern education’ at schools, colleges, and universities all over the country, in which there is rapidly growing up a force that is regenerating the Chinese people, and will make itself felt throughout the whole world.
It is this keen and shrewd appreciation of the learned, and this lust for knowledge, which, barring the tragedy of foreign domination, will make China, in the truest and best sense of the word, a great nation, where, as in the United States of America, the rigid class status and undervaluation, if not disdaining, of knowledge which are proving so disastrous in England and other European countries will be avoided, and the aristocracy of learning established in its place.
...Having noted that Chinese education was mainly literary, and why it was so, it is easy to see that there would be little or no demand for the kind of knowledge classified in the West under the head of science. In so far as any demand existed, it did so, at any rate at first, only because it subserved vital needs. Thus, astronomy, or more properly astrology, was studied in order that the calendar might be regulated, and so the routine of agriculture correctly followed, for on that depended the people’s daily rice, or rather, in the beginning, the various fruits and kinds of flesh which constituted their means of sustentation before their now universal food was known. In philosophy they have had two periods of great activity, the first beginning with Lao Tzŭ and Confucius in the sixth century B.C. and ending with the Burning of the Books by the First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, in 213 B.C.; the second beginning with Chou Tzŭ (A.D. 1017–73) and ending with Chu Hsi (1130–1200). The department of philosophy in the imperial library contained in 190 B.C. 2705 volumes by 137 authors. There can be no doubt that this zeal for the orthodox learning, combined with the literary test for office, was the reason why scientific knowledge was prevented from developing; so much so, that after four thousand or more years of national life we find, during the Manchu Period, which ended the monarchical régime, few of the educated class, giants though they were in knowledge of all departments of their literature and history (the continuity of their traditions laid down in their twenty-four Dynastic Annals has been described as one of the great wonders of the world), with even the elementary scientific learning of a schoolboy in the West. ‘Crude,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘mediocre,’ ‘vague,’ ‘inaccurate,’ ‘want of analysis and generalization,’ are terms we find applied to their knowledge of such leading sciences as geography, mathematics, chemistry, botany, and geology. Their medicine was much hampered by superstition, and perhaps more so by such beliefs as that the seat of the intellect is in the stomach, that thoughts proceed from the heart, that the pit of the stomach is the seat of he breath, that the soul resides in the liver, etc.—the result partly of the idea that dissection of the body would maim it permanently during its existence in the Otherworld. What progress was made was due to European instruction; and this again is the causa causans of the great wave of progress in scientific and philosophical knowledge which is rolling over the whole country and will have marked effects on the history of the world during the coming century."
So it is the rigid class system and dislike of eddication which made England and Europe inferior in learning and attainment to the USA. The Chinese must emulate America in establishing the aristocracy of learning.
(1/2)
>How very convenient for Mr. Kirkegaard that he is one of the cognitive elite, is my instinctual response.
So you think it would be possible for low/average IQ people to write and think about this kind of thing productively? Of course not.
>Take a look at our current 'cognitive elite' whomever they may be. Are their children all following Papa's footsteps into being awarded Nobel prizes and inventing automatic door knob wipers?
Who's doing all the cognitively demanding work in soceity? Who's doing all the scientific research? People with an IQ of 100?
(2/2)
I'm sure it's very flattering to feel you are one of nature's noblemen and part of the aristocracy of learning. But as we see from the above excerpts, it is not a mere matter of modestly shuffling your feet and saying "Well, we're on top because we have all the smart people". There were plenty of smart people in China, yet somehow it lagged behind the West. Even in the West, we see Hail Columbia outstripping the feeble, rigid, disliking learning Brits and Europeans.
"Those that do well with education also do well with health, have less corruption, have better roads, earn higher incomes etc."
Somehow it seems there is more to it than just raw brainpower. As for social progress, yes, that is linked to intelligence - but not necessarily education. Smarter is richer, and richer means you can spend money on things like hospitals, sewerage, cleanliness and all the rest of it.
As for Jensen:
"The growth of civilization, the development of written language and of mathematics, the great religious and philosophic insights, scientific discoveries, practical inventions, industrial developments, advancements in legal and political systems, and the world’s masterpieces of literature, architecture, music and painting, it seems safe to say, are attributable to a rare small proportion of the human population throughout history"
Hmm, I seem to remember something about some of those "great religious insight" types, now what was it?
"7 As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? 8 What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings' houses. 9 What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet."
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men."
Yeah, I'm not responding to this ad hominem nonsense.
So the one thing out of that article that I would agree with is that the smart children should be identified and helped. The smart kids of rich families will always be okay, their families will help them get ahead and teach them what they need to know to navigate the system.
But the kids where nobody has gone to college, where they don't know how to write a killer 'personal statement' or have a range of quirky novel extracurriculars to tickle the fancy of jaded admissions officers, who need the support and guidance and encouragement towards advanced classes - yeah, help them.
But you also cannot neglect the "bottom 5%" or however he puts it, because they too are part of society, they too will have an economic and social impact, and unlike the story, you can't pack them all on rockets to fly off to Venus:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
> But the kids where nobody has gone to college, where they don't know how to write a killer 'personal statement' or have a range of quirky novel extracurriculars to tickle the fancy of jaded admissions officers, who need the support and guidance and encouragement towards advanced classes - yeah, help them.
Whenever someone says that IQ is a myth, it is exactly these children he is throwing under the bus.
Also everyone who goes in for "stop looking at SATs and just evaluate the student holistically" is basically switching from grading kids on intelligence and test prep to grading kids on parental social class. Which will solve two urgent problems for higher education:
a. Too many Asians are getting the top spots; they'd like to pare that down and make sure the right sort get those spots.
b. Too few blacks are getting the top spots, and they'd like to somehow give them a boost (at least some subset of the black students are "the right sort")
Explicit laws against racial discrimination make this hard to get away with, especially now that it looks like maybe the supreme court will go ahead and decide that those laws apply even when the universities have a really good reason why they should be able to discriminate by race, and have engaged in various dodges to avoid having the discrimination be too explicit.
But if the schools can simply eliminate any quantitative criteria for admissions, maybe they can keep on discriminating without being obvious enough to get called on it.
So, three comments,
First, the paper (1) is much better than the blog post and absolute credit to the men, there is a very clear rmd file (2) with all his code and it's even fairly readable. I'm reasonably confident I could replicate these findings in a morning and make simple iterations with new data or models that afternoon. Absolute bravo!
Second, put me down as this being a statistical artifact for two reasons.
-He's feeding the results of one model into another one and that's always much easier to screw up. Specifically, he's not technically using the IQ of the top 5%, he's running a linear regression on what the top 5% "should" be and then feeding that gap, positive or negative, back into the model. (3) I don't want to say this is super bad but it's....much easier to make mistakes when you plug one complex process into another complex process.
-Worse, the residuals he's generating don't make sense, as he himself notes. Some, like South Africa, match our intuitions but Bulgaria and Ghana don't seem like they have a...unusually intelligent elite. Nor can I imagine a reason why Japan, which has virtually no immigration, should have unusually intelligent elites relative to their general population.
So yeah, my gut says he used a technique likely to generate untrustworthy results, the results don't make much sense, but he plugged them in and they worked. Put my money on weird statistical artifact/bug.
Finally, I am somewhat skeptical of "just elites" theories of IQ enhancement. Partly because I think it focuses too much on the benefits of IQ in terms of GDP. One of the things I appreciated about this paper is that it used the Social Progress Index (4), which looks at a wide range of social and economic factors, not just GDP. And a lot of this factors, like "Money stolen" or "freedom of discussion" are much more influenced by the personalities and abilities of common people than a few elites. Frankly, a lot of the happiness in your daily life depends on ordinary interactions with the people around you and there's no substitute for that.
But, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think this properly models the challenges or opportunities of IQ enhancement technology. Specifically, the challenge is credibly proving that it works. If it works, as I guess a "right rationalist", I'm confident that as soon as a bunch of Asian and White nerds start doing this, our enemies will immediately demand that it be provided to everyone, free of charge, by some large and ugly government bureaucracy. Which is awesome, everyone should have this technology, and it's probably inevitable that some large bureaucracy will be in charge of it. Our enemies are our enemies because they, to be overly charitable, they deprioritize the truly important things in life like, family, freedom, and the pursuit of truth to the point where these things are fading away. They are not our enemies because they have bad health care policies or lack opportunism. Frankly, I think most proponents envisage a world where IQ enhancement is unpopular even after it's proven to work, whereas I see a world where those with the ability will hypocritically flip on a dime and try to take it over and build a powerbase out of it, which, again, is super awesome because that's the best way to distribute this to as many people as possible, which is the point.
(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366691469_Smart_Fraction_Theory_A_Comprehensive_Re-evaluation
(2) https://osf.io/azw32
(3) Specifically this line of the code: "d$IC_reg = lm(x95pct_IQc ~ SAS_IQc, data = d, na.action = na.exclude) %>% resid() %>% standardize()"
(4) https://www.socialprogress.org/global-index-2022-data-definitions#2/0/0
I was one of the commenters. I was considering writing an article about it sometime soon. I think it would be a situation where almost everyone will benefit from cognitive enhancement, but the returns will go to those who are enhanced more. I believe that universal subsidy is a reasonable policy. The issue would be that people would still object for moral and religious reasons, and many people would be unable to not accidentally become/get someone pregnant.
I think that a huge number of social issues would be drastically reduced like welfare dependency, crime, illiteracy, etc. The flip side would be that innovation would slow because 115 is intelligent, but the extraordinarily intelligent make very disproportionate contributions to science and technology. See my most recent newsletter about the socio-economic correlates and lack of threshold effects (https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/newsletter-001-cognitive-ability)
I wonder how jobs associated with low iq would be dealt with. If you suddenly made everyone 115 it'd get rid of a lot of smart people but make room for a lot more people help with developing the tech that automates those jobs on a much shorter timeframe
If you just flattened everyone, I think you'd cut off the tails of outcomes due to intelligence. The chip designers and the janitors would all be equal intelligence, which means we'd get highly competent janitors compared to our world, but lousy chip designers compared to our world. In man-vs-man competetions, everything flattens out; in man-vs-nature competitions, we would win if most of the societal benefit from high intelligence was at the low end (not screwing things up), but we'd lose if most of the benefit was from the outsided contributions of the high flyers. My guess is that the second is more accurate--it matters a lot more that our chip designers and drug developers are very good than that our janitors are very good. We can get a multiplicative effect from a smallish number of very smart people, in a way we probably can't do (at least not with out current society) with the people at the bottom becoming smarter.
Suppose we shift the IQ distribution over by a sigma to the right.
A simple model is that the returns to intelligence are a mix of absolute and positional ones.
Some benefits just come from more raw brainpower. Given the same starting technology and resources, having your smartest people be smarter will mean they can build faster microprocessors and more effective drugs and write better code and learn more from nature. At the low end, making the dumbest people a little smarter means they can forsee problems a little better, can understand places where their world is complicated and not get tangled up and make some error that hurts them or society. The shift helps everyone here.
Other benefits are positional--it may be that there's a pretty good living to be had for most anyone in the top 10% of brainpower in your society, and that life will be extra hard for people in the bottom 10% of brainpower. The shift is neutral here.
I usually think of this as the realms of man-vs-nature and man-vs-man. A rising tide that lifts all IQs will make us better at man-vs-nature struggles, but no better at man-vs-man struggles.
Presumably, technological progress would have been a lot slower in such a world. It feels a bit pointless to speculate how far they would have got by AD 2023. They probably wouldn't have had any difficulty inventing agriculture, but what about metallurgy? Does it take a genius to invent bronze for the first time? What about steel? It's hard to even speculate.
Absolutely it requires genius. Genius plus generations of noodling around, and a healthy slice of luck. I defy anyone of even well above average intelligence, somehow born without knowledge of the existence of metals, to come across some nondescript black rock[1] and realize that if it's cooked at a high enough temperature with some partially burned wood in the absence of air and various other exacting conditions it will turn into a shiny magical substance with more tensile strength than any other natural material.
Even for modern humans of good intelligence, with instant access to the vast modern library of information, making iron from rocks in the way it might have been done at the dawn of the Iron Age requires impressive levels of energy and ingenuity[2].
Almost the entire history of chemistry is the history of the human struggle to wrest metals from ores. It's a shame the pantheon of unknown geniuses who wrought these miracles is unknown to history, since they did far more for humanity than any number of Platos, Alexanders, or Rothschilds.
------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetite
[2] https://youtu.be/AUn6LzakHsM?t=96
" Does it take a genius to invent bronze for the first time? What about steel? It's hard to even speculate."
This is my main problem with this entire discussion about "cognitive elites": the underlying presumption, or perhaps it's not even that, it's some faint fuzzy picture built up out of popular culture, of the Lone Genius doing the eureka! bit in his lab/garage/under an apple tree, while the dull, cud-chewing masses stand around gape-jawed contributing nothing.
Have a look at one timeline of steel production, kindly note no Lone Geniuses until we get well into the 18th and 19th centuries and guys refining long-standing processes and finding better, more efficient ways, thus getting their names slapped on:
https://steelfabservices.com.au/who-invented-steel/
"13th century BC – The earliest evidence of steel production can be traced back to early blacksmiths in the 13th century who discovered that iron become harder, stronger and more durable when carbon was introduced after being left in coal furnaces."
Were all the early blacksmiths Lone Geniuses or, you know, ordinary working guys finding things out by trial and error and happy accident?
"12th century – By the 12th century, Sri Lanka was the world’s largest supplier of crucible steel." Something that didn't catch on until much later with one 'Lone Genius' - or at least, Guy Who Got His Name Slapped On The Procedure - in England:
"1740 – The crucible steel technique is developed by English inventor Benjamin Huntsman."
To be fair, the fact that we don't have a name doesn't necessarily mean that genius (whether lone or collaborative) wasn't involved. Some things are clearly "in the water" once the conditions are right, with a bunch of people coming up with it and fighting over priority. Others really do seem to need a specific someone to come up with it, or not.
E.g., paper seems to have been invented once (chronology suggests probably not by Cai Lun, to whom its attributed) and diffused and improved from there. It took centuries to travel westward, and at least doesn't seem to have been independently invented by anyone else during that time even though it's a useful substitute for expensive parchment/vellum (especially if papyrus isn't handy). That at least seems like the sort of thing that probably depended on someone's key insight. Even if that someone isn't lucky enough for anyone writing history to give them credit for whatever reason.
A lot of inventions that are possible and would be useful don't get invented for a long time. The New World basically didn't have wheels, nobody had stirrups for a long time after they started fighting from horseback, horse collars choked the horses for a long time despite an easy fix. I think writing was invented only a small number of times, and phonetic writing only once. Positional notation with zeros was unknown in Europe until I think the 1400s.
There were also a lot of clever inventions that were lost. The inventor worked out some brilliant solution to a problem but the problem wasn't applicable most other places so it was lost, or nobody understood it, or events overtook the brilliant idea or invention and it was forgotten. The Antikythera Mechanism is an example of this we know about, though probably nearly all the examples have been lost and forgotten. Also, greek fire.
Similarly, I think we still don't know quite how a lot of megastructures were made by stone or bronze age humans--clearly they managed it, since those structures are there, but it's not obvious how. You have to guess that there were some clever folks working on those structures who came up with clever tricks to move the giant pieces of stone around and position them as needed, but if nobody wrote the tricks down and there wasn't an ongoing sequence of such megastructures being built, probably the tricks were just lost. My guess is that there were a couple guys working on the pyramids who were as bright as the guys working on the latest SpaceX rocket or the latest Apple-designed ARM chip, and they were able to come up with some really clever techniques that modern archaeologists, mostly not being one-in-ten-thousand mechanical geniuses, can't figure out.
First, thank you for the link -- that's genuinely interesting. Second, Kirkegaard et al are probably correct about their conclusions. Third, if it were possible to meaningfully bet money on it, I'd bet half a year's salary that they weren't looking in even the right general category of data to meaningfully prove their probably-right hunch.
I wonder if the authors could pass a lie-detector test quizzing them on whether or not they liked "Atlas Shrugged" when they read it as teens.
What do you think is wrong with Kirkegaard and Carl's data?
Almost everyone has political beliefs, and the social sciences contain a disproportionate number of progressives. If it were revealed that a study's author was a Democrat, would you discount their finding to an equal extent as if they were libertarian/enjoyed Rand?
The hypothesized libertarianism is unrelated to the point, which is why it's in a separate section and not in the numbered list. I threw it in because it amused me to do so. As for what's wrong with their data that's the wrong question entirely. I'm sure their data are great. The best. The problem isn't that they're bad at data it's that comparing things is hard when they are very similar and in a controlled laboratory environment, and nearly impossible at the country level.
Imagine two countries. One of them has some material advantage, natural resource, important waterway, good weather, nice beaches, whatever you like. A neighboring country next door has none of these, despite having a superficially similar population that score as well on IQ tests. Something happens, perhaps contact with colonial powers. The first country's advantages are developed or perhaps exploited under the guidance or direct control of some other more developed nation. If there is subsequently any free movement of peoples between the two, in which country are the smart people going to end up?
Further, imagine that none of the actual human capital responsible for making the first country better able to take advantage of natural resources it already possessed were from that country at all. (We'd further have to imagine that the natural resources or advantages were not of the type that without development could have changed the demographic balance in the first place, such as naturally rich fisheries or especially fertile soil.) What's more, those who created the prosperity might not end up living in the country or raising any kids there to show up on the census. The smart kids that do show up in the data might be there because of the good weather. Who knows? So many possible points of comparison.
What we do know is that someone creating a study will perhaps consciously and more likely than not unconsciously select points of comparison that agree with his own hidden priors. A couple of marxists doing the same study might conclude that all of the differences noted are due to trade imbalances or the legacy of colonialism or one nation having conquered another, etc. Is this because marxists are bad at data? No but they would have chosen perhaps a different index for measuring the outcomes and have chosen different economic factors rather than the six these authors chose, perhaps measures of relative wage disparities, press freedoms, what-have-you.
It's common at this stage of a discussion about data to cry that correlation is not causation, but it is important to remember that correlation usually isn't even correlation, let alone anything else. Statistics are hard to do, and much harder to do right. (We saw this often enough and with particularly ugly examples during covid. Someone who is far better at statistics than I and would publish a study about this that or the other thing which would be taken up by partisans of one side or another and spread around on twitter. Within 24 hours of it getting big enough to attract attention from people on the other side of the debate, and often within 20 minutes, some luminary who is actually good at statistics would briefly explain why the whole thing is bogus and everyone should be embarrassed to have believed it in the first place. Many such cases. Sad!)
I wrote a short story about folks trying to escape a video game simulation, if you’re looking for a fun read. Inspired by a real glitch in Mario in which you could access the backend of the game through in-game actions:
https://solquy.substack.com/p/122422-iterationflavors-of-the-apocalypse
https://solquy.substack.com/p/111422-the-squeakularity
heh heh heh
Keep up the writing.
Great read. Thank you!
Amazing, thank you.
I have always thought the Simulation shtick is criminally underused. There is really a niche for a computer scientist\software engineer\security researcher (-adjacent) author who tells a modern day Matrix in the style a malware exploit blogpost (e.g. "we privilege-escalated our way into getting an execute permission on arbitary memory"). It would have massive potential if executed correctly.
I think I got a glimpse of that in gwern's It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World, in the mid sections where the AI was exploiting any systems it can its hands on to get money and hardware. And of course Greg Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora are the role models I base this imaginary genre on.
Reminded me of many happy hours spent browsing the SCP wiki. Definitely a Keter-class anomaly.
has anyone tried the full moon potato glitch from the story yet?
A perfect script for the 1980s.
Holy cow! This is really good. Have you written anything else?
A great retelling of Mass Effect 3. I think.
I find it very funny that they decided the Universal Language Translation could get lowered in priority compared to instructions presumably requiring knowing the language. I guess the multivariable apocalypse will do that to you.
You might also like the 2003 Vinge novella "The Cookie Monster."
The premise is vaguely similar to a YA novel I read called Shinkei.
I've got three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email address, or email me at mine, which is specified here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
EDIT: All 3 have been sent now.
Can I send you an e-mail for the next time you'll have additional subscriptions to give away?
I've got more available now, but I don't have your email.
Great, thanks, just send you an e-mail.
Go ahead.
You're doing god's work my friend
I assume I'm doing Substack's work :)
Isn’t it basically ODD that people in low density states and regions and or with less formal education should be unsympathetic to the package of immigration & “wokism” & expanding health insurance & freer trade & taxing the rich & people “having pronouns & a larger social safety net & being more concerned by urban “crime” & wanting to own handguns w/o hassles than people in high-density places. I mean there could be reasons for some of them but why the package?
Living in a vast dense community requires substantial control of human individuality. You can't have everyone just doing as he pleases, you need social shibboleths to constrain behavior, because functional coordination is essential for a dense urban community. Living in a low concentration more self-sufficient community permits one to shrug and be live-and-let-live with your crazy (to you) neighbors. So human beings in dense concentrations have always had a higher preference for exploring and adopting social ideologies that help narrow individual variation in thought and behavior.
And education of course promotes dominant urban social ideologies, because it serves that class of human beings -- the highly specialized workers training for the complex coordinated urban economy.
So the observation is no more surprising than that understanding of and adherence to religious dogma in the Middle Ages was concentrated in the cities, monasteries, and universities.
Yes, that seem right, but it does not translate very well onto issues like taxation/deficits, trade, immigration, climate change policy, heterogender attitudes.
Why not? I think the mistaken assumption here is that a particular position on these issues is much more appealling to city and country mice. I don't think that's the case. The positions adopted by both are to no small extent arbitrary (which may help explain why it seems nonobvious why each cohort might adopt their respective positions, and why some of the adopted positions are in logical contradiction).
What *is* important is the position as a tribal identity signaling device. If you say "I'm worried about global warming and think we should ban all gasoline-powered cars!" you are not really saying something practical so much as identifying yourself as a member of a certain tribe. Same if you say "I think the illegal immigrants flooding across the border brought us COVID and syphilis and we should build a forty-foot wall to keep those vermin out."
I mean, you might also genuinely believe the position, but as in all social movements and religions, the true believers are probably a fairly modest minority, most other people sign on because (1) the dogma seems at least a little plausible/attractive, but more importantly (2) they want to be identified with the movement, associate with the other people in that movement.
That said, I'm sure there are *some* practical considerations that influence people into which tribe they want to be seen with. You have to be a bit selfless and insensitive to your neighbors to go all-in on requiring electric cars to save the whales if you live in a rural county where it's 15 miles to the nearest store, 25 to your assigned high school, and the farm equipment goes through 1000 gallons of diesel a season. You're probably a lot more comfy with government taxing the bejeesus out of small business to subsidize college education if you're a professor of social science in the big city than if you own a car dealership in the suburbs. And so on.
But I think where the debate is the fiercest and most polarized is on just those issues that have fewer practical and immediate daily implications, which serve more as tribal totems.
There are two factors I've heard of that correlate with these things.
One is the "Big Five" personality trait of "openness to experience". Obviously it correlates with what it currently called liberalism. But it also correlates with whether one undertakes a long-distance move and also with the amount of education one gets. A consequence is that our cities are currently disproportionately packed with people who move (of course) but also people who are educated. As one paper said, we've got a remarkable level of *personality* sorting between metro and non-metro areas, and that correlates with *educational* sorting.
Another factor is that the strictures on building housing in metro areas really raises their cost of living. So there's a tendency of cities to drive out people who don't produce a large value-added (in econo-speak). For in-person service work, even though it doesn't add a lot of value, this is counteracted by a striking increase in the price of in-person service work, but any sort of work that is "tradable" is priced out of metro areas unless it benefits from having a high concentration of educated workers.
So there's a lot of sorting between "blue America" and "red America". People speculate whether the United States might come apart because of this, but I think not for a lot of reasons. One of the more cynical reasons is that blue America pays for red America but red America staffs the military machine that blue America pays for. And that military machine is a big part of maintaining the "(sort-of-)rules-based international order" that enables blue America to add so much value.
Thoughtful! Thanks
It is odd if you see politics as individual ideas fighting for support among people with different preferences. It's not odd when you see it as a fight between narratives.
People do not support their tribe because they share all its views. They support it because otherwise the goddamed other tribe will get what they wanted and these guys are total sickos! If you support only some ideas of your tribe, you are not supporting it whole-heartedly and in a zero sum game it's like supporting the other tribe. There is a huge pressure to endource whole set of ideas not just parts of it.
And surely, people will find some justifications to support every part of the narrative simultaneously on the individual ideas grounds. The narratives are great at justifying themselves post hoc, they are selected for that, after all. But try predicting them beforehand, and you will notice that their new parts can be pretty arbitrary. See Scotts Thrive/Survive theory of political spectrum and it failures to predict the political divide on COVID response.
Insightful, but not totally, as you say. It does not explain the exact combination of rural/urban packages. Let's say "rural" explains guns but not anti-"progressive" taxation.
Immigration will either turn their low density states into high density states or dilute their political power.
"Wokism" is a campaign of vilification against them.
It's not their health insurance and safety net being expanded - it's shovelling their taxes at the urban poor (or shovelling a mixture of currency dilution and expanding government debt).
Freer trade means jobs they can do being outsourced to China.
The rich dodge their taxes anyway, so it's mostly them being taxed.
Urban crime spreads out to rural areas; at this point, urban crime is more-or-less anarchy in large parts of their country.
More to the point, all of this represents an expansion of the federal government for the benefit of its client groups (bureaucrats and the urban poor). Simply annihilating that whole system would be net-benefit for vast swathes of the US.
I agree that they believe this, but it is worth pointing out that it's false - the federal government is effectively a process for transferring wealth from urban to rural areas (urban areas pay most of the taxes, rural areas get a majority of the benefits).
So far as I know, that's only true if you include military spending, and the fact that military bases and training areas are generally located in Southern states and in non-urban locations for practical reasons. And that's always struck me as a pretty disingenuous comparison, because few people think "the salary of an E-5 stationed at Fort Benning" when they think of "government benefit enjoyed by the rural population."
Eh, if bureaucrats in Virginia count then so do military bases in Kansas. But either way, most spending is healthcare/social security - which disproportionately flows out of rich urban areas to poor rural ones (the biggest industry in West Virginia isn't coal mining, it's healthcare- which is mostly funded by federal subsidies transferred from more urban states).
Infrastructure is also a massive subsidy - rural highways mostly aren't economic, and neither is the rural postal service or internet, except for either direct or indirect subsidies (i.e. government mandates for equal costs in those areas). Amtrak's biggest problem running good service where it pencils out is that it has to use its useful northeast corridor to subsidize low-ridership expensive rural western lines. The list goes on.
I doubt a priori that healthcare and social security benefits flow preferentially to rural areas -- how would that work? The urban poor population is much larger than the rural poor population.
With respect to infrastructure: first of all, it's not a "massive" subsidy, the government spends peanuts on infrastructure. The bulk of Federal social spending is on wealth transfer payments, and that's typically what people think of when they think of "Federal benefits." Stuff like SS, SS disability, ACA subsidies, SNAP, Medicare & Medicaid, student loan guarantees, et cetera. If you want to make an honest argument that the city's taxes are paying for the country's government benefits by the conventionally understood definition of the latter, that's where the focus needs to be.
Secondly, if there's a subsidy at all, one can readily argue the subsidy is of the urban consumers of rural products, which is what most rural infrastructure is about. The people of Kansas have less need for Interstate 70 to haul their household goods about, or visit grandma, than do, say, the citizens of Chicago and St. Louis who need Kansas wheat to get to their tables cheaply, or who want Korean cars delivered to the port of Los Angeles to get to their local dealership without costing an arm and a leg or needing to float up the Mississippi.
What would food cost in the city center if it all had to be grown or reared within city limits? Could you even buy a Hyundai in Denver if you didn't have I-15? National-scale transportation infrastructure serves largely to service interurban transport or deliver the commodities of the country -- food, oil, coal, ore, lumber -- to the enormous appetities of the city. The fact that they happen to be mostly built in the country should not distract from the fact that their benefits flow largely to the city.
> I doubt a priori that healthcare and social security benefits flow preferentially to rural areas
They flow from richer areas to poorer areas, which means they go from urban to rural areas. Hospitals are also more expensive and less efficient in rural areas, so the subsidies end up having to be bigger to compensate. (Of course all of this is on a per-person basis, but US population is roughly evenly split between urban, urban-suburban, rural-suburban and rural so it works out in raw numbers too, more or less).
Re infrastructure - there is some amount of rural infrastructure that's economically optimal (although freight rail is more useful than roads for the cases you describe), but the government subsidizes it beyond that for political reasons. e.g. Even Jon Tester argues for building rural roads in Montana on the basis of "aw heck they don't pencil out economically but the good ole farm people like having them".
That's curious. In the UK urban areas pay most of the taxes, and get the majority of the benefits (at least, assuming spending on you counts as you getting the benefit). I wonder why the US is different.
Partly cultural history (the US historically thinks of rural areas as "real America" and has a history of giving them more political weight, see e.g. the capital of New York being a small town upstate and not NYC), and partly the Senate overweighting rural states (it's not a coincidence that places like Montana and west Virginia have a democratic senator despite being red states - those guys *really* bring home the bacon).
Thanks for explaining!
Another solid comment from Jack here. Nicely done.
I'd add for the sake of completion that by any but very recent standards it is odd to regard with complacency the dilution of one's population with people that are very much unlike oneself and one's family. We can call the underlying tendency "racism" if we like but that certainly doesn't make it odd by historical standards. Conservatives are the people we would expect to behave more according to historical standards (even if only by a few decades) so this would fit.
I would, however, add a quibble about taxing the rich. If wealth is measured by stock valuation, it is possible to frame it as everything that goes into the price of the stock is already taxed in various ways before it gets there. If you build a factory to import steel to make cars, not only are a long list of state and federal taxes going to come out of those steps but every person you hire will pay income tax on the wages that make your enterprise possible. I'm not saying you have to buy this frame, only that it isn't odd for people who do buy it to not be hugely concerned about taxing the rich more.
The perception of "different" is important. Isn't the initiative to leave home to a better life elsewhere sort of SUPER American? Whatever his flaws, I don't see Elon Musk "diluting" anything. :)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4312044&dgcid=ejournal_htmlemail_nber:working:paper:series_abstractlink
It is now, based on completely new ideologies that would have been incomprehensible to the ordinary conservative a century ago. Emma Lazarus's poem on the statue of liberty is not a founding document.
Remember, the founding stock of the city of Boston were against the Irish overwhelming them and taking over, and by their own standards it is now obvious that their worst alarmists were right.
Again, point here isn't that we should agree with the past, merely that we can't call people who do "odd" in good conscience.
I want to re-write the poem, "Give me your brightest, your most entrepreneurial, yearning to get rich." :)
I agree that negative economic and cultural consequences could result from too many of the wrong kind of immigrants, but a) I think we are numerically very far from that point and b) better section and policies that promote assimilation mitigate this risk.
I'm not sure if yours is a sarcastic question, but I think if you like open spaces and farmland you are going to be less sympathetic to densification and immigration, tracts of townhouses built on former farmland, refugee resettlement on your community, etc. To the extent your low-services area also has low taxes, you might also be against the corresponding increases in taxes that the services (which may not benefit you in any way) might impose upon you.
Not sarcastic, although I don't disguise my preference for the urban package. Nor is my intention to refute anyone good enough to respond to my questions. I certainly get a preference for less dense places per se. But that hardly translates into hostility (perhaps too strong in some cases) to immigration, especially high skilled immigration which is unlikely to affect rural places. And the taxes/transfers in question are the federal income tax/transfers which if anything are positive for rural areas.
"And the taxes/transfers in question are the federal income tax/transfers which if anything are positive for rural areas.'
The unspoken assumption here is that people should like things which benefit them is some measurable way. If one's belief is that one should Mind One's Own Business, then saying "well, but this gives you $X so you should like it" isn't even wrong.
Sure, but then that has nothing to do with why "low density" voters prefer tax cuts and deficits more than "urban" voters do.
I think you're cheating by bundling those two together-- I've never heard any voter say they prefer deficits.
Unless this another unspoken assumption that cutting spending is never an option?
I don't think it is cheating. The Regan, GW Bush, and Ryan-Trump tax cuts were not accompanied by equivalent spending cuts, or even restraint; they were deficit/tax cuts packages.
But the census of the answers I'm getting is that the precise configuration of the package is pretty much coincidental. I guess that could apply even if you strip out the deficits from the tax cuts/deficits policy.
I don't know how blanket the hostility is. I think people at base a friendly and willing to let you in. The evangelical churches that all those Slavic food bloggers seem to attend (Natasha's Kitchen! Great but complicated recipes, btw) are probably very welcoming.
In the less and less rural area I have family in, a lot of farmland is being redeveloped with those ugly townhouse developments; there is more pressure on the social services and on the rents for my relatives who rent; and if there are a LOT of people from an entirely different culture coming, that's something that's not easy to reckon with.
Likewise, remember the Central Valley discussions? If the oft cited Victor Davis Hanson is to be believed, the immigration contingent there has caused problems of crime and quality of life deterioration (eg uninsured motorists driving around, metal wire being stolen, unvaccinated and unlicensed dogs, lots of trash), which people care about more than the mere fact of an Immigrant moving in next door.
On high skilled immigration, that is a more urban thing for sure. The concerns one might find there is that such immigrants might work for way cheaper for the visa, bring different mores from their home culture and don't feel buyin or loyalty to their new country or community, treating it as an economic decision, and therefore not caring as much about the rights/institutions/traditions that the old timers cared about. (One really stark one might be fun rights. Or something as small as decorating their houses for the holidays - definitely way less of that in NYC where the Italians have moved out, but that's not a rural issue.)
I don't think it's at all odd, if you approximate these people as "conservatives".
Here's how it looks from a conservative's point of view:
Conservative: "la la la, life is pretty good I guess"
Some government dumbass: "Here's a package of fifty untested new ideas that we're going to impose upon you"
Conservative: "No, I don't like those"
It's not at all odd that conservatives should be opposed to whatever random grab-bag of changes that "progressives" are trying to impose on them this decade.
Pretty reasonable, although it leans toward the style in which the urban/"progressive" package is presented. It could be presented (my personal take) as how to make a good thing better. national anthem.
I don't think it's odd at all.
90% of the package you describe is about getting along with and helping other people (e.g. being careful with your language, inviting people of different cultures into your world, reducing gun violence, redistributing wealth).
People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion.
People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places.
Edit: to be clear, not saying one is better than the other. In many cases I value self-reliance and isolation.
There's a general tradeoff between independence and cohesion, between self-reliance and cooperation. This is the main divide in contemporary politics. It's totally OK to value the former, and there are cases (today and historically) where we've moved the needle *way* too far towards the latter.
Well I've lived in both, though my small town experience was ages before the current urban-rural politization, but I don't think knowing how to "get along" with others is quite it.
Yeah it was a bad choice of words. Maybe “attitude towards strangers”?
"People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion.
People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places."
Forgive my ignorance, but is this really true? Has it been studied?
I didn't word it great, but I intended it as a truism. More people implies more people-interaction; fewer people implies less people-interaction.
It's not such an obvious truism for me.
> People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion
I could easily imagine that people in high-density areas get along with people less. In many (if not most) places of the world, rural areas have a lower crime rate, are higher-trust societies. That surely can lead to getting along better than an anonymous big city. You would also need to define "getting along". Does it mean trusting people? Does it mean perceived ease of making friends? Does it mean percentage of interactions with others that are perceived as positive?
> People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places.
I wonder if this is true. There are many collectivist cultures in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if in those, rural people are more collectivist and family oriented, and people in cities are more Westernized and prefer a more individualistic and self-reliant way of life. You would also have to define "isolationism". Rural areas often have more established relationships, whereas in urban areas you can live near a lot of people but lead a completely isolated life and have no close relationships.
Yeah agreed--"getting along" was not the right phrase.
The main point is, people in high density places need to deal with all sorts of people-friction. You're constantly faced with folks who don't speak your language, who don't share your values, etc. This leads to a very different outlook on life (not better or worse, just different).
"inviting people of different cultures into your world"
So long as they don't show up on *your* doorstep. They come in over the border and settle beside the rural rednecks who are so ungracious and unwelcoming? That is the natural order of things, and the rednecks better get on with learning how to be nice people who get along with and help others.
They end up in your neighbourhood? Oh well, despite being well-off, there is just no way at all we can take these people in, so let's ship them back elsewhere! Asking us to put our money where our yard signs and window signs are, and work to make it possible to take in the people of different cultures we have invited into the country? Not feasible at all!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_migrant_crisis
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/25/san-antonio-migrants-florida-desantis-00075447
50 people arriving on our island is a "crisis". "(H)undreds of thousands of migrants who made a similar journey to the Texas city" is just being nice people who get along and are helpful to others of different cultures who have been invited in. Why can't those rednecks just understand the benefits of social cohesion like us nice Blue Tribers?
That's a very cherry picked example. Also somewhat misrepresented, but that's adequately addressed below. But in general, when we get immigrants or refugees, there is an effort made to keep them together and that's typically accomplished by sending them to the cities. My city got a bunch of the Bosnians in the 90s, and a smaller number of the Somalis and Syrians more recently. This is as it should be, since we need the people and, as you point out, we're the ones who want them. By contrast, the only immigrants in the small town I grew up in were the Indian doctor and his family.
My impression of the MV crisis was that Martha's Vineyard happily took them in as best they could. DeSantis still scored points w/ his base for "owning the libs" but I didn't see any liberal hypocrisy.
I do agree that blue states tend to be far from the border and have less overall immigration. But there are still huge immigrant communities in e.g. New England, and you'll find a wide range of opinions no matter where you go in the U.S.
The fact is that the Martha's Vineyarders (the rich people who have holiday homes there, anyway) made a point of parading their virtue about being warm'n'welcoming (unlike, you know, *those* people). They even got special signs made up for businesses to put in their window, because someone saw a sign like this elsewhere and they thought it would be a really good thing:
https://www.mvhc.us/all-are-welcome-here-poster.html
Faced with fifty real migrants on their property suddenly it was impossible to shelter them. There just weren't the resources. The migrants would have no community. It was a horrible thing to exploit these poor people like this, wicked DeSantis, they cried (as they shoved them off the island as fast as possible, to be someone else's problem elsewhere in New England).
"All Are Welcome Here" - until it *costs* something more than mere words to prove it.
I mean...neither of those things is fundamentally bad or unaccepting. The military base was an emergency shelter--where else are you going to find 50 beds on short notice?
I could cite CNN and NPR stories that show photographs of people volunteering as translators and making food and such, but my guess is you'd reject those as "liberal media".
What evidence that would change your mind here?
Edit: for me, I'd accept any of the following:
* An immigrant complaining about how they were treated in MV
* A photo of an MV immigrant in handcuffs, or being treated roughly
* etc
> The military base was an emergency shelter--where else are you going to find 50 beds on short notice?
How does El Paso do it? The answer is, they don't, they have vast encampments and people sleeping rough on the street. And the military doesn't step in to stop the people of El Paso from being inconvenienced in this way, but it _does_ step in to stop the people from Martha's Vineyard from being inconvenienced. Why is it so?
"What evidence that would change your mind here?"
People (and I don't mean the native inhabitants of the island, who are as dependent on the seasonal holiday trade as every tourist destination so have to cater to the whims of their betters) putting their money where their mouths are. Take one of those migrants into your home. Be in it for the long haul. Don't go on about the horrible anti-immigrant sentiment, when you are not a border town coping with thousands of people arriving in a month and needing to be processed somehow.
It's very easy to be virtuous about the poor when there aren't any poor, hungry, dispossessed people turning up in your neighbourhood. That's where the Virtue Signallers of Martha's Vineyard failed - when it really happened, then the migrants were someone else's problem to handle. Yet if they read or watched a news story about a small town in Texas putting migrants into a military base before moving them out - you tell me what they would have said over their breakfast tables about that, about the unwelcoming and even racist spirit of the townspeople?
There's an aspect where some people do not think it is appropriate to achieve social cohesion or other desirable outcomes by taking and spending other people's money. Many people enjoy the social cohesion of their churches or community organizations, but don't want the Feds taxing and spending, even on programs that purportedly help others. There may also be few examples of success stories from Federal spending visible to such folks. E.g. the war on poverty is viewed to have been a decades-long failure.
Except with regard to uh reducing poverty
Other people have already done a good job of dissecting this take, but it would really benefit from a little less of the 'my side must do good things' reasoning sitting behind it
Edited a bit for clarity. I'm not trying to say "urban liberals are better", but I see how it came off that way. I think valuing self-reliance and isolation is perfectly OK.
Have you considered that people who are relatively libertarian may also value equally(or more) all of the things that you think urban liberals value, but believe that tax and government action are counterproductive ways to achieve those goals?
Hmm...no actually, I hadn't.
How would a libertarian propose e.g. universal health care without taxation? Or gun control without government action?
As Ghillie dhu points out, those are instruments, not objectives. What you care about is some version of 'maximise human life quality'. Universal health care is not a goal in and of itself. It's an instrument you're choosing. Libertarians also care about healthcare received by the population more generally (at least, I do, and I'm close to libertarian). It's just that I think universal healthcare, especially government funded and controlled, is a good recipe to over time get less quantity and quality of healthcare as a population than we would otherwise, and this includes those who are the least fortunate! I think the actual difference is that American liberals seem to believe that government enforced redistribution is an important instrument to achieve goals, while I believe that concentration of more power in government has historically proven itself to be disastrous. In fact, a major ingredient of the human flourishing that we've seen post the industrial revolution has been the limitations placed on government appropriation of private property.
Universal health care & gun control are instrumental goals; a libertarian would likely disagree that they're effective instruments toward whatever the ultimate goals are, either because the costs/side effects are too great or because they wouldn't actually achieve the intended result.
>inviting people of different cultures into your world
When it comes to actually living next to Diversity, white liberals usually find a million reasons why they can't do it. That neighborhood has "bad schools"(why so is unsaid), there aren't enough art museums, it's a food desert, etc.
Agreed. I think it's a broader pattern, where they'll agree that X is good, and we should do X, but refuse to acknowledge that X comes at a tradeoff or a personal sacrifice.
E.g. I know a lot of rich liberals who want universal health care. They'll happily tell you that your wealth shouldn't determine your level of care. When I point out that this means they (being rich) would inevitably get *worse* care, they tend to argue.
Typically conservatives are well aware of the tradeoffs, but they have a tendency to overemphasize them. They'll often kill obviously beneficial programs (where e.g. $x of welfare generates $2x of economic growth) as a result.
I think the Economist does a good job of trying to quantify the tradeoffs, and coming up with a utilitarian path forward, usually leaning towards the progressive side.
> People who get along well with others are more inclined to live in high-density areas, and people in high-density areas understand the benefits of social cohesion.
> People who value self-reliance and isolationism take the opposite stance, and tend to prefer low-density places.
This feels like it's approaching (but does not exactly match) the opposite of the narrative I've usually heard, where people living in a more rural environment feel a greater sense of community than people living in a more urban environment. To be clear, unsure how true either claim is, just wanted to mention my confusion, and unsure how these things could be made to mesh.
Yes, but there is not necessarily a contradiction. Rural communities are ones where almost everyone knows everyone else, if not personally, then by reputation or through family - think 2 degrees vs the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing. In urban settings, helping the community often means benefiting people you never expect to know or ever meet, like donating money to a clinic or homeless shelter or park -- think 6 or 7 degrees of separation within the community.
>90% of the package you describe is about getting along with and helping other people
Remarkable. Sitting on people's tongues to wait for the inevitable wrongword to use it against them is considered "wanting to get along", while advocating that people should say whatever they want is considered isolationist.
This seems like a mischaracterization of most of the left, based on extreme cases. None of the lefties I know join twitter mobs or want to cancel people over wrongwords.
Obviously there are some people who do this, but we can't judge an ideology by its most extreme adherents.
"This seems like a mischaracterization of most of the left, based on extreme cases. None of the lefties I know join twitter mobs or want to cancel people over wrong words."
The extreme cases may be more common than you think. I'm a psychologist and in the past 3 years I have had 5 patients, all affiliated with a university in our liberal state, who had anxiety disorders centering around a fear of somehow involuntarily blurting out something very unwoke: a racial slur, or a grossly politically incorrect statement about women, gay people, trans people, overweight people, etc. I don't mean these people were cautious about what they said, I mean they literally had phobias or OCD: They re-read their emails dozens of times to make sure they had not said or linked to something godawful, and then also had a friend check it and then asked the friend to check once more, saying "Are you sure? Are you sure?" Or they avoided sending emails as much as they possibly could, even if it caused great inconvenience to themselves or other people. One woman felt unable to attend her son's wedding because of a fear of standing up and shouting a racial slur in the middle of the ceremony (she was eventually able to attend, but she had to work very hard in treatment to get to that point).
Anxiety disorders of this type aren't unusual, & I've seen many people who had one over the years. But until recently people feared other things: shouting an obscenity -- tearing off all their clothes -- announcing to the room that they were murderers or child molesters. But this fear of falling short in wokeness is really a recent thing. Even the twenty-somethings that I'm seeing these days for some other problem seem quite anxious about the issue. Guys tell me about initiating a first kiss with a woman, then look at me uneasily and worry aloud that that was rapey because they did not ask her permission first. People who dislike a roommate who is of another race can barely get out their complaints about the roommate's failure to do their share of the housework because every other sentence they say is "I'm not racist, that's not what this is about." People describing self-hatred about their own overweight think I'm sitting there judging them because I assume they have some scorn for *other* overweight people.
I'm not sure how this data can help to estimate the spread of extreme cases. People can be more anxious because there is actual thought police at every corner. Or because there is a lot of scaremongering about thought police. Distinguishing between these two cases, or rather, finding the correct place on the spectrum between them, is a tricky thing.
On a separate note, I find the situation where people worry at all about consent - even if just on reflection while telling about the situation to the therapist and not not beforehand, leading to actually asking a question - an improvement upon previous status quo in multiple ways.
Well, my anecdata is certainly not something that can be held up as proof, but it is a pretty striking change that I've noticed. I'm not sure there's a difference between having thought police on the one hand and on the other hand scaremongering about the presence of thought police. Since "thought police on every corner" is anyhow just a figure of speech, and not a claim there are actual people whose job it is to catch and punish offenders against wokeness, the phrase seems actually to mean that if you break the rules, your group will disapprove of whjat you did. Generally in groups when there's a norm that people behave a certain way, there are only a few incidents when somebody breaks it and gets called out -- the norm is communicated and enforced by other, more subtle means, plus of course everybody remembers the few iincidents where somebody was actually called out.
I have in fact heard a couple stories about such incidents. Here's one: It's early in the semester and the first year grad students in a social sciences program at Famous Left-Leaning University are getting to know each other. One student has come from China to be in the program. He speaks good English, but is not familiar with American ways. At some event where most of the group is gathered he tells another student, a Black woman, that her slenderness is lovely. The remark does not come across as hitting on her -- I checked with the woman who told me the story, who was present at the event. It comes across as an awkward, embarrassing, naive compliment. The Black woman gets angry at the Chinese man, and tells him that where she comes from being thin is considered unattractive, and she finds it very disrespectful that he would comment on her appearance without first understanding the norms of her community. The Chinese man is terribly embarrassed. He says he did not know that, does not know much about American norms, and that he meant his remark as a compliment. The Black woman is not willing to let it go at that but holds out for him grasping that not only was it disrespectful for him to make that remark while ignorant of her culture, but that is even more disrespectful to argue with her about her reaction. The rest of the group, who are mostly or maybe 100% white Americans, listens to all this silently. The point is, a little of that goes a long way. People do not have to witness frequent incidents of this kind to be afraid of being called out the way the Chinese man was.
As for guys worrying about being rapey. Yeah, I get it, it's kind of a nice turnaround that the guys are the ones walking around scared instead of the women. On the other hand, there's an unfairness in how this plays out. If we could inject a dose of long-lasting guilt, fear and self-doubt into all the guys who have been assaultive to women, that would be a just punishment. But I'm seeing those feelings in young, shy guys who have a terrible time even approaching women. It seems like the current culture has given them a big dose of Fear of Rapeyness, but nothing else. It's left to people like me to tell them that in sexual interactions you need to be very attuned to your partner. Asking permission is one way to be attuned, but in some situations talking spoils the magic. ("Now that I have with your permission touched the left breast, may I also touch the right?"). About first kisses, I might advise one of these guys that if there have been little signs all afternoon that the woman feels romantically drawn to you, it's probably OK to try giving her a kiss without asking first. But start with a small one, and be very alert to her reaction -- if she pulls back, stop.
You look like you're arguing in good faith, but you're fundamentally trying to square a circle.
First, a note. I resent when people say that the "Left" is doing what woke american "leftists" are doing, it's wokism doing these things, not the left. One is a respectable 200+ years old tradition of fighting for the rights of the unfortunate, the other is a rich kids toy trying to "how do you do fellow leftists" its way through the idea space.
Second, why I think you're fundamentally wrong. The idea of "wanting to get along with people" is incoherent. This is just the paradox of tolerance by other words. I, as a person who counts, do not want to say "Xi-Xir" pronouns. Anybody who forces me to do so is not getting along with me. I, as a person who counts, do want to say that Islam (and inventing pronouns) is bullshit, and forcing me to find elaborate ways to not say it is not getting along with me.
You can't get along with all people. Speaking for myself, I can't even find myself getting along with most people, and I find this perfectly okay. You just defined people like me out of existence, because the ideology you're describing as "wanting to get along with people" is abs-fucking-lutely not getting along with me (and I'm far from a unique snowflake).
What you're saying amounts to "This ideology is followed by people who want to get along with people who follow the same ideology", which is trivial and not unique at all. I can tell you, e.g., that Islam's followers get along with each other pretty well, but they generally have terrible difficulties getting along with people of other faiths.
This is just the inverse of the whole thing where white people are said to be complicit in racism if they are not actively anti-racist. (Which turns out to involve a moral blank check written out to Kendi et al.)
What fraction of conservatives or libertarians are standing up against cancellation mobs? Most aren't, both because most of the time you wouldn't even know about such a mob (or much care--how much do I actually care about the latest middle-school drama in the YA publishing industry?), and if you did, you'd be sensibly thinking of protecting your own job and family before any other response.
> inevitable wrongword
Such as?
The Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence at Hamline University in Minnesota, for one:
https://hamlineoracle.com/10750/news/who-belongs/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/academic-is-fired-over-a-medieval-painting-of-the-prophet-muhammad/
Art professor shows mediaeval pictures of the Prophet Muhammad in class, after warning that they are about to do so. One student (at least) gets their knickers in a twist, reports the prof, the university fires the prof for "Islamophobia". By showing *Muslim* Persian images in an art history class:
"Aram Wedatalla, a Hamline senior and the president of Muslim Student Association (MSA), was in the class at the time the photos were shared.
“I’m like, ‘this can’t be real,’” Wedatalla told the Oracle. “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
Student appears to be self-described Black and Muslim, so probably an African-American branch of Islam type, not a MENA native (EDIT: going by the photos on this story, she is indeed African-American as is the professor):
https://saharareporters.com/2023/01/09/us-professor-fired-showing-paintings-prophet-muhammad-students
So you tell me: who was waiting for a slip-up so they could be Professionally Aggrieved about it as a Black person who is being disrespected?
If the school administration had a brain and a spine, this sort of story would never come up because it would be "some student complained and the admins had a good laugh about it."
If the school had any brains, they would have bounced the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence for being an idiot.
If Ms. Wedatalla really wants to see a regime where strictest Muslim orthodoxy is practiced, there's a place where such imagery would indeed not be tolerated, and even perhaps would be burned. But Ms. Wedatalla wouldn't be attending college there, either:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/23/taliban-minister-defends-closing-universities-to-women-as-global-backlash-grows
These are historical depictions of the Prophet by genuine Muslims. This isn't the same thing as the Danish cartoons. If Ms. Wedatalla is that aggrieved, then the thing to do is have a discussion. But the school caved in on grounds of "a student complained? of course they are in the right!" and Diverse Excellence guy was all "undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic" because, I presume, his job is just to rubberstamp the decision of the kangaroo court.
This is why I bang on about teaching history. Without knowledge, we are at the mercy of whoever can shout the loudest right this minute.
But of course, we shouldn't worry. Things like this are only "a few kids on campus". Well, one kid on campus got a teacher's career ruined.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/01/06/professor-who-was-controversially-fired-for-islamophobia-after-showing-depictions-of-prophet-muhammad-is-named
Exhibit #699 :
http://web.archive.org/web/20221219160303/https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/ehli
And this one was off the top of my head just because I posted it a couple of weeks ago.
Curious if you can give an example or two here! I see where you're going but I can't think of any good ones.
The USSR, China, pre liberalisation India strike me as strong examples of political programs that purport to give government more power for the good of the people, but 'the people' then de facto inevitably end up being limited to those who hold power in government. This is true at smaller levels of most government programs as well. Public choice theory has good models for it!
I feel that you are talking about three, somewhat related, but essentially different things, muddled together.
The first is "virtue weoponisation", how the belief that you are fighting for good and against evil emboldens you and overrides the mechanisms of you conscience. This is the source of a lot of problematic stuff from religions and ideologies and something to be wary about.
The second is the tendency of people in general, and sociopaths in particular to use whatever justifications they can come up with to appear to be on the side of the goodness and high status.
And there is a third thing of being good-intentioned but wrong about the consequences of your policies.
Your first example talks about the virtue weoponisation, but has little to nothing to do with actual implementation of political program. Your second example is about the implementation of a good-intentioned policy and your conclusion is about the sociopaths justification. You vaguely feel that these things are connected but do not try to figure out an actual mechanism of this connection.
Also there is a problem of your examples not being particularly good. Like, do we really know that mobbing motivated by the target not fully accepting someone in the past is most vicious? How did we come to this conclusion? Is there some analysis that compares the viciousness of mobbing regarding to its motivations?
Similarly, can we really say that well meaning policies tend to harm people they we trying to help more often than ill-meaning policies?
I am confused on whether to commend you on clearly identifying three traits/impulses that interact so well to make virtue signalling a strong strategy for taking more government power and misusing it, or to be surprised that you don't see the implications yourself.
This is odd. The converse that people in high density areas of the US predominatly subscribe to the reverse of each of these is equally odd. As I understand it that's what the term 'culture war' is describing - the emergance of opinions aligned by 'tribe' across a slew of apparently unrelated subjects. Note that the details of the phenomenon you're describing are specifically American, though America's culture footprint is so large that analogous odd polarisation is happening in my country at least.
This post reminds me of the Herman Goering biography The Knight, Death and the Devil, in which the author presented a letter from Goering's wife that was just a huge rambling sentence connected by & marks.
Man that book sucked.
huh? What package is this? When are more immigration and pronouns ever packaged with less gun control?
A Pink Pistols meeting, perhaps?
(but yes that threw me too, unless I'm badly misunderstanding left views on 2A)
You all may enjoy my interview of Holden Karnofksy - co-CEO of Open Philanthropy: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/holden-karnofsky
We discuss, among other things: why he thinks transformative AI makes this the most important century, whether he regrets their $30m grant to OpenAI in 2016, how bad the track record of forecasters is, what his success scenario for AI looks like concretely, and whether someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution could have done anything useful even if they knew what was coming.
"Karnofksy" -- Banksy doing street art about AI and philanthropy.
There's a general observation that to some degree, US drug research funds European healthcare since medicine is more expensive in America.
I wonder if the reason European life quality is generally higher is a generalization of this - the US spends its money and talent making the kind of consumer goods that are easily traded, while european countries have worse private industry but more competent governments. America can export Microsoft computers to Europe a lot more easily than it can import European infrastructure (partly because buy America rules often ban importing things like trains or dredge ships, but mostly because the real important resource is competent administrators and competent Americans prefer private sector jobs).
I have no idea about the main question that you are asking but on a related subject, from my French point of view, it seems very strange that US people do not insist on having things that seems obviously good to me, like reasonably long maternity leave or annual vacations, good public transportations or cheap high quality education. The explanation that I have usually seen proposed for that in France is the American tradition of individualism, which makes people reluctant to subside common goods.
I am aware that this is very cultural, but from my French values background, I can not really understand why a very rich country does not subsidize things like maternity leaves.
The things you mention have the same thing in common -- they require other people to do things for you, either directly in these services provided or indirectly by paying you while you are off enjoying yourself on vacation/bonding with your child.
While there is no monolithic "American" ethos, a lot of the more common strains reject this sort of entitlement mentality.
The standard French explanation for this preference, for no maternity leave or no vacation, is that the American people tradition of individualism makes them reluctant to subside common goods. Do you think it is a correct explanation or do you think it is a bit different?
On a personal note, you really don't think it would be better if all mothers could take a reasonable amount of maternity leave (which would then indeed be subsidized by the community) rather than mothers of limited means being forced to return to work very early? Again I am aware that my preferences are strongly influenced by my culture but the no maternity leave policy feels so strange and wrong to me...
I will also say that from my limited experience (Motorola had a 200mm fab in Toulouse I worked somewhat closely with). French companies have a LOT more "fat" in their workforce. I'd imagine that being away from work there places less of a burden on one's coworkers than it does in the US.
When that fab finally closed down, it was completely empty, all tools idle, and a full workforce with full pay.
Honestly, that sounds like someone trying to fit an unexplained behavior into their preexisting philosophical framework.
There's nothing about individualism that precludes taking money for not working. Maybe a holdover from the "protestant work ethic," or an idea of fairness (that one shouldn't be paid for not providing a good or service) or a kind of courtesy (knowing that the longer one is a way, the more their work will be placed onto their coworkers -- this assumes of course that one's work actually needs to be done).
How do you square the support of paid nonwork with the objection that CEO's don't "earn" their salaries being greater than their employees?
I mean, define "reasonable" here. Maternity leave definitely exists for a lot of companies in America, but there are also ones where it doesn't (especially where workers aren't particularly attached to working for any particular company, and vice versa).
There's also some consideration of "providing maternity leave but *not* paternity leave has sexist consequences": it makes women more expensive on average to hire unless they're already past their childbearing years (because by definition you're not working while on leave), and so you'll get HR pressure to hire fewer young women; it might be restricted to *deniable* pressure if it's illegal, but it'll still be there.
Most of these things end up coming down to a mix of "some people benefit from them being expensive" (also true in France I'm sure), "few competent people in mid level public service jobs" (a differential, I think, in the US there's a much higher tendency for competent people to go into private industry or, if they go for civil service, top jobs only), and lack of public trust. There is also a cultural thing where government services are seen as a thing for lower classes - e.g. US has socializes medicare for poor people but not the middle class. Transit is usually seen as a thing for either the poor or as a job creation tool - people in city hall drive.
Yes, it seems to me that there is indeed a large cultural component but for things like longer vacation and federal maternity leave, it really seems to me that almots everyone "should" want them. For example, wouldn't you like having that?
Yeah, it's the thing I'm saddest about. I think it's actually gotten better in recent years - the norm for standard vacation time in white-collar jobs seems to have shifted from 15days/year to 20ish (plus we got a new federal holiday in Juneteenth), but I do wish it was longer. That said I think Americans tend to be more into work and want long vacations less? But still though.
Yes, I have the impression that for americans, long vacations reek of laziness. But it is so nice to have time to not work!
I took my first three week vacation about ten years back. I got looks from a few people while I was planning it. My mom actually sat me down and talked to me about it. "You know Jon, it's an old saying that if you leave for more than two weeks, your boss might just decide he can do without you." She was legitimately worried about my future.
There is very much a culture of fear here, where you're always one wrong move from being poor. To be fair to my mother, she worked at Walmart until she retired, and for all I know a three week vacation might have been a firing offense. Certainly I don't recall her ever taking more than one week, and rarely that.
Response #2.
I'm not sure what percentage of Americans believe that "good public transportation" will be provided even if we vote to spend the tax dollars. I expect that it is lower than in France.
From a recent local news article: "The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority recently increased the budget for its BART Silicon Valley Phase II extension to a staggering $9.3 billion. That would be more than $1.5 billion for each mile of the six-mile project from the Berryessa station through downtown San Jose to Santa Clara."
$1.5 billion per mile of rail makes public transportation a tough sell. And the $1.5 billion isn't terribly unusual. A study was done to connect Mountain View, CA with Los Gatos CA via the Santa Clara light rail. There is already a highway that connects the two cities. The estimate was $1 billion per mile. We aren't getting that connection :-)
The California High Speed Rail project was approved (by voters !) in 2008 with a projected cost of $33 billion. It would have connected San Franciso/San Jose to Los Angeles and eventually San Diego. Best guess right now is that the thing will cost $100 billion and the first trains will begin running in 2029 ... between Bakersfield and Fresno. I have no idea what an SF->LA date would be. And I fully expect self-driving cars to be working before this thing is finished so I expect the demand to be low.
My expectation is that Americans push less for good public transportation because we don't expect to get it even if we tax ourselves to provide it.
I have not the smallest knowledge about transportation but why on earth a price tag of $1.5 billion per mile??
At a much smaller scale, from a European point of view, the fact that even within a not so large city sidewalks are frequently absent (I expecte them to be reasonably cheap to build!) suggests that there really is a choice or an habit of focusing on car.
Retrofitting tunnels and trains in a dense urban environment is extremely expensive, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
I recall when that work was being done, because I had multiple occasions at the time to visit Boston, and it was done in fantastically expensive ways, so as not to perturb the existing city. In the country you would just dig some great big holes, pour a lot of concrete and lay steel, shovel the dirt back and plant trees, and be done with it. Two or three times the final surface area would be closed off for massive construction for several years, but it would be as economical as possible. But when you have to dig small shafts in the least-used overlayer area, lower complex equipment into them, then burrow underground to make vast caverns, line them with concrete and steel, et cetera, the cost goes to the Moon. It's as complex as digging tunnels under mountains[1].
---------------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
Very interesting thank you!
A lack of sidewalks is a choice/habit of focusing on cars. Some nearby communities don't have sidewalks because they want to keep people from outside the community out.
"why on earth a price tag of $1.5 billion per mile??"
I don't know. California has managed to make MANY things very expensive because of permits and licensing and then because of lawsuits (e.g. for environmental impact reasons). A huge (though still minority!) chunk of housing costs in California are due to permits and licensing. This is totally a *choice*, but it seems to be one that Californians, in aggregate, are okay with. And housing is private rather than public so this isn't Californians hating on public goods and services.
But this doesn't change the fact that at these prices public transportation isn't going to make much progress.
> A lack of sidewalks is a choice/habit of focusing on cars. Some nearby communities don't have sidewalks because they want to keep people from outside the community out.
It also seems like a consequence of the US's patchwork of (often) tiny local governments. In other parts of the world, your local community doesn't have its own government that can decide whether or not to build footpaths, that kind of decision is made at a much higher level.
Similarly, one of the reasons that public transport in the Bay Area doesn't make any sense is that the whole area has nine county governments and one hundred city governments, all of whom need to be bought off. Why the fuck are there two incompatible rail systems down the two sides of the Bay which don't even connect, plus a third one in the North Bay which doesn't connect to anything at all? Some stupid combination of reasons involving local governments.
At least in the US local governments don't build sidewalks. They're built and maintained (or not) by the landowner, because they're on private land, although once you build them the public acquires an easement (meaning you can't put up a gate and charge tolls, or forbid your ex-wife from using it). Interestingly, the landowner also acquires a heightened liability: if I trip on a badly-maintained sidewalk in front of your house, I can sue you for negligence and recover for my injuries, just as if you invited me inside for a visit and I fell through a hole in your foyer.
A number of these are that the US has made different tradeoffs.
I'll pick you "cheap high quality education" example because I understand that a bit.
My understanding is that the "cheap high quality education" in France is available only to those high school students who score well on standardized tests. Maybe the top 10-15%? California, to pick a state with which I'm familiar, has state run (and subsidized!) schools, the Cal State system, where the *average* incoming freshman scores in the bottom 40% [except that the Cal State system has now gone 'test optional' so the evidence that these incoming students are in the bottom 1/2 is vanishing].
Cal State could easily be *free* for California residents if we simply took the allocated money and decided that only the top, say, 25% would be educated there. But California doesn't want to do that so the money necessary to educate for free the top-XX% is spread over a much larger pool of (much less academically qualified) students. The state spending per student is less (because of math ...) so the students have to pay non-zero tuition dollars.
California's public universities *were* tuition free 4-5 decades ago when a much smaller percentage of Californians went to college.
>My understanding is that the "cheap high quality education" in France is available only to those high school students who score well on standardized tests. Maybe the top 10-15%?
No, public universities (some specific schools, private of public, are more restrictive) are open to anyone who graduate highschool. Tuition, as of half a decade ago, was of ~450€/year without scholarship, and down to ~4€/year with a scholarship. People are easily failed (iirc around 1/3rd don't pass each of the first 2 years, then it decrease), through standards are constantly diminishing.
Only when you apply for a master will you find selection (though at the time, the criteria to be selected in my comp-eng master was "managed to show up to apply, & find some deadbeat teacher to provide you with a 3rd semester project").
The unfortunate consequence, however, is that when you pay 5*400€ for a master, you end up wit ha degree that's worth 5*400€. And since it's the state footing the rest of the bill, the state get to decide how much will be invested in higher education.
Still, I think it's a decent system for everyone. Students get diplomas worth a bit less than american one, but at a tiny fraction of the cost, teachers get paid a bit less than US ones, but the US ones are also getting the shit end of the stick, and it keep cost disease at bay. The only issues to solve are :
1- Making foreign students actually pay what it cost to educate them. We're plagued by the prodigal childrens of the upperclass of Africa & Asia, extracting more money from them or disuading them from enlisting would be a net benefit
2- So many man-year wasted in failing the first 2 years. You got people actually completing their master 7, 8, even 10 years after graduating highschool, because it's soo easy & cheap to just fuck around.
I'm not sure it's totally comparable.
The current system in France is that universities are accessible almost free of charge (less than 1000 euros per year) to almost all students who have obtained their baccalauréat. There is a very selective parallel system for the top 5-10% of students, which is also almost free, but the normal university education is of very high quality.
The system is very far from perfect. French universities lack money and are often in a serious state of disrepair, the level of failure among first year university students is extremely high (which is probably expected given that it is a very cheap education with almost no selection at the entrance...), and some sectors like business do not have valued university education. And living expenses are somewhat subsidized by the state for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, but the stipend they receive is not enough to live on.
But... it seems to me better that almost any student can go to college and graduate with little debt, if they have a minimum, not very high, academic ability. (Again, I'm aware that it's largely because this is the system I'm used to that I find it better!).
"The current system in France is that universities are accessible almost free of charge (less than 1000 euros per year) to almost all students who have obtained their baccalauréat. There is a very selective parallel system for the top 5-10% of students, which is also almost free, but the normal university education is of very high quality."
So, speaking to California:
*) We have a community college system (that feeds into the generally well regarded University of California system as well as the okay-ish CalState system). This is available to pretty much anyone and is very cheap. With a bit of care, two years of classes at the community college will allow one to transfer to UC or CalState with junior (3rd year) standing. Anyone with a pulse who is over 18-years old can go to a community college.
*) California doesn't have the top 5% - top 10% selective parallel system which is almost free. California *does* have a top ~10% university system (the University of California system) that WAS free in the 1960s and 1970s when many fewer students in California went to college. Because the same subsidy is available to the students who are in the bottom 50% of academic ability there are many more students to subsidize rather than just the top 10%. Tuition is no longer free.
If one pursues the community college -> CalState route then the total tuition over four years is probably in the ~$15K range total. One doesn't NEED to go deeply in debt. Lots of kids *do* go deeply into debt, but for Californians this is not required.
And, yes, allowing kids to graduate with little debt is highly valuable! But many students (and/or their parents) choose to go to much more expensive out-of-state or private colleges. But for the more populous states with most of the students this isn't required.
My son went to a local community college for two years and then transferred to UCSB for the final two years. Rough tuition cost: $4K for the community college and $25K - $30K for UCSB. UCSB also had housing costs because it was 300 miles from home.
A high school friend of mine sent his kid (same age) to Northeastern at ~$50K/year.
I wasn't going to do that. But, obviously, people do.
A neighbor is considering sending their daughter to Baylor (tuition: $50K/year) instead of to in-state University of California colleges.
So, some parts of the US don't have inexpensive public universities. But the states with most of the population DO.
Were *I* benevolent-dictator-for-life the state 4-year universities would only accept students from the top ~30% of the test taking pool. This would result in shutting down probably 1/2 of the campuses (maybe more). This would allow free tuition for the students who DID get in. In addition, I'd keep the community colleges and allow transfers (just like today).
But this is NOT what most Californians want. And it creates unpleasant demographic differences in the student population -- specifically it would result in many more black and Hispanic students not attending the in-state 4-year universities. This is politically untenable even if it is "better."
The most cost effective gains in life expectancy and QoL aren't from novel cutting edge treatments but implementing basic known things like childhoodvvaccination and primary health care well at scale. So US innovation on medicine would seem not to make much of a difference
(well, aside from covid vaccines).
But overall yes and this is also true of transportation - both of these contribute to lower US lifespan (which is caused by a mix of general public health issues and car crashes - the US spends a lot on big cars, which increases car fatalities).
there are these observations about most of europe being poorer than most of USA:
https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-richer-than-most-nations-of-europe/
I have no economics knowldege at all but I am not convinced that all that we mean by "standard of living" is captured by "consumption of goods". Access to health care and education readily come to mind as important categories not included.
If you spend money on health care by paying doctors, buying medicine, building hospitals, you have added to the consumption of goods.
If you spend money on education by paying teachers, buying books, building schools, you have added to the consumption of goods.
Economists spend a lot of time and resources trying to accurately account of these things.
Despite the media narratives, US health care, though flawed, is better than European health care by many metrics and on par with it on many others, and worse one some. General access is one where the US excels compared to Europeans - its much easier and quicker for us to find doctors and get appointments, especially with specialists.
On education, things are quite complicated as there are much greater differences in the systems used in the US and Europe.
I'm not convinced that "European life quality is generally higher". I think this is an impression that one might get when hanging around in the sort of places that tourists go and doing the sort of things that tourists do ("ooh look at this shiny train"), but for actual day-to-day life quality it's much less clear.
In particular, at pretty much any income quantile, your living situation in Europe is probably going to be very much worse (smaller/crummier) than the living situation of an equivalent-quantile American.
My gut (as a biased UK citizen) is that the mean standard of living in the US Is higher, but so is the variance. Specifically I think it's harder (but definitely not impossible) to have the rug totally pulled out from under you in the UK by medical debt or lack of employment protection.
This is all mostly anecdotal, so let me know if you think I've drunk the Kool-Aid.
As an American, I think you're basically right. Especially w/re health care and medical costs. I'm pretty sure *most* Americans get better health care than most Brits, with less hassle and with more money left over at the end, but you'd rather be in the bottom 25% in the UK than in the US.
If you are at the bottom in the US you are eligible for Medicaid which would be comparable to many European health systems. The exact eligibility requirements vary by state.
I think it's a weirder picture, and it's more like you'd want to be in the bottom 1% in the UK, the next 2-10% in the US, and the the 11th-50th % in the UK. The UK is more like the US than other European countries are, but it's still different and not always in a European direction. If you're likely to be street-homeless, you're better off in the UK, but you'd probably rather be very to somewhat poor in the US, working-class (US terminology)-lower middle class in the UK, and well-off in the US.
The UK, and most European countries, are ok at dealing with street-homelessness (in the sense that if you're willing to hide your drugs somewhere overnight, you can probably find a bed in a shelter and at least one meal a day), while the US doesn't seem to be. The UK (especially Southern England) has huge problems with affordable rented housing, and the UK has pretty low welfare, so when you move a notch up you're better off in the US; healthcare-wise, you'd probably rather be on Medicaid than using the NHS.
Moving up the ladder, it's all the stuff you'll remember from late 2000s reddit - maternity leave, free healthcare, employment rights (this one's a pretty huge gap - in the UK and most of Europe, employers can't fire people without a good reason) etc.
Once you're in the salaried-worker bracket, you'd rather be in the US as your healthcare will be better, you have reasonable employment-security, your money will go further and you'll have more of it. In the UK you avoid the catastrophic risk of suddenly losing your job, healthcare and home all in one day though, so there's that.
I'm no so sure about consumer goods, but it's undeniably true that European standards of living have significantly depended for a long time on US technological advances. Europeans often act like they have things better than Americans, but without American technological advances they would have much more backward societies in the same way that their "better" healthcare systems would be worse without US medical advances (in both medications and technologies). Which is to say, the only reason they can stifle industry to the extent they do is because they let America do the heavy lifting for them. And of course, there's the issue of military spending - they've been free riding on the US military for many decades. The US dollar's reserve status does see some benefit flow back to the US, though this benefit accrues very unequally to parties in the US.
Europe needs its own army but free fusing against what exactly? If anything NATO is helping the US hegemon in Asia by bolstering the US in Europe.
A country that produces technology isn’t “subsidising” another that doesn’t. They trade for it.
> A country that produces technology isn’t “subsidising” another that doesn’t. They trade for it.
No, they trade for _stuff_. Technology is usually "culturally appropriated" for free once any patent period expires. Airbus, for instance, didn't pay the Wright Brothers' estate royalties for the use of the aircraft; Europe simply stole that technology from the US.
I'm not really complaining, of course, the US stole a lot of technology from Europe as well; this is hardly a one-way transfer. (From Europe and the US to just about everywhere else in the world, on the other hand...)
Once the patent has expired, it's not stealing. Your phrasing is non central fallacy.
I'm too lazy to look at it in more detail but using number of Nobel Prize as a proxy for scientific research we get that the US are worth about the same as Germany+France+Sweden+UK*, which means that 1) it's unclear the US are better per capita at scientific research and 2) even if the US are really contributing more the situation is far from the "Europeans are free riding".
*European Nobel prize are probably more ancient on average than American's I assume. Although for example for Fields medals France has done better than any other country over the past 30 years. Should be easy to check out for someone more motivated.
Filter your Nobel tally for the past 50 years (say), and see what you get. (I don't know - I'm curious!).
Certainly pre-WW2 the Nobels would have been totally dominated by Europe with America nowhere, but that was a different world, and including it in the sample will skew the results.
I performed a similar exercise with patents ..Germany and Japan both did well.
"I wonder if the reason European life quality is generally higher is a generalization of this - the US spends its money and talent making the kind of consumer goods that are easily traded, while european countries have worse private industry but more competent governments."
I'd be cautious about the 'consumer goods that are easily traded.' Europe is competitive in cars (or whatever comes after competitive ...) and jet engines. ASML is one of the 'big five' of semi-conductor equipment vendors. Airbus has competed well with Boeing, and for the past 3-4 years has managed to miss out on Boeing's screwups (737-MAX, KC 46, ...)
What Europe is NOT competitive in, in general, is tech. Europe has no equivalent to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix. Europe *used* to have competitive semiconductor fabs, but not any more. ArianeSpace was a match for ULA (United Launch Alliance), but isn't for SpaceX.
Europe does have *some* large tech companies: ASML, ARM and SAP come to mind.
But the difference isn't necessarily things such as cars or trains, but in tech developed in the past ~40 years. The older, established companies in older, established industries are doing fine. Europe just doesn't have much presence in the current tech/information industrial revolution.
I agree that it's not quite all or nothing (this goes both ways - US government services are worse than western European ones but they're also not third world levels).
Spotify is Swedish I think and while far from Netflix or Amazon in cultural impact and financial power it seems to be pretty relevant. Only example I can think of on top of my head though.
I'll observe that Spotify's market cap is around $16B.
[And it is an observation, not some passive-aggressive commentary! One way to score this is that Europe does have more than just those three tech companies. Another is ... we are under $20B in market cap and still in Europe's top-10 ...]
One other way to look at the US-Europe difference is to consider the incorporation date for, say, the largest 15 or 20 companies in a country. The list of largest US companies tend to have a lot more "young" companies than equivalent European stock exchanges.
The US list looks something like this (from a month or so ago):
1976) Tech? Apple
1975) Software Microsoft
1998) Software Google
1994) Tech? Amazon
2003) Cars Tesla
1983) Berkshire Hathaway [1964 may be a more realistic date]
1974) United Health [legally, 1977]
1882) Oil&Gas Exxon Mobil [as Standard Oil]
1886) J&J
1958) Finance Visa
1962) Consumer Goods Walmart
1877) Banking JPMorgan Chase [Chase National Bank]
1882) Oil&Gas Chevron [as Standard Oil]
1993) Nvidia
The United Kingdom list looks like this:
1890) Oil&Gas Shell [Royal Dutch Petroleum; technically 1907]
1913) Drugs Astrazeneca [Astra, AB]
1879) Chemicals Linde
1929) Consumer Goods Unilever
1865) Banking HSBC
1909) Oil&Gas BP
1759) Beverages Diageo [Guiness]
1902) Tobacco British American Tobacco
1873) Mining Rio Tinto
1873) Drugs GlaxoSmithKline [Glaxo as Joseph Nathan and Co.]
1918) Insurance Aon
1895) Publishing RELX [Reed]
1895) Finance LSE
Sorry about the formatting!
I think it's quite clear that the US are better at making big companies than Europe, especially in tech. What I'm not convinced (see my other comment) is that they are so much better at research that European are essentially free riding on them.
We get a lot of Europeans coming here to do research, presumably because the grants/facilities/pay are better.
I think it's possibly more tech-company specific, and boils down to the weird mixture of quasi-service, quasi-manufacturing that 80s/90s tech involved meaning a European company couldn't have expanded outside its home country (eg. Acorn in the UK), but the US ones could get big enough to fund the big enough to go export.
The newer tech companies are probably more to do with immigration, ease of doing business and cultural factors in the US; Europe doesn't have the same "start a business in your garage" mentality, resulting in fewer people starting businesses in their garages.
"The newer tech companies are probably more to do with immigration, ease of doing business and cultural factors in the US; Europe doesn't have the same 'start a business in your garage' mentality, resulting in fewer people starting businesses in their garages."
I am sure that cultural factors play a part. Possibly a huge part -- does Europe have a Stanford equivalent in the sense the "Stanford -> startup" is a well understood pipeline?
One catch is that "tech-company specific" covers a LOT of the global economy now, so competing in it poorly isn't terribly great. It seems to me to be a bit similar to not doing well at "industrial revolution company specific" in the 1800s ... agriculture is still a thing, but missing out on the new bit of the economy isn't going to be a win.
*Historically* Europe was *much* better at research than the US.
Traditional European sciency folks include Newton, Liebniz, Euler, Pascal, Einstein ... with lots of rigorous mathematically sound work.
US heroes tend to be: Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers. Lots of *pragmatic* engineering without a lot of concern about rigor or general theories.
The US imported a bunch of sciencey folks as Mr. Adolph drove lots of them away from Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s, but the *culture* of science and of treating science with high respect is much more a European cultural attribute than an American one.
Measuring science output is tougher than measuring corporate market capitalisations, but I see no reason to believe the Europeans are doing less (or worse) science than Americans.
Sure, American dominance in science is very much a `post WW2 thing.'
So what? Chap who discovered fire and wheel guy are probably the most important scientists ever, and they probably lived in Africa. Should we conclude then that Africa is the world's leading scientific continent?
When Newton and Leibniz were working, the not-yet-US was an agricultural colony with the same population as Springfield, Idaho. Literally anyone inventing or discovering literally anything would be punching above their weight.
Notably though their platofrm is entirely based on US technology and the difference between them and American streaming services is really only the interface. Life wouldn't be so different if they disappeared.
At least in the UK I'm not aware of anyone with such a broad catalogue. A handful of good engineers could build a technical competitor without too much trouble, but negotiating licensing seems like it would be much harder.
Spotify is a natural monopoly, no? If it disappeared tomorrow, some other company would fill its niche before the year was out, but Spotify became the streaming platform that "musicians hate but mostly are afraid to not be on" first. Nobody can really compete with it as long as it exists.
Plenty of competitors existed (or exist still with a tiny market share) before spotify (eg: Deezer). And yet Spotify came and won. I can't tell why, but it must have been better at pleasing consumers or attracting artists. Maybe other services would fill in at the same level of utility, but if so, why didn't they before Spotify won the market?
Same argument, in fact, as for Amazon & co. Calling something a "natural monopoly" a posteriori fails to explain why this particular competitor won the market.
I signed up for Mainfold Markets after reading the recent Prediction Markets FAQ post. While I largely agree with the case made there for prediction markets, I am not at all impressed by Manifold.
Obviously play money isn’t ideal, but given the legal constraints around that, it’s understandable. My two main issues are that 1) interesting markets are hard to discover and 2) the service gives so many freebies it’s nearly impossible to “go broke” and weed out poor forecasters.
Regarding the discoverability issue, there’s just so many low-quality or irrelevant markets with vague resolution criteria to wade through (the worst offender is the “will I complete X task?”, where “I” is the market creator. I understand why someone might want to make that market, but I wish I could block all of them. I’m aware of the topics/groups sorting, but there’s no way to subscribe to notifications or updates for a single group (that I know of).
>Also, Adam Strandberg corrects me: there are at least three immortal mammals, although the third one is also a Tasmanian Devil.
What about Henrietta Lacks?
Not until we find a way to sexually transmit her! (ethics board review pending)
I think that was mentioned last time.
A suggestion for anyone on Adderall who's having trouble getting their prescription filled due to the shortage: Talk with your doctor about switching to dextroamphetamine. It's chemically similar, and there is not a shortage. I believe Scott's written some favorable stuff about this med -- Scott, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Shrimp are unaware of me; unaligned AIs cause fear in me.
Here's DALL-e's illustration of that sentiment. https://i.imgur.com/hop9Skf.png
London is now, by far, the most religious part of the U.K. From this Reddit thread on regional religion in the U.K. only 26% of London is atheist compared to 54% in Scotland, 51% in the south west of England, and 51% in Wales. Those three regions are majority white. Is the trend to secularisation reversing and will that also happen in the US.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/1039yba/study_on_atheism_in_the_uk_by_region_from_20212022/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
I'm fairly confident secularisation is still happening to immigrants (and moreso, the children of immigrants), just more slowly and less visibly. The people I've known in my generation who would show up as 'Muslim' on a census form mostly have a 'religious sincerity score' that is in reality pretty close to zero, it's just something they do performatively to fit in with family/cultural expectation and will likely fade further with more generations, just as it has with those who used to put down 'Christian' out of inertia but now increasingly don't.
Having multiple small religious groups is very different from having a single large one, because they will have their own interest in keeping institutions impartial. So it's unlikely they'd reduce secularism.
Unlikely it will happen in the US. The same trend in declining religious affiliation is seen with Hispanics as with whites:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2014/05/latin-exec-aside.png
My guess is that "Is the trend to secularization reversing?" isn't high-resolution enough to capture what's going on. There seems to be a Western trend toward secularization which is driven by natives converting to atheism, agnosticism or apathy, and then also a separate trend of religious people immigrating to the West. So the trend of people losing their religion might be unchanging, or even accelerating, and statistically it might still look like desecularization because of the other trend.
Sounds right.
Not precisely correct; London is the most religiously diverse part of the UK which bumps up the figures. If you pick an area where the alternatives are "Christian, Muslim, culturally Christian but functionally no religion" then you'll have the active Christians (i.e. turn up to church for more than a wedding) being lower than the "yeah well me mum was CoE but I don't bother going" lot. If you pick an area where there are ten different religions not just Christianity, then the profile changes.
I looked up the 2021 census, pulled the figures for London out, and here we go. A lot of people didn't bother answering with any particular religion, so it's hard to tell if this is "none", "atheist", or just "couldn't be bothered". I checked the survey responses against the population figures for London, so they seem to be fairly accurate, and my calculations seem to be agreeing with the census returns (they used 1 decimal place, I used 2):
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021
"Regions of England
London remained the most religiously diverse region of England. "Christian" was still the most common response in London (40.7%, 3.6 million of all usual residents). Over a quarter (25.3%, 2.2 million) of London's population identified with a religion other than "Christian", up from 22.6%, 1.8 million, in 2011. The next most common religious groups in London were "Muslim" (15.0%, up from 12.6% in 2011) and "Hindu" (5.1%, up from 5.0% in 2011)."
Population of London 2021 8,799,800.00
Census results 2021 8,722,298.00
By "responses as percentage of population", the top three are:
Christian 40.66%
No religion 26.94%
Muslim 14.99%
Remember, "Christian" here covers everything from "I go to church three times a week and am involved in the various ministries and groups" to "Christmas and Easter" types. We can increase the "no religion" percentage a little by including all those under "no religion":
No religion
Agnostic 6,074.00 0.07%
Atheist 2,333.00 0.03%
Free Thinker 41.00 0.00%
Humanist 1,301.00 0.01%
No religion 2,370,641.00 26.94%
Realist 9.00 0.00%
Total: 2,380,399.00 27.05%
And finally the panoply of religious, spiritual, non-religious and who the heck knows experience in London town, where the Satanists are beating out the Scientologists and a few stern Herbert Spencerians linger on 😁
Religion Number % of population
Agnostic 6,074.00 0.07%
Alevi 19,633.00 0.22%
Animism 120.00 0.00%
Atheist 2,333.00 0.03%
Baha'i 1,091.00 0.01%
Believe in God 689.00 0.01%
Brahma Kumari 92.00 0.00%
Buddhist 77,426.00 0.88%
Chinese Religion 24.00 0.00%
Christian 3,577,684.00 40.66%
Church of All Religion 2.00 0.00%
Confucianist 29.00 0.00%
Deist 227.00 0.00%
Druid 160.00 0.00%
Druze 444.00 0.01%
Eckankar 122.00 0.00%
Free Thinker 41.00 0.00%
Heathen 306.00 0.00%
Hindu 453,035.00 5.15%
Humanist 1,301.00 0.01%
Jain 17,524.00 0.20%
Jewish 145,467.00 1.65%
Mixed Religion 3,464.00 0.04%
Muslim 1,318,755.00 14.99%
Mysticism 32.00 0.00%
Native American Church 8.00 0.00%
New Age 60.00 0.00%
No religion 2,370,641.00 26.94%
Not stated 615,665.00 7.00%
Occult 64.00 0.00%
Other religions 16,067.00 0.18%
Own belief system 368.00 0.00%
Pagan 4,621.00 0.05%
Pantheism 352.00 0.00%
Rastafarian 2,127.00 0.02%
Ravidassia 1,284.00 0.01%
Realist 9.00 0.00%
Reconstructionist 123.00 0.00%
Satanism 523.00 0.01%
Scientology 258.00 0.00%
Shamanism 1,306.00 0.01%
Shintoism 503.00 0.01%
Sikh 144,538.00 1.64%
Spiritual 6,922.00 0.08%
Spiritualist 3,207.00 0.04%
Taoist 796.00 0.01%
Theism 161.00 0.00%
Thelemite 35.00 0.00%
Traditional African Religion 344.00 0.00%
Unification Church 107.00 0.00%
Universalist 138.00 0.00%
Valmiki 139.00 0.00%
Vodun 109.00 0.00%
Wicca 922.00 0.01%
Witchcraft 113.00 0.00%
Yazidi 92.00 0.00%
Zoroastrian 2,047.00 0.02%
Wow. Most impressive. Seems like Christian or nominally Christian is stronger than I’d thought.
I think because of a lot of black African and Afro-Caribbean influence, but that's just guessing on my part. A lot of it too could be "cultural Christianity" e.g. Irish, Italian, Polish Catholics putting down "Catholic/Christian" even if they're non-practicing.
I had so much fun with that, I had a look at the data for Wales and that is a lot more "no religion/didn't state any":
Total responses 3,107,487.00
Christian 1,354,773.00 43.60%
No religion 1,446,392.00 46.55%
Not stated 195,043.00 6.28%
Total "none" 52.82%
All religions 1,466,052.00 47.18%
If we take the "no religion" and the "not stated" (as not having enough interest to answer this, no religion, or didn't care) both meaning "no religion", then the non-religious do have the majority at 53%. All religions are 47%, Christianity is 44%. So definitely a swing there from "Christian" to "none".
Population of Wales (or at least the survey responses) is only 36% that of London, so we can see the effect a bigger, more diverse population has on such figures. The Welsh and London "nones" aren't that far apart - 1,641,435 in total for Wales, 2,380,399 for London so Welsh figures for 'secularism' are about 69% of London ones.
But the percentages in total population wildly differ - 53% for Wales, 27% for London. So does that mean London is 'more religious' or 'less secular' than Wales? I think somebody better versed in sociology needs to look at this, rather than merely taking percentages, since the effect is bigger in the smaller population.
EDIT: And in Wales, the Satanists are *still* beating out the Scientologists 😈
Surely this is just an artifact of the higher percentage of immigrants in London? Seems like it could be determined easily enough. But not by me, too lazy.
Yes. The question remains open though. Will religious immigration and birthrates overcome increases in secularism in the U.K. and other countries.
Of course the demographics are different in every country.
Another thing that could be happening here is that a cultural Muslim is more likely to declare themself Muslim than a cultural Christian Christian. But the question is directly about being atheist or non religious.
It's really a question of "observing" or "practising" a religion, rather than just identifying with it culturally. In France, for example, most new immigrants are from poor, rural areas where religion is a basic structuring factor in life, and they bring these attitudes with them. New mosques are opened all the time, therefore, whilst churches close. In addition, "religious" in such context often means believing that society should be governed by religious principles even if they conflict with the law: hence the fuss over such things as the teaching of Evolution.
London is probably a lot more Muslim than, say, Wales.
And black and south Asian.
According to wikipedia:
:- London is about 40% Christian and 15% Muslim (plus about 35% none/not stated, and 10% other religions).
:- Wales is a bit less than 60% Christian and1.5% Muslim (plus 40% none/not stated, and negligible presence of other religions)
By my breakdown of the 2021 census responses, Wales is 44% Christian and 2% Muslim (rounding off). London is 41% Christian and 15% Muslim.
So not that huge a difference in Christianity but yes, a big difference in Islam. But I think the major difference is the population difference, London is a lot more densely populated than Wales so that skews the results. Though it would indeed be one of those unexpected results if big city cosmopolitan multicultural London was a lot more religious than the valleys!
Last week the excellent ACX Grants-supported publication Seeds of Science posted the explainer piece I prepared on a technical article published in Frontiers in Pharmacology in October. Topic: [putative] Antivirals from plants.
Epistemic status would have to be seen as hypothesis-generating (i.e. earliest stage of evidence hierarchy), but the underlying metabolic mechanism we shine a llight on has a lot more literature evidence underpinning it, as we show.
The reviewers (Gardeners in SoS parlance whose comments are at article bottom) seemed to enjoy reading, hope you do too :)
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/will-general-antiviral-protocols
I have started a VC fund based in Prospera.
New Website: https://infinitavc.com/
New Manifesto and my blog, feel free to comment / discuss: https://niklasanzinger.substack.com/p/infinita-manifesto-10
In the manifesto, I talk about how startup cities x network states x defi rails can further technological progress in areas held back by overregulation.
Telegram group for Prospera visits and conferences (dates to be announced soon): https://t.me/+xhTw-dudXBc1NmE6
Some people here in the community visited and loved it, hope to see more of you there in 2023!
"What’s holding back technological progress are outdated “layer-0” guardrails. Layer-0 innovation, however, is on the horizon, which create new possibilities for startups to disrupt sclerotic industries."
Okay, I read that and my immediate thought? "Scam". Which is unfair to you but given the rash of recent "uh-oh, all those disruptive new technology blockchain outpacing traditional financial industry red tape" not turning out so well, therefore maybe cool it on "we're smashing the rules!" and more emphasis on "we solemnly promise we won't blow all your investment on beanbags and luxury holiday homes for our parents".
""startup-like" jurisdictions such as Puerto Rico, Wyoming, Estonia, or Palau are layer-0 innovations"
Puerto Rico, like this guy?
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/12/27/mango-markets-exploiter-eisenberg-arrested-in-puerto-rico/
Few would deny that there is a lot of scam in crypto.
Scott wrote a good post about that: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile
Open to any questions that come from an open mind.
About 50-60 people right now. With the finalisation of two residential units, it'll likely be a few hundred (including myself & my wife).
> if you invest in a blockchain product based on a Bay Area House Party post, then you will lose all your money faster than anyone has ever lost all of their money before in all of history.
Woah, so if I can find a way to bet against such a product, I'll get rich quick... Wait, but Bob and Ramchandra mentioned anti-antistocks, so by the above quote that's doomed too, so I need anti-anti-antistocks.
IMHO it's a safe prediction that somebody will soon invent an even faster way to lost money!
I've been having a grand, if exhausting, time writing about my adventures with ChatGPT. I've just issued a long working paper, Discursive Competence in ChatGPT: https://www.academia.edu/94409729/Discursive_Competence_in_ChatGPT_Part_1_Talking_with_Dragons
Here's the abstract: Noam Chomsky’s idea of linguistic competence suggests a new approach to understanding how LLMs work. This approach requires careful analysis of text. Such analysis indicates that ChatGPT has explicit control over sophisticated discourse skills: 1) It possesses the capacity to specify high-level structures that regulate the organization of language strings into specific patterns: e.g. conversational turn-taking, story frames, film interpretation, and metalingual definition of abstract concepts. 2) It is capable of analogical reasoning in the interpretation of films and stories, such as Spielberg’s Jaws and A.I., and Tezuka’s Astro Boy stories. It must establish an analogy between some abstract interpretive theory (e.g. the ideas of Rene Girard) and people and events in a story. 3) It has some understanding of abstract concepts such as justice and charity. Such concepts can be defined over concepts that exhibit them (metalingual definition). ChatGPT recognizes suitable stories and can revise them. 4) ChatGPT can adjust its level of discourse to accommodate children of various ages. Finally, much of ChatGPT’s discourse seems formulaic in a way similar to what Parry/Lord found in oral epic.
And I've just issued a somewhat shorter blog post about story grammars and ChatGPT: The structuralist aesthetics of ChatGPT, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-structuralist-aesthetics-of-chatgpt.html
How can a company 'censor' the output of one of its own products? Censorship implies a (human) third party- I can at least see the arguments for being 'censored' on social media, but there is no person trying to speak through ChatGPT. Obviously there have to be some kind of limits on what it can say (it can't tell a user fuck you or call them racial slurs, probably can't write a pro-Nazi screed, etc.)- just a question of where one draws the line
No. That's orthogonal to my concerns in those papers.
I've been taking Silexan for anxiety (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety) for two weeks now, and it has been surprisingly effective for me. The anxiety is still there, but it's much less overwhelming than it had been. I skipped a day once and the anxiety was notably worse. Add 1 to your sample of anecdata!
Related anecdata, I couldn't find silexan but took lavender oil capsules for a while. No noticeable improvement on anxiety. And weird lavender tasting burps.
Glad it works well for you. The survey asked about this and although some people share your experience, it's atypical - just like everything else, most people see no effect and a few people say it's great for them.
Can someone explain “SHRIMP LOVE ME, UNALIGNED AIS FEAR ME” for those out of the loop? Also, the cap seems to say shrimp want me, not love me.
As hi explains, it stems from a pithy quote commonly found on fishing apparel, which has been riffed on in various ways to produce e.g. "WOMEN HAVE INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCES, THE MINDS OF FISH ARE UNKNOWABLE".
There is a common humorous t-shirt, worn by fishing enthusiasts, that states "Women want me. Fish fear me."
There has been a joke going around about a utilitarian who breeds large numbers of shrimp, which he keeps very happy, as an alternative to other attempts to increase happiness in the world, such as giving to charity, or doing volunteer work.
I'd tell you to just lurk more, but really it's probably a good thing that you're avoiding social media enough that you don't get these jokes.
What is the best explanation / model of serendipity that doesn’t involve reducing it to sample bias or selection bias or some other bias but accepts that there is such a thing as serendipity. Let’s define serendipity as something like life altering luck or fortune that seems or feels providential and yet also involves some amount of agency
I think the agency comes from having an open enough mind and enough slack to do something when serendipity comes knocking - how many people miss opportunities because they don't see them? how many people miss them because they can't afford the initial investment of time and energy?
Of course, keeping your eyes open and aiming to have slack in your life don't guarantee that you will get lucky in a major way, but I think minor bits of serendipity (eg. making a new friend) are common enough that the practice will pay off far more often than not.
Yeah there's probably habits that can be developed that increase your sample size of potential opportunities, so increase the overall number you get. Eg it would be serendipity to meet someone at a party who offers you a job in am ideal area, but you can make that more likely by going to parties where people like that might exist and talking to lots of people.
This reminds of Isaac Asimov’s Psychohistory where Harry Seldon is able to predict with high certainty that someone like the Mule will come along.
Are you looking for a model to explain/predict “expected” anomalies? You’d have to be willing to accept deviations from the norm in both directions though. Not just serendipitous ones.
No, Seldon /can't/ predict the Mule will come along, that's the entire point of the Mule. He throws off the entire Plan by being a mutant and outside of the bounds of psychohistorical prediction. In order to do psychohistory "properly" you need to be looking at the movements of entire civilizations, it can't predict jack about individuals. So it also can't predict "something unexpected happens here", because if it did it would throw everything else off.
That's part of why the Second Foundation exists, and then the sequels just keep throwing stuff psychohistory can't predict at them.
Donald Kingsbury did a nice sequel to the original Foundation trilogy (with the serial numbers not so much filed off as slightly buffed), in which the Mule-equivalent was a one-off (rather than being followed up by Gaia, etc.), set in Second Empire more or less along the lines Seldon and the Second Foundation might have envisioned. The book, "Psychohistorical Crisis", deals with the first real challenge to the rule of a system that can accurately project and respond to future threats.
Can you give an example of the kind of thing you have in mind?
What would the model need to do apart from be a binary yes/no?
If you consider an immense number of events some strikingly weird things will happen. Someone eventually beats the 1 chance in 292 million odds and wins the Power Ball.
Jung read an awful lot into a knife in a drawer fracturing at a particular moment. This sort of thing just happens once in a while. Different materials expand and contract with varying temperatures at different rates.
I had a mason jar with metal bolts inside explode while we were watching The Exorcist. We giggled and shrugged but nobody thought Satan was involved.
I don’t read too much into coincidence.
Scott, there's a fourth transmissible cancer in mammals! This one is a hamster! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_reticulum_cell_sarcoma
Will there be a way to find out what I answered for the prediction contest?
Other Google Forms I’ve filled out have sent me an email upon submission, saying what was filled out. It looks like Scott might not have set that up here, which is unfortunate. Maybe there’s a way to do it retroactively though.
One other advantage of that feature is it also lets submitters edit their answers. I was going through my answers just now (I had noted them down in Excel, since I had been worried about this) and realized I had answered the inverse of one of the questions posed (i.e. I said 90% where I meant 10%).
We should all make predictions on what your predictions were.
Seconded! Submitted my responses but can’t figure out how to see what I said and would be curious to see how I do as the year progresses
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/ironcondor.asp
An interlocutor once reviewed boilerplate descriptions of the four major Myers-Briggs categories and complained that it was so biased -- they made one category sound so great and the others sound so horrible. Of course, all of the descriptions were neutral; the bias was in his own mind.
It's possible that Garcia Martinez is trying to get you to see how the "chaos monkeys" think and feel about themselves and the world, and you're discovering you don't like them.
I read it a few years ago. I think that he was deliberately trying to be as Hunter S Thompon-esque as possible- after all, his goal is to be controversial and sell books. Oddly I thought that he did that more in the first half of the book, then dialed it down or lost steam in the second half.
I hated his writing style and disliked the book, then discovered his other writings and I think they're fantastic. He's a genuinely smart guy who's good at synthesizing different fields and making novel social observations. Just reinforces me for that he was trying really, really hard to be a Silicon Valley Tucker Max in his book. Anyways, I don't recommend the book but do recommend almost anything else that he's written
If this comment were an Amazon review it would be in the vanishingly thin tail of those most often voted helpful. I can imagine it wedged between a stack of five star reviews by wannabe Silicon Valley types and one star reviews by people who hated the protagonist, its three stars marking a thin previous signal in the midst of the noise.
I met Antonio at a startup poker game years ago. I think he sees himself as something of “a man from an older time.” He said he wrote it in a style that he compared to something like an old sailor’s novel.
“Likable” or “unlikeable” is clearly in the eye of the beholder, though, right? Some people love Trump. Some people really hate him. Is he “likeable?”
He had the 2nd highest negatives of any Presidential candidate of the major parties... behind only Hillary.
"He had the 2nd highest negatives of any Presidential candidate of the major parties... behind only Hillary."
One can be both likable and unlikable. Howard Cosell was both liked by a lot of people and hated/despised by a lot of (other) people.
We call that "the marmite factor" in the UK. It would take a long time to explain...
I think that "likability" goes out the window when politics is involved anyway. It's almost impossible to find someone likeable when they're actively implementing a political program that you despise.
Someone like Tom Hanks is probably pretty universally likeable. But if he became President and implementing whatever the fuck his political agenda may be, then he would undoubtedly be hated by half the population almost immediately.
Joe Biden would probably seem like a perfectly nice guy if he were a retired gas station owner who had never entered politics.
The author compares himself to Hunter S. Thompson in a Vox interview, which I think would explain what's going on. He portrayed himself as somewhat unlikable.
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/9/12415696/antonio-garcia-martinez-chaos-monkeys-recode-decode-podcast-transcript